Team probes shipwreck’s history
U.S. archeologists explore wreckage found under CityPlace condo site
A team of archeologists from Texas A&M University are combing through the remains of a shipwreck in downtown Toronto, hoping to connect the dots on this mysterious piece of local history.
Crews stumbled upon parts of the schooner about 12 metres below the surface when development company Concord Adex started building a condo in the CityPlace neighbourhood two years ago.
The vessel was excavated and transported to the Fort York National Historic Site with the intention of preserving it for public display, Fort York’s program development officer Kevin Hebib said. But some of the artifacts discovered on board provided clear information on the people crewing the ship and roused further curiosity, he said.
For example, they found an American penny at the mast step, leading to speculation the vessel may have been an American cargo ship bringing supplies to a growing city. The coin also helps date the vessel. Such coins “don’t postdate anything after the 1820s,” Hebib explained, “so we can start there and move back.”
Hebib, who has been at Fort York for nearly 30 years, said this could be the oldest vessel ever discovered underneath Toronto.
According to Hebib, the city unearthed a ship dating from the 1850-1890 period at the Rogers Centre. Another one named the Commodore Jarvis was discovered at the Air Canada Centre, and a 19th-century flat-bottomed boat was found in the Lakeshore West area. None of them were preserved.
“It’s amazing to me now, when you walk the streets of Toronto, you’re always thinking what’s underneath you,” he said, explaining that much of the city south of Front St. used to be covered by Lake Ontario.
“In a weird way it’s like a sealed-up time capsule. As development occurs here in Toronto and new developments start, we peel back those layers and we find evidence of people who were here before us.”
Lead researcher Carolyn Kennedy said the team is interested in examining the physical aspects of the ship in order to determine who was on it and why, what it was carrying and what happened to it.
Kennedy, who is from Montreal and graduated from Concordia University before going to Texas, previously worked on a shipwreck project regarding a steamboat in Lake Champlain near Vermont. She sees similarities between the two boats in how they were designed, but this Toronto ship carries “little mysteries” that are harder to discern.
“What we’re studying here is not really to inform ship building,” she said. “What we’re really after is that human story and connecting us to our own past.”