Roughly 15 years before Herman Melville introduced the world to Moby Dick, a whaling ship from Massachusetts sank near the mouth of the Mississippi River.
Nearly 190 years later, experts say, it’s still the only whaler known to have gone down in the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of enslavement at Southern ports posed a risk for Black and mixed-race men who often were part of whaling crews.
Researchers checking out odd shapes during undersea scanning work on the sandy ocean floor believe they’ve finally found the shipwreck about 70 miles (113 kilometers) offshore from Pascagoula, Mississippi. It was documented in February by remotely operated robots in about 6,000 feet (1,829 meters) of water.
Not much is left of the two-masted wooden brig thought to be Industry, a 65-foot-long (20-meter-long) whaler that foundered after a storm in 1836. An old news clipping found in a library shows its 15 or so crew members were rescued by another whaling ship and returned home to Westport, Massachusetts, said researcher Jim Delgado of SEARCH Inc.
Melville’s “Moby-Dick; or, The White Whale,” published in 1851, told the story of American whaling from a Northeastern view. The discovery of Industry shows how whaling extended into a region where relatively little is known about whaling despite the Gulf’s extensive maritime history.