James Goodman

@goodman_dandc

The Royal Albert schooner was last seen Aug. 10, 1868, when it left Oswego, headed for Toledo.

But its remains — a shipwreck about 400 feet deep in Lake Ontario — were recently found by three shipwreck explorers from the Rochester area.

Their finding sheds a little light on the mid-19th century, evidence of what could have happened when a schooner carrying 285 tons of railroad iron ran into rough weather.

"It was typical of the schooners used at the time to carry heavy freight," said shipwreck explorer Jim Kennard, 73, of Perinton, who with two colleagues, Roger Pawlowski of Gates and Roland "Chip" Stevens of Pultneyville, Wayne County, discovered the shipwreck.

Kennard is a retired engineer who worked at the Eastman Kodak Co., while Pawlowski is an electrical engineer who has a consulting business and Stevens is a retired architect and working artist, known for his watercolors.

The schooner, said Kennard, sank about 15 miles west of Oswego, when the weather apparently caused some of the railroad irons on board to shift enough to poke a hole in the back of this sailing vessel. The crew escaped on a rescue boat.

Discovery of the wreck happened about two weeks ago, when the three explorers did one of their shipwreck searches on Pawlowski's 22-foot motorboat equipped with Kennard's high-resolution side scan sonar.

An image of a wreck appeared on the sonar's computer screen.

"What we saw was the outline of a schooner. We saw two masts — lying on either side of the ship," said Kennard.

Close-up photos and a video of the sunken ship — 104 feet long and 23-feet wide — were subsequently taken by a remotely operated underwater vehicle.

Kennard, who has located or helped find more than 200 shipwrecks since the mid-1970s, maintains a database of about 600 ships wrecked in Lake Ontario. Only one — the Royal Albert — was a schooner with two masts that matched what they found.

The Royal Albert, according to a statement that the shipwreck explorers released, was built in 1858 in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Its owner at the time of the wreck was H.C. Bolland of Oswego.

He bought the schooner for $10,000 ($276,406 in 2015 dollars) but was insured for only $7,000.

The wreck is likely to stay where it is.

Historic shipwrecks abandoned and embedded in state underwater land belong to the people of New York and are protected by state and federal law from unauthorized disturbance, according to the explorers' statement.

"It's essentially an underwater museum of maritime history," said Kennard.

JGOODMAN@Gannett.com