You may never have heard of the Dorothy Palmer or her 13 sister ships, known collectively as "The Unlucky Fleet."

You may never have heard of the Dorothy Palmer or her 13 sister ships, known collectively as "The Unlucky Fleet."



But they played a unique role in a nearly forgotten chapter of the country's rise as an industrial power. To the divers who discovered her broken wreck two weeks ago off Chatham's Monomoy Island, it was like diving into the back pages of history.



One of the ironies of the sea is that tragedies play out on the surface and then disappear, leaving no apparent trace. For the past 11 years, Chuck Carey has roamed among the broken, discarded set pieces on the ocean bottom, diving on shipwrecks, touching the ribs, the keels, a wheelhouse, or boiler.



A Hyannis-based commercial real estate broker, Carey started diving in earnest when he was 50. Not quite a mid-life crisis, more like a mid-life project, he said. He admits that diving partner Don Ferris often sees things he misses when they comb a wreck.



To Ferris — a website developer, diving instructor, author and amateur historian — the Cape's shipwrecks represent a neglected historical record whose stories beg to be told. He is thankful that Carey was passionate enough about finding them that he bought a torpedo-shaped instrument, known as a sidescan sonar, that he can tow behind his boat. Cruising off the ocean bottom, the device projects and receives sound waves that can detect bottom contours as much as 300 feet on either side.



That's just what he was doing last week in what might be considered the Metropolitan Opera House of marine tragedies, the twin shoals off the tip of Monomoy.



"It's usually not very clear what you're looking at," Carey said. "A lot of times, you get an edge of something, and wonder if it's a shoal. What is that?"



Interpreting the grainy brown shadows of the sidescan is a bit like finding meaning in tea leaves, but there was no doubting what he saw last week. It filled the whole screen.



Battered, with not a straight line remaining, it was nonetheless clearly the outline of a ship, nearly 300 feet long.



"My eyes bugged out of my head," Carey said.

Diving on a wreck off Monomoy isn't easy. The currents are too swift to swim against and divers must plan their whole trip around a slack tide — roughly a one-hour window when the tide reverses itself and the water is calm. Like most wrecks, the Dorothy Palmer had been stripped by salvagers, including 4,000 tons of coal. Its superstructure was blown up with dynamite to keep it from becoming a hazard to navigation.



Divers off Monomoy use multiple safety lines that attach them to their vessel, which also drags long lines in the current in case someone gets swept away. Although they weren't blessed with good visibility either of the two days they dove, the Dorothy Palmer was "a darkness in the background" as they descended to the ocean bottom less than 30 feet below, Carey said.



On the way down, Ferris was already thinking it was the Dorothy Palmer. Ghostly underwater ribs, each over a foot and half square and heavily crusted with marine life, jutted up from pearly white sand. Sunlight penetrated down to the bottom, illuminating the wreck where it settled in 1923 after losing the wind at a critical turn and drifting onto Handkerchief Shoal. Once entrapped, said Ferris, it was there forever.



"All I knew," said Carey, "is that I found something big."

The Dorothy Palmer and the 96 other five-masted giants of her ilk were not the sleek subjects of marine paintings. These were pack mules, hauling bulk cargo such as coal and grain along the Eastern seaboard. The hulls were five stories high; the masts soared 200 feet above the deck. When they sank, the masts often jutted above the waterline, where survivors sometimes huddled awaiting rescue.



Their crews, largely immigrant laborers, were considered expendable, and paid low wages of $2 to $3 a day. Gangs of African Americans loaded and unloaded a football field of coal at least 40 feet deep, and were paid by the ton. They labored to fill the three massive holds that occupied nearly the entire area below decks.



While conventional ships might employ 30 to 50 sailors to haul the immense sails of a big vessel, these cargo ships were equipped with steam boilers powering winches that required just two people per mast to do the same work. The total crew for a 300-foot-long ship like the Dorothy Palmer amounted to just a dozen men, a cook, and the captain, Ferris said.

Although the age of sail would soon be eclipsed by steam-powered vessels, enterprising men such as Roxbury's W.F. Palmer realized these wooden vessels still had a role to play. With a small crew, they could be run cheaply and profitably. A $200,000 investment to build a ship like the Dorothy Palmer was paid off in just a few voyages.



But the vessels were literally worked to death, and rarely lasted more than a decade. The West Virginia coal, for instance, that powered the enormous industrial growth occurring in the Northern states, was so heavy that the hull of a fully loaded ship sagged like a fat-bellied hog. The ships were so long, said Ferris, they flexed in heavy seas "like dancing snakes." The stern twisted in the opposite direction of the bow, the decks had peaks and valleys. Pumps ran around the clock to keep up with leaks.



Still, they were the best way to haul bulk cargo, Ferris said. Beset by a patchwork of gauge sizes and localized service, railroads were not yet efficient at long-distance transport. The only way to move big amounts of coal was in big ships.



One of the most dangerous choke points in a trip along the New England coast was the turn made off Chatham, like a sharp curve on a highway that put ships on a relatively safe course around the shoaling sands of the Outer Cape. But the turn itself was a gauntlet run in a relatively narrow channel between shoals, with ships following the beams of large floating lighthouses known as lightships.



The definitive clue that sealed the identification of the Dorothy Palmer was when the divers found the iron strapping that W.F. Palmer, a naval architect as well as businessman, used to reinforce the hulls of his vessels against the loads they carried.



But no amount of strapping could save his fleet. Over a 14-year span, from the Marie Palmer in 1909 to the Dorothy Palmer in 1923, the 14 ships that W.F. Palmer built and named after his children, succumbed to the sea. Several were lost in collisions with steamships or other vessels; some went up in flames, or sank in storms. Particularly tragic was the loss of 15 crewmen when the big five-masted schooner Davis Palmer ran aground within sight of Boston in a two-day Christmas gale on Dec. 26, 1909.



The loss of the Dorothy Palmer marked the end of an era, Ferris said. Even larger vessels were built, with six masts, but less than a dozen were made. None of this large sailing fleet remains.



"All gone, not a single one," Ferris said. "The only way to see them now is underwater."