Wreckage of “Ghost Ship of the Pacific” found in California after 82 years

On Aug. 1, a ship dumped its unusual cargo in an area of ​​ocean about 70 miles northwest of San Francisco: three orange robots, each more than 20 feet long and shaped like a torpedo. For a day, the aquatic drones patrolled the waters autonomously, scanning nearly 50 square miles of seafloor.

About 1,000 meters below the surface, an apparition appeared on the robots’ powerful sonars. In the dark, the drones spotted a ghost.

The robots had located the wreckage of the “Ghost Ship of the Pacific,” the only U.S. Navy destroyer captured by Japanese forces during World War II. Formerly known as the USS Stewart or DD-224, the ship rested in what is now the Cordell Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

Three days later, another set of underwater robots captured images of the historic sinking. Although shrouded in decades of marine growth — and home to sponges and crabs — the 95-meter-long destroyer is almost perfectly intact and standing on the sea floor.

“This level of preservation is exceptional for a vessel of her age and makes her potentially one of the best-preserved examples of a U.S. Navy ‘four-pipe’ destroyer known to exist,” said Maria Brown, superintendent of Cordell National Marine Sanctuaries. Bank and Greater Farallones, in a statement.

The discovery, which occurred during a technology demonstration, highlights the efficiency of modern robotic ocean exploration. Ocean Infinity, the marine robotics company that operated the drones that made the discovery, has the world’s largest fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles. Drones are used to create high-resolution maps of the seafloor — a major gap in our understanding of the oceans. The technology is also crucial for selecting sites for offshore construction projects, such as wind farms and oil platforms, or for plotting routes for gas pipelines and undersea cables.

These robotic fleets are also proving invaluable to marine archaeologists. In 2020, Ocean Infinity helped find the wreckage of the USS Nevada. In 2022, the company also contributed to the rediscovery of the Endurance, which sank during a 1915 expedition led by Ernest Shackleton.

“We are in the midst of, I think, a sea change in oceanic discovery,” said Jim Delgado, senior vice president of SEARCH, Inc., a marine archeology company involved in the discovery of DD-224.

Delgado joined the search for DD-224 a decade ago as director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees more than 1 million square miles of underwater parks in the United States. Marine archaeologists have long been fascinated by the ship’s unusual history.

After being sunk and abandoned in the waters off Java in 1942, DD-224 was recovered by Japanese forces, who used her to escort their naval convoys. Allied pilots reported what appeared to be one of their own ships deep behind enemy lines.

In a symbolic farewell to the ship following its postwar recovery, the U.S. Navy recommissioned DD-224, towed it to California, and then buried the vessel at sea under a hail of practice gunfire on 24 May 1946. After enduring two hours of fire, the stubborn ship gave way and sank.

“The entire history of that ship was actually exceptionally well documented,” said Russ Matthews, president of the nonprofit Air/Sea Heritage Foundation and a member of the discovery team. “The only part of that story we didn’t have is: What does he look like today?”

Matthews spent years, on and off, trying to locate the ship’s last known coordinates. An initial tip from a colleague, Lonnie Schorer, revealed a 1946 U.S. Navy communiqué that restricted the search to what is now the Cordell Bank sanctuary. But none of the NOAA boats that sailed through the sanctuary found the vessel, and Matthews and his colleagues were unable to secure funding to go there.

Luck changed in April this year, following a meeting between Matthews and Andy Sherrell, director of marine operations at Ocean Infinity. The company wanted to test the use of several of its largest autonomous drones at the same time. Why not try to find DD-224?

Matthews had made a breakthrough in the case by tracking the coordinates of the tug that pulled DD-224 to the area where it sank. With NOAA permission, Ocean Infinity went to that location. Sherrell noted that on the seafloor, mapping a 37-square-nautical-mile region — the search area for DD-224 — typically takes weeks. Ocean Infinity’s drones spotted the ghost ship within hours.

“I covered it very quickly, and in high resolution,” said Sherrell.

The terabytes of data collected by Ocean Infinity now constitute the best map of that part of the Cordell Bank sanctuary. The dataset also concludes the eight-decade story of a ship that always meant more than the steel now corroding in the depths.

After the recovery of DD-224, the American team that brought it back preferred to call the vessel RAMP-224, from the acronym for “Recovered Allied Military Personnel”, a term used at the time for freed prisoners of war.

“This ship, in its own way, was basically humanized by the Navy,” Delgado said. “People invest so much in ships — and we’ve been doing this since the beginning of time. They represent us.”