After colorful past, sunken ship becomes state preserve

It was built as a gunboat and sank as a tramp steamer. It also helped Adm. Richard Byrd explore the Antarctic.

PENSACOLA - The wreck of a tramp steamer that helped Adm. Richard Byrd explore the Antarctic but later sank under mysterious circumstances off the Florida Panhandle is the state's newest underwater archaeological preserve.

"It's got a really fascinating history," said Della Scott, a state underwater archaeologist. "The local people are still absolutely convinced it was sabotaged."

Divers salvaged its cargo of lumber after it sank, but the ship, then known as the Vamar, has remained at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico since 1942. In the 62 years since then, it has attracted a wide range of sea life in about 25 feet of water.

A dedication ceremony is scheduled for Friday at Mexico Beach, a resort community about 125 miles southeast of Pensacola, for a monument describing the ship's colorful history. That history includes stints as a British warship and an American rum runner before it wound up as a tramp steamer - a ship without a regular route but available for hire anywhere cargo awaits. Within a few days, weather permitting, the monument will join the wreck 3.7 miles off Mexico Beach to mark it as Florida's ninth underwater preserve, Scott said.

The 170-foot, 598-gross-ton ship was built in 1919 as the patrol gunboat HMS Kilmarnock in Middleboro, England.

The Royal Navy sold it during the 1920s to a private company that converted it into a freighter and renamed it Chelsea. Byrd purchased the vessel for $34,000 from the U.S. government in 1928 after it had been confiscated for Prohibition-era liquor smuggling, according to a ship's history compiled by the Florida Division of Historical Resources.

Byrd renamed it Eleanor Bolling, after his mother, Eleanor Bolling Byrd. The first metal-hulled ship used in Antarctic waters, it transported crates containing two airplanes to Little America, Byrd's Antarctic base. Byrd made the world's the first flight over the South Pole on Nov. 29, 1929, in one of the planes that had been carried aboard the Eleanor Bolling. Byrd sold the Eleanor Bolling later that year to an Arctic sealing company, and in 1933 it was sold to Vamar Shipping Co., giving the vessel its final name.

The ship was owned by Bolivar-Atlantic Navigation Co. when it sank on March 21, 1942, in calm seas after leaving Port St. Joe, about 10 miles southeast of Mexico Beach, bound for Cuba with its load of lumber. The mystery of why it sank has never been solved.

[Last modified July 5, 2004, 23:26:10]