Location: US 421 (Fort Fisher Boulevard) in Kure Beach
County: New Hanover
Original Date Cast: 2012
On June 27, 1862, the British-owned steamer Modern Greece ran aground near Fort Fisher while attempting to run the Federal blockade. The 224-foot-long vessel was heavily laden with war material for the Confederacy, including Enfield rifled-muskets, edged weapons, munitions, and other assorted military hardware as well as civilian goods. Although a portion of the cargo was salvaged by the crew, the vessel was intentionally sunk with most of its cargo still aboard.
The Modern Greece sailed during the heyday of Confederate blockade running efforts. Owned by the London firm of Zachariah Pearson & Company, the ship was headed for Wilmington, one of the South’s principal ports for blockade running business. Up the Cape Fear River 28 miles and guarded by numerous shoreline batteries in addition to Fort Caswell and Fort Fisher, the port was well protected. Furthermore, vessels could reach the mouth of the Cape Fear by two approaches, Old Inlet and New Inlet. By the last years of the war, Wilmington had become the lifeline of the Confederacy through which supplies flowed.
The vessel was spotted first by U.S. Navy blockaders on June 24. Pursued for three days, the ship ran aground at 4:15 A.M. under fire from the USS. Joined by the USS Stars and Stripes, the USS Cambridge continued firing on the vessel preventing the crew from removing too much of the cargo until dawn, when the two naval ships came under fire from Confederate shore batteries. The Confederates then turned their guns on the vessel to sink it and “wet the powder and prevent an explosion.”
The first salvage operations on the wreck site took place in July 1862, as Confederate officials removed several of the artillery pieces—namely four 12-pounder Whitworth rifles—from the vessel for use at Fort Fisher. One hundred years later, in the early spring of 1962, a fierce storm removed the sand covering the wreck. Fishermen and local divers had long been known about the site, but it had not previously been fully exposed.
A team of U.S. Naval Ordnance School divers, on holiday leave, began diving on the site on March 15. Word of the discovery quickly passed to the North Carolina Department of Archives and History, the Confederate Centennial Commission, and the Governor’s Office. The Department of Archives and History began cooperating with other agencies to oversee the salvage efforts.
Working from a rented shrimp boat, the Navy divers salvaged a number of artifacts. For three weeks they worked at the wreck site, but then had to return to duty. Another set of Navy divers continued working the site, at first from civilian barges, then a U.S. Coast Guard vessel, and finally from a U.S. Navy minesweeping boat. Similar diving operations took place well into 1963 and recovered nearly 12,000 artifacts from the Modern Greece.
With appropriations from the General Assembly, the Department of Archives and History established a preservation lab at Kure Beach to oversee the conservation of the artifacts from the wreck. The creation of the lab was North Carolina’s initial foray into historic shipwrecks and underwater archaeology. The first laboratory assistant, Leslie Bright, ran the lab for the following 34 years, overseeing the conservation and protection of the vast amount of artifacts.
The discovery of the Modern Greece prompted others to become interested in salvaging artifacts from the numerous other Civil War shipwrecks in the Cape Fear/Wilmington area. In the summer of 1965, a group called Flying W Enterprises began diving operations on the Modern Greece and other wrecks with the intent of selling salvaged artifacts. The Department of Archives and History, concerned with these actions, brought a criminal complaint against the group for “damage to personal property,” arguing that that the vessel belonged to the state under the 1783 Treaty of Peace with Great Britain, which established that any sunken ship within a marine league was owned by the sovereignty.
The case eventually led to the 1967 statute that determined that North Carolina had sovereign right to “all shipwrecks, vessels, cargoes, tackle, and underwater archaeological artifacts which have remained unclaimed for more than 10 years.” In addition, the state then authorized the development of a professional staff to oversee the preservation and archaeological assessment of the state’s submerged cultural resources. Four years after the law, the state legislature appropriated funds to establish the underwater archaeology program first envisioned in the 1967 statute.
The salvage of the Modern Greece involved recovery and conservation methods that underpin the science of underwater archaeology to this day. The landmark court case and statute that developed from the salvage efforts on the wreck led to the establishment of the state’s underwater archaeology program, one of the oldest and most respected institutions of its nature in the archaeological discipline.
References:
Leslie Bright, The Blockade Runner Modern Greece and Her Cargo (1977)
Gordon Watts and Richard Lawrence, “An Investigation and Assessment of Civil War Shipwrecks off Fort Fisher, North Carolina” (2001)
Richard Lawrence, “Forty Years Beneath the Waves: Underwater Archaeology in North Carolina” (2006)