Divers equipped with digital scanners have created a set of ground-breaking, 3-D images of the legendary Klondike-era sternwheeler A.J. Goddard, which sank in a Yukon lake in 1901 and was discovered in 2008 by a team of Canadian archeologists.Photograph by: Handout, HandoutDivers equipped with digital scanners have created a set of groundbreaking, 3-D images of the legendary Klondike-era sternwheeler A.J. Goddard, which sank in a Yukon lake in 1901 and was only discovered two years ago by a team of Canadian archeologists.
The imaging system, similar to one used recently to document the wreck of the Titanic off Newfoundland's east coast, was employed during an expedition this summer to the sunken-but-perfectly-preserved Goddard — a dive that also produced a stunning new artifact: the vintage phonograph used to entertain fortune-seekers on their long, northward steamboat voyage to the Klondike gold fields.
"They're not only stunning and amazing images, they're also an accurate measuring tool," Canadian marine archeologist James Delgado, one of the experts involved in the Goddard project, told Postmedia News.
The precise 3-D model of the wreck was generated with scanning equipment supplied by the U.S. firms Oceangate and BlueView Technologies.
While documenting the boat's pristine condition, the researchers also spotted and collected several relics that were missed during earlier dives to the Goddard, which was declared an official historic site by the Yukon government earlier this year.
Corked bottles with their liquids still intact, leather footwear and other items were added to previous discoveries of tools and clothing.
"There was a bottle with vanilla extract still in it," said Delgado, former head of the Vancouver Maritime Museum and now director of marine archeology with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"Talk about the proverbial miner's cabin that you stumble across," he said. "Here's one under water — the Goddard really does represent a time capsule."
But the most remarkable find was the music player and three vinyl discs — one in almost perfect condition.
Experts from the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa are now studying the phonograph and the discs to determine what music was played on the Goddard before it went down in a storm on Yukon's fabled Lake Laberge in October 1901.
Delgado says the phonograph had previously been hidden by a "light dusting of silt." But he says if conservation experts are able to restore the phonograph or its discs, "a drowned voice from 1901 may sing again."
In November 2009, Delgado, John Pollack from the Texas-based Institute of Nautical Archaeology and Yukon museum curator Doug Davidge announced they'd located the "perfectly preserved" Goddard in Lake Laberge, a widening of the Yukon River that served as a key transportation route for gold-seekers in the 1890s.
"The A.J. Goddard is not only a testament to the ingenuity, sense of adventure and determination of those men and women who took part in the Klondike Gold Rush, but also to the key role that the river and sternwheelers played in the economic development of Yukon,'' Elaine Taylor, the territory's tourism and culture minister, said in June in announcing the wreck's historical designation.
The sternwheeler is known to have gone down with three men in the 1901 storm that swept across the lake, a setting made famous by the Robert Service poem The Cremation of Sam McGee. The boat was named for an intrepid U.S. shipping merchant who pioneered Yukon River transport during the wild race for Canadian gold in the 1890s.
In Service's ghoulish 1907 rhyme, a Tennessee gold miner's frozen corpse finds blissful relief from the fatal Yukon cold in the fiery boiler of a sternwheeler stranded in ice on Lake Laberge.
Most of the Klondike miners trudged from Skagway, Alaska — which could be reached by Pacific steamers — across dangerous mountain passes to the Yukon River headwaters in northern British Columbia, where they hitched rides north on sternwheelers and other boats bound for the goldfields.
Goddard took the same arduous route with the materials he used to build his sternwheeler, assembled on the shores of British Columbia's Lake Bennett.
In June 1898, it became the first steamboat to reach Dawson, which at the time was only a tent city filled with fortune hunters.
Goddard's historic arrival at Dawson in his self-named boat — to the thunderous cheers of miners — has become part of Klondike lore, recounted by author Pierre Berton and other Gold Rush chroniclers.
The archeologists had led several searches for Klondike-era wrecks before discovering the Goddard site in 2008 and positively identifying the 15-metre vessel last year.
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