The World’s Most In-Demand Wreck – The Sweepstakes

It seems suitably appropriate, while Canadians are excitedly enjoying the fireworks, the food, the camaraderie, and the many special events that will form the celebrations for their country’s 150th birthday this year, that we look at the small sailing vessel, launched in Canada in the same year as their country, that has attained a significant place among the world’s many shipwrecks. Hundreds of thousands of divers and boat tourists have seen this shipwreck named the Sweepstakes in person.

It is the most-visited submerged shipwreck in the world!

The relatively quiet history of the Sweepstakes gave no inkling of the superlative reputation it would later have. The Hamilton, Ontario, newspaper of September 25, 1867, described the new vessel:

Launch At Wellington Square – A fine new schooner was launched at Wellington Square [today’s Burlington, Ontario] yesterday, by [owners] Messrs. Bunten [sic] and Waldie, being the third completed there the present season. The new craft was named “Sweepstakes.” The launch was witnessed by a large number of spectators. The dimensions of the Sweepstakes are: 114 feet [34.5 metres] keel, 124 feet [37.6 metres] over all, 24 ½ feet [7.4 metres] beam and 8 feet 4 inches [2.5 metres] in hold. Her tonnage is 269 tons, and she isvalued at $12,000. She is classed “A1” [for insurance] and is said to excel any vessel yet built on this side of the lake for strength and fine model.

The two-masted Sweepstakes was constructed by John Simpson, well-known, along with his more famous shipbuilder brother, Melancthon, as the crafter of fine ships from the 1850s to the 1880s.

For the next 18 years, the schooner, s, worked as a reliable workhorse hauling bulk cargoes, such as lumber, coal, and wheat, and, in 1880, carried 1,000 telegraph poles for the American Union Telegraph Company. Also late in 1880, the Kingston newspaper reported that, “The sch. received $800 for bringing a cargo of staves from Detroit to Kingston,” providing a rare detail about maritime economics in that era. Researching this vessel, however, is not without its challenges because there were several ships using the popular name, , on the, this one, slightly larger than the one that is the focus of our attention, built at Cleveland, Ohio, in 1856, eleven years before, and operating for at least eleven years after, the Canadian . Newspaper listings of ships’ arrivals and departures in the latter one-third of the 1800s rarely differentiated between the two schooners named , and both vessels carried cargoes to and from harbors on both sides of the border. Generally (but not always), the American press wrote about the American , while Canadian newspapers reported on the Canadian one. But journalists at that time also erred; the “ of Wellington Square” was reported stranded and wrecked near Rondeau on Lake Erie by the Kingston of October 22, 1872, but it proved to be the American (which was recovered and returned to service).