Raising one of the 1758 sunken bateaux in 1960 (Photograph courtesy of the Adirondack Museum).

1960 "Discovery" of Sunken Bateaux

In July 1960, two teenage scuba divers found 10 to 15 sunken bateaux in Lake George. They were located "some 30 to 80 yards from shore" and they appeared to have been "deliberately sunk." Local and national news media covered this discovery and an article in the July 30, 1960 issue of the New York Times reported the sunken bateaux were "in perfect formation, parallel to each other, and perpendicular with the shoreline." Later that summer, newspapers reported that two Saratoga Springs, New York divers, Walter Stroup and Fred Tarrant, located an 18th-century shipwreck, possibly two bateaux configured together, that held a cache of British mortar bombs. This probably was from a vessel that went down in 1757, shortly after the fall of Fort William Henry. Each mortar bomb weighed over 150 pounds.




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