Original subtitles

The thing about the Alaska coast

is that there's still places that are unknown.

Lots of islands, rocky shorelines.

Where we were working, well above the Arctic Circle,

you have to have everything with you.

We took 136 crates of stuff.

That's a measure of the remoteness of the place.

Alaska's a frontier.

It's a powerful place.

In the 20th century, it was oil; in the 19th century, gold.

But this land lured fortune seekers

long before then.

What they encountered was a vast, relentless,

dangerous landscape.

We're now finding shipwrecks

of the first outsiders who came here.

We know the Russians came to Alaska.

But nobody had ever found a Russian-era shipwreck

in the United States.

What was it doing, and why was it lost?

In Alaska's far north,

there were 32 vessels that were lost

over the span of one week.

It changed the world.

What was still there?

And why did people risk everything

in these frigid waters?

Alaska can be unforgiving,

particularly if you go in blind, unequipped,

or foolishly.

When you come into Kodiak, you see fishing boats,

you hear the seagulls,

you see the sea lions and hear them barking.

You could be there in 1850,

and you would have seen and heard

those same identical sights and sounds.

Ahoy!

Come aboard.

How's fishing?

Oh, you know.

Wow, that's a lot of crabs.

Can I take a look at one?

I'm a biologist.

Oh, there we go, that's a big boy.

I went to Alaska in 1984, specifically to study crabs.

I've studied every crab in the world,

and I've been pinched by every crab in the world.

Little did I know that Alaska would have a hold on me

for the next 20 years.

Kodiak lies off Alaska's southern coast.

It is an island with a lot

of very deep, narrow bays.

In 1991, I got some money to use a submarine,

and about a week after starting this project,

we literally ran into a wall of crabs.

And it was in the news in Kodiak,

and it got my name out there

as someone who was doing interesting things underwater.

Sometime in the spring of 1991, out of the blue,

I got a manila envelope in the mail from Mike Yarborough.

He introduced himself and he said he was an archaeologist.

I had no idea at the time, but Mike's letter

was the beginning of an incredible adventure.

He'd seen the stories in the newspaper

about me diving in Kodiak, and he wrote,

"I thought that you'd be a good person to talk to

about a shipwreck in Kodiak."

The "Kad'iak."

The hairs stood up on my arm.

I, I literally got chills.

In the letter, Mike outlined this incredible legend of a ship

that was abandoned after hitting a reef.

It drifted, unmanned, for eight miles,

and ended up in a lagoon called Icon Bay,

the sacred burial place of a Russian saint.

Somehow, the ship sank with its mast poking above the water,

forming the shape of a Russian Orthodox cross.

All this happened without a soul aboard.

And nobody's seen a trace of the Kad'yak ever since.

Now, that story's got to be too good to be true, right?

When I first heard it, I thought, nah.

That's, that's just... it's mythical.

But what if it is true?

What if that's what really happened?

The letter said the ship sank in 1861.

That's only a few years before the US took control of Alaska.

For more than a century,

the Russians had claimed the territory.

There's not a lot of physical evidence left

to say why they gave it up.

Nobody has ever found a sailing ship

from the Russian colonial period in Alaska.

To find something like that

would be spectacular.

I've got to do this. I just have to do it.

There's no way I can not do this.

I didn't really know much about the ship,

so I began investigating that.

And through various sources, I began to piece together

the story of the Kad'yak.

I discovered it was a three-masted sailing ship

with copper sheathing protecting the wooden hull.

The captain, Illarion Arkhimandritov,

survived and later returned to Icon Bay to chart the coastline.

This is just a few miles from Kodiak's main harbor.

And the more I read, the more fascinated I became.

He took compass bearings to landmarks

such as capes and islands,

and took one final bearing to the mast of the ship

that was still standing in the center of the bay.

If I could find out where that last bearing was taken from,

I'd be able to pinpoint where in the bay the mast had been.

Arkhimandritov's notes were...

cryptic, to say the least.

I spent literally years

crisscrossing the bay in my kayak,

trying to match his compass bearings to the landscape.

They didn't line up, they didn't take me where I wanted to go.

I still didn't know exactly where he stood, and I thought,

I think it's this point here;

I'm gonna draw my X on the chart.

That was what I had to go with.

But it was better than anything else I had.

Brad called me and he said,

"Hey, Stefan, I think I've found Kad'yak.

I think I know where it is."

And he said, "Would you like to come with me diving on the boat

and film it?" And I said, "Of course."

I jumped on it.

"Great, let's do it. When can we do it?"

"Uh, three weeks from now."

"Who will we bring?"

"Well, invite all the divers you know."

You always want to be first,

see something with your own eyes

and with your camera for the first time.

That's exciting for any filmmaker.

One morning in late July of 2003,

we get together to go find the Kad'yak.

Okay, so we're at about 90 feet here.

The first thing I did when we got to Icon Bay,

we get our gear on, our tanks, our masks,

and we just roll off into the water.

On our first dive, we kind of thought

we'll see a boat sitting down at the bottom.

We descended something like 80 feet.

There was a lot of sediment.

I literally could not see the seafloor.

We got to the end of our dive and we hadn't seen anything.

So, I was kind of disappointed.

The next team of divers went in,

and they came back up at the end of their dive,

and they said, we think we've found something.

And one of the divers had picked up some little bits of metal.

We knew that Kad'yak

had been covered with copper sheets,

to protect the wood from the sea worms.

This could be copper from the bottom of a ship,

or it could be aluminum foil

somebody threw over with their fried chicken.

We don't know what it is.

But it deserves another look.

So, the next team of divers went down,

and they came back up at the end of their dive,

and they said, "Brad, you're not gonna believe this!

We saw a cannon!"

"A cannon? Really? Are you sure it wasn't rocks?"

"No, it was a cannon, we saw a cannon."

Does this mean that there's a whole ship lying down there?

That diver went back down with a camera

so we could see what the diver was seeing.

And we're up on the deck of the boat

going, "Wow! Look at that! He found an anchor!

Oh, my gosh! Look at that!"

And then the diver swims a little bit and turns around,

and here's the cannon, and we're going, "Oh, my gosh!"

I think we found a shipwreck.

In the water, you can't allow yourself to get excited,

because it could be dangerous.

But of course, when you find something

that's hundreds of years old,

your heart starts beating faster.

I was elated and ecstatic,

but I was also wary,

because hundreds of ships were used

in the early centuries of Alaska.

Ships were commonly lost.

How could we know if we'd found the Kad'yak?

We didn't have the expertise to answer the key questions:

When did it sink?

Is it even a Russian ship?

We needed a professional archaeological survey.

Nine months after we first laid eyes on the wreck,

we were back with a pro team from East Carolina University.

This dive was the first time I had dived at that site

with professional archaeologists.

Ooh.

Frank Cantelas, he was the principal investigator.

This comes back to where these diameters are...

They had made out a wonderful plan:

what to do and what to look for and what to bring up.

What they revealed was incredible.

Systematically, the archaeologists removed

the sediment around the artifacts.

What they uncovered was the wooden remains of a hull.

The first thing that struck me

was the pile of rocks in the middle.

It stands up about three feet off the seafloor.

It's not a natural formation.

That's called ballast.

That would keep the ship weighted

and prevent it from tipping over.

There's ship timber sticking out under the ballast pile.

Being able to see the wood and the ribs there,

all of a sudden, that ship takes shape.

We think that there were supposed to be

six cannons on the ship.

If there's anything I wanted to ever find underwater,

it was a cannon.

It was just amazing.

You wouldn't find that on a modern wreck.

We found three anchors.

The largest one is probably the main anchor.

Definitely 19th century anchors.

We found parts of what obviously appeared to be

a sailing ship.

Could it be the Kad'yak?

As we searched the wreck for clues to its identity,

we saw there were a lot of unrecognizable things.

There was at one location

a big pile of what looked like rusted metal machinery.

Part of it looked like there was a wheel,

a round part that might be a pulley.

I thought maybe it was part of some mechanism

for raising and lowering cargo into the hold.

I thought, if I could learn more about Russian trading activity

in Kodiak, maybe it could help me identify the ship.

Russians came to Alaska to hunt sea otters

and other fur-bearing animals.

By 1861, they'd been running the operation out of Kodiak

for nearly 70 years.

But there were a lot of references to a set of docks

on a tiny little island

just across from Kodiak's main harbor.

What were they up to over there?

I went there to visit,

and walked through the woods.

On Woody Island, there are a couple of small lakes.

I saw that there was physical evidence

that this place had been manipulated by humans

over 100 years ago for a specific purpose.

There was a trench about maybe six feet across

and about four feet deep,

that goes straight down through the woods.

These earthworks didn't look like

they had anything to do with the fur trade.

So what was this trench for?

Looking at the position of the lakes, it became obvious.

This lake would have been the perfect place to make ice.

Which was good for the Russians,

because there was a new market opening up.

In 1849, the San Francisco Gold Rush happened.

San Francisco became a boomtown,

and they needed things that cities need.

They needed refrigeration for food.

Well, the Russians, sitting up in Alaska,

saw this as an opportunity.

During the winter, they drew horse-drawn saws along the ice

to cut it into blocks to sell to San Francisco.

The Russians probably dug this trench and lined it with wood,

so that they could easily slide ice from here

down to the storehouses, before loading on the ship.

Those ice blocks would have to be huge

to last the journey to San Francisco.

Lifting them aboard would have required specialized equipment.

This chunk of rusted metal down there

might actually be part of that system,

part of that ice machinery.

Buried in documents on the Russian ice trade

was some fascinating detail.

The Kad'yak had an ice elevator on board,

a piece of machinery that was built

to help lower and raise ice into and out of the hold.

I figured this metal on the seafloor

must be related to that device,

but it was too corroded to say for sure.

We needed more evidence to say this was the Kad'yak.

A few days after the archaeologists arrived,

I was diving with Frank Cantelas,

and we saw this object embedded in the seafloor

that was about a foot long and sort of round.

And Frank indicated to just leave it,

and maybe we'll come back for it later.

Several days later, we'd all finished diving,

and Frank said, "Oh, by the way,

I had a look at that interesting object today,

and it's got writing on it."

And my mouth just about hit the floor.

And I was like, "Really?

We've got to go back and get it."

They brought up this item to the boat.

It was partly metal, partly wood,

with the inscriptions on it.

Everybody gathered around that piece,

and somebody was cleaning off the top of it.

Sure enough, it's got Cyrillic writing on it.

And I can read Cyrillic letters.

It says "K, O," the Cyrillic delta, "deh."

Jenya Anitchenko, the Russian graduate student,

looked at that, and she says, "That's it."

It says "Kad'yak."

This is the name of the ship.

Everybody kind of went crazy.

To find an object with the name of the ship

that you're studying written on it

is the holy grail of marine archaeology,

and we had found it.

What is it?

It's the hub of the ship's wheel.

Not in our wildest dreams could we have predicted that.

Here it is.

We found the Kad'yak.

When you know that it's the correct boat,

that's when you can open the bottle of champagne

and celebrate.

We'd found the only Russian-era sailing ship

ever discovered in Alaskan waters.

But the wreck was eight miles from the reef

that tore its hull open.

How had the ship stayed afloat without a crew

for three whole days before it finally sank?

It turns out that the Russian captain survived

and later described the ship's sinking

in letters to his superiors.

On the morning of March 30, 1860,

Captain Illarion Arkhimandritov had his ship loaded,

and then he set sail.

The ship's going along well, the sails are all set.

And suddenly there's crunching and a shrieking

and a snapping of boards.

The ship was probably tearing its bottom out

across the rock reef that it had hit.

There was nothing they could do; the damage was too great.

They had to abandon the ship.

But it didn't sink.

It stayed afloat.

That would make sense if the crew had just loaded up

with cargo at Woody Island,

because even though the ship had a big hole in the bottom,

it was full of ice.

So, it was now a wooden-hulled iceberg.

It kept the ship afloat for three days,

drifting without captain or crew.

The Kad'yak finally came to rest

with the top of the mast sticking out of the water,

forming the shape of the Russian Orthodox cross.

The ship had settled on top of the reef,

so Arkhimandritov could still see the mast three months later.

At some point, probably during the winter,

storms had broken up the ship.

The bow had fallen off to the west,

and on the other side of the reef was the rest of the ship.

And that is how we found it.

Finding the Kad'yak proves that these tales and records

about the ice business, which are kind of obscure,

that they really were true,

and that it really did contribute significantly

to the development of Alaska.

It brings it all back and makes it real,

and it elevates it from mystery to history.

Not long after, artificial ice became common,

and there were not enough fur-bearing animals

left in Alaska to support the Russian colony.

For the Russians, Alaska had become a worthless wasteland.

And Russia, at that point, began to talk about

selling Russian America to the United States.

In 1867, just six years after the Kad'yak sank,

the deal was done.

The US paid just two cents an acre

for territory they still saw as potentially valuable.

And American sailors saw untapped resources offshore.

They sent hundreds of ships in pursuit.

Unfortunately, many never made it back out.

I'm a retired airline pilot who used to fly

back and forth on America's busiest routes every day.

But I love to explore.

Nowadays I use my license to fly over

remote parts of the North American wilderness.

I was always attracted to the north coast of Alaska,

because of its incredible history of human endurance.

I've been reading about Arctic exploration

for probably 50 years now, ever since I was very young.

The story of the whalers and the voyages

that they did were actually very remarkable.

Some lasted as long as five years,

and these captains and sailors were incredibly capable.

They faced perils of weather and lack of provisions.

In the mid-1800s, whale oil lubricated the machines

of the Industrial Revolution,

so it was a very valuable commodity.

But when things went wrong in Alaska,

they could be catastrophic.

I ran across the story of the 1871 whaling disaster

very early on, and it really captured my imagination.

This is the logbook of Captain Valentine Lewis

of the whaling ship the Thomas Dickerson,

and on Thursday the 14th of September of 1871,

he writes this:

"With light winds from the south, good weather,

and the ship still ice-bound,

may God please send us a northeast wind

or all will be lost."

After that, the logbook ends.

He's saying that his ship is stuck in an ice field.

They need help.

Then he goes quiet.

What is known is that a fleet of more than 30 ships

had been hunting whales off the north coast of Alaska

in the early fall, late in the season.

This area was not very well-known,

and they were actually pushing the boundaries

of what was capable with their ships of the time.

Sea ice started forming and trapped them

before they could escape to the warmer waters in the south.

Almost all those vessels went down.

So, out of the 32 ships that were lost,

only one of 'em was salvaged.

You'd think more than 100 years of being crushed by the sea ice

would have totally destroyed 'em,

but I thought, could the remains of those ships

still be out there?

For the locals, the 1871 whaling disaster

must have been like a hardware store

washing up along the beach.

Talking to the residents on Alaska's north coast,

I discovered they'd been salvaging debris

from the wrecks for generations.

They recycled the components of these ships.

I knew the ships must have been lost

close to where this debris had come ashore.

Among the items we found on the beach was a flensing tool.

And a flensing tool is a broad blade

that is used to remove the blubber from the whale

before it is boiled down for oil.

This tool had been found on a beach

just west of Point Franklin on Alaska's north coast.

So I got my team together, and that's where we headed.

We had a helicopter that brought us directly to the campsite.

When they dropped us off at the beach,

the silence of the tundra kind of descended upon us.

In winter, ice covers up the sea and the shore.

But in the summer, it melts back to reveal the beach.

In August, along the shoreline,

when the wind is calm, it's absolutely beautiful.

We enjoyed 24-hour daylight,

but we also had an awful lot of down days

where the winds were howling.

So we started looking upon the shoreline.

There is quite a bit of driftwood up there,

but we started noticing in and amongst all this driftwood

were ships' timbers.

Amongst all the artifacts we found on the beach

were portions of the hulls that are virtually intact.

And it's impressive.

There's an awful lot of it.

In theory, this wreckage could have been from any wooden ship.

But then we began to find other intriguing items.

All along the beach, there were portions of sheet copper,

and this copper was used to cover the hull,

to protect the wood from the teredo worm.

One of these copper sheets still had the maker's mark on it.

The maker's mark said "A.B."

and was able to trace that to a copper company in Connecticut,

the heart of American shipbuilding

and the whaling industry at the time.

We knew we were on the right track,

but we had no proof that these ships were from the 1871 fleet.

We needed to search for wreckage offshore.

We used a small inflatable boat,

and the best survey instruments I could mount on that vessel.

But in the area we searched, we couldn't find anything.

Out of a 14-foot inflatable boat,

we were forced to use a very compact sonar.

We, you know, could have had better equipment,

a more stable vessel.

This area deserved an expedition

with more sophisticated equipment,

and in 2015, that's what NOAA brought to the table.

What I loved about the stories of the Alaska shipwrecks

is that it was so closely tied to areas where I'd grown up.

The story of the lost whaling fleet of 1871

is perhaps the most incredible to me.

32 ships lost, with more than 1,000 people aboard.

Not only crew,

but also some of the captains' wives and children.

Amazingly, everyone escaped.

That nobody died is practically miraculous.

1,200-odd people.

How do you do that?

We would never know the answer

unless we found wreckage offshore

where they originally sank.

The fear was that maybe that ice

had literally just chewed up those ships

and left nothing.

But where there's smoke, there's fire.

What Randy was showing us

was that ships had not completely broken apart

and disappeared into matchsticks.

There were big chunks of these ships up on the beaches,

and those chunks of ships had survived

over a century and a half of being moved by ice.

That was an important clue.

The question in our minds was, could we find these ships

and figure out what had happened after they'd been abandoned?

Each winter, as the Arctic freezes, icebergs form

and sea ice pushes right up to the north Alaskan coast.

This is what trapped the whaling fleet of 1871

in the area we now call Alaska's North Slope,

before they could reach warmer southern waters.

There was a big question:

Would that grinding sea ice

have left anything intact on the seabed?

This chart, with soundings and fathoms,

would suggest, if you didn't know better,

that this area's charted and we know what's on the bottom.

But the reality is, is that there's whole areas

that are blank and they're uncharted.

You've got gaps here and here, and gaps in here.

There's no data here.

This is blank.

To stand any chance of finding remains,

we had to plan for total data capture to map the seabed.

I had known about this, this story for decades.

The disaster of 1871 was one of the things

that basically ended Yankee whaling

in the early 20th century,

because it was such a devastating loss.

What was still there, if anything was still there?

It was a question that needed to be answered.

I was the mission coordinator.

Once we got there, it was deeply personal.

We were going out, we were going to essentially develop a map

of the seabed between Point Franklin and Wainwright.

I remember sitting on the afterdeck

of the vessel we were on and thinking to myself,

you know, this is the same place where the whalers tucked in.

They were here, and now we're here.

And that was a very powerful experience for me.

One of the first things we did was to scan using sonar.

With sonar, you're basically bouncing sound waves

off the seabed and building a picture

from the returning signal.

What you're looking for are straight lines,

which are rare in nature.

What's it look like on the screen?

Suddenly you see these straight lines

and then more horizontal figures, blocks,

and it's like, that, that looks interesting,

that could be a piece of a shipwreck.

The sonar picked up six features

that appeared to be manmade.

But the sonar can be a bit misleading.

Is it a provocatively shaped group of rocks,

or is that the outline of a hull?

That's when you need to put eyes on it.

Diving was not an option.

You're literally in water that's just above freezing.

You get into that water and it hurts.

To avoid diving, we created a drop camera system

that could be lowered to the seabed.

We started to drag the drop camera around,

try to get a better view of what was there.

See that?

What is that?

Suddenly, this structure appeared.

It was a mass of heavy wood.

You could see sections of the hull that were there,

indicating some of that structure had survived.

You had the broken ends of the ribs, or the frames,

that had been gnawed by the ice.

But it's covered in marine growth.

You had some stone ballast as well

that helped stabilize that ship when it was afloat.

You go, okay, we've got a shipwreck.

Pieces of copper sheathing were visible on sections

of planking next to the 70-foot-long hull.

It was clear evidence that what we were looking at

was a vessel that had at least been built in the 19th century.

We now knew a shipwreck could survive underwater

on the north Alaskan coast.

But were these the remains of a whaling ship?

We needed more than just an empty hull,

so we turned our attention

to another of the most promising of the six sites,

10 miles up the coast.

What we saw on the bottom were basically large timbers

that were ribs of a vessel.

And then we really saw the cool stuff.

You're seeing clear structure

that had survived being in the ice,

and with that, artifacts scattered around it.

What this wreck showed us that the other didn't

was the actual ship's hardware.

You began to see things like an anchor.

And then another feature which shows up,

which is a metal bar, two bars, that come around into a loop.

Right beside there was a piece of iron

shaped like a corner bracket, a couple of feet long.

The question was, did we have enough in those wrecks

to prove that these were the remains

of the largest wrecking event in the history of American whaling?

To try to make sense of what we were seeing

on the seabed, we decided to study

the last 19th century whaling ship still in existence.

This loop of iron is very similar

to what we saw in that wreckage.

They're called chain plates.

This is all part of the standing rigging that supports the mast.

This is something that speaks directly to the fact

that we've got a 19th century ship lying in pieces.

That metal bar with the loop was a clear indicator

that our wrecks were of the right period.

But did any of these artifacts prove that these were whalers?

This is a smoking gun.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, they would only be on vessels

that had tryworks installations.

Yeah.

That explained the bracket-shaped piece of iron

that we found in our survey.

The tryworks is the big furnace with its huge pots

for taking whale fat and making it whale oil.

They were held in place with iron brackets called knees.

That's bolted in place, and that's bolted down to the deck.

They go out to sea, they get onto the whaling grounds.

Out come the big pots, out come the bricks.

They lay all the bricks, they make this big tryworks,

and then they start whaling.

Seeing the chain plates and the iron knees at Mystic Seaport

confirmed we had 19th century vessels,

and we had a 19th century vessel

that clearly had been used as a whaler.

With this evidence, and these clues,

the wrecks, the artifacts that Randy had found on the beach,

everything was consistent with 19th century whaling vessels.

There's no doubt in my mind that we had finally found

the submerged remains of the greatest disaster

in the history of American whaling.

The common sense assumption would be

that the Arctic eats ships and leaves very little.

No.

Things have been preserved

despite the violence of the disaster

and the intervening century and a half

of ongoing storms and ice.

Things survive just as powerfully

as human stories survive.

The 1871 whaling disaster was a major blow to the industry.

The loss made news around the world,

but we still had one final question:

How did everyone actually escape?

The ice was in, and it wasn't going anywhere.

Their ships were caught.

The reports say that the crews managed to make their way

to another group of whaling ships 90 miles away.

In the ice-locked Arctic in poor weather,

that's a very hazardous trek.

When we looked again at our mapping data,

we found an important clue.

Where we did the seabed mapping

close enough to the shoreline,

we did see evidence of a raised feature

that runs parallel to the shoreline.

The sonar clearly shows this sandbar or reef offshore.

It was maybe five feet below the surface of the water.

We wondered, did that sandbar play a role in the escape?

We went through all the evidence we could find.

If you look at the pictures based on first-person accounts,

there are pictures of the shore, open water, ice pounded up,

and then the vessels stuck in the ice.

Looking at everything, it all became very clear.

The ships are offshore, and as the ice comes in,

many of them are caught.

As the ships are racing to get south,

they're encountering more and more ice.

They're stuck.

And as the days pass, fangs of ice begin to pierce hulls.

Water floods in.

Pressure begins to crack and break frames.

But that sandbar stops the ice.

It leaves a gap.

Between the sandbar and the beach,

it's an open channel of water, and that's the escape route.

That sandbar literally, I think, helped save lives.

The ships themselves are trapped, and some are crushed.

But they still have their little whaleboats.

They get into those boats and row to where ships

that have not been caught in the ice are waiting for them.

And now packed in, in large numbers,

they all get to go home.

The weather was awful, the ice was bad,

and it's an incredible story of human endurance.

1,200 more people walked out of this,

but this was the beginning of the end for an industry

that had dominated the American economy for centuries.

Whether you're searching for fur,

whether you're searching for fish,

whether you're searching for whale oil,

this is a dangerous place to sail.

In the 150 years since the US purchased the territory,

people have taken huge risks

to pursue its abundant natural resources.

It's a land of ice and extremes, but people keep coming.

And just when Alaska looks too challenging,

it offers up a new irresistible temptation.