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Graham McKay, executive director of Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, points to the shipwreck near the shoreline of the Merrimack River in Haverhill.
Archaeologist Victor Mastone measures a section of the wreckage in 2007 while Graham McKay takes notes. The sunken ship points downriver toward Newburyport and is almost completely exposed during low tide.
Graham McKay, executive director of Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, looks out toward the shipwrecked boat near the shoreline of the Merrimack River in Haverhill.
The lightship wreck is seen along the Merrimack River in Haverhill in the 1970s.
This image from the 1930s shows LV-9, aka the Elk, anchored off Bradford.
This image from the 1930s shows LV-9, aka the Elk, anchored in the river in ice.
Graham McKay, executive director of Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, points to the shipwreck near the shoreline of the Merrimack River in Haverhill.
Archaeologist Victor Mastone measures a section of the wreckage in 2007 while Graham McKay takes notes. The sunken ship points downriver toward Newburyport and is almost completely exposed during low tide.
Graham McKay, executive director of Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, looks out toward the shipwrecked boat near the shoreline of the Merrimack River in Haverhill.
The lightship wreck is seen along the Merrimack River in Haverhill in the 1970s.
This image from the 1930s shows LV-9, aka the Elk, anchored off Bradford.
This image from the 1930s shows LV-9, aka the Elk, anchored in the river in ice.
For 86 years the wreck of a floating lighthouse has slept on the banks of the Merrimack River, evoking mystery and eliciting surprise.
It’s less than a mile from the Groveland Bridge and an odd spot for an ocean going lightship built not long after the Civil War.
The lightship mystery was quietly cracked 15 years ago by Graham McKay in his 61-page master’s degree dissertation in marine archaeology at the University of Bristol, England.
When McKay, now director at Lowell’s Boat Shop and Museum, launched his research on the ship the prevailing thought among the maritime officialdom was that it was the original Nantucket Lightship, a historic vessel.
His dissertation, however, identifies it as Lightship No. 9, an itinerant relief vessel with a story of its own, built in the late 1860s, more than a decade after its famous cousin from Nantucket.
For generations Merrimack boaters have cast quizzical glances at the wreck.
John Macone, who lives in Amesbury and is a member of the Merrimack River Watershed Council, regularly gazes at the wreck as he passes by in his Boston Whaler.
“To think it has survived all these years,” he said.
The wreck lies just off Casey Calderwood’s yard on Broadway.
Calderwood has climbed aboard it and is intrigued by having a vessel from long ago in his backyard.
“You can see some of the ribs and metal parts sticking up,” he said.
The ship is accessible from shore at low tide. A ragged nursery of trees and shrubs have long since taken root and sprung up midship.
A duck hunter uses the vegetation as a blind.
McKay, 43, a master boat builder, vaguely recalls seeing the vessel in his youth while he was riding by on a boat with his family. Then, as now, it was pitched to its starboard side on the riverbank.
It wasn’t until years later, in his late 20s, having already earned his bachelor’s degree at Harvard University and having worked in boatyards, on tall ships and on commercial fishing vessels dragging the ocean’s bottom, that McKay became intrigued by the wreck.
He was enrolled in the master’s program at the University of Bristol, on England’s west coast.
He reached out to Victor Mastone, director of the Massachusetts Board of Underwater Archaeological Resources at the time, asking him to recommend a dissertation project.
McKay was entrusted with identifying the Merrimack River wreck and documenting how it had been constructed.
The prevailing opinion in the maritime establishment about the wreck, based on reference notes by a well known historian — but without any official documentation — was that it was Light Vessel No. 1, LV-1.
If true, that would have made it a historic ship, arguably the most significant lightship of the 19th century and worthy of a Hollywood film.
Built at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, it was anchored in 1856 by Nantucket’s deadly New South Shoals and for 37 years its lights guided ships to safe passage.
The LV-1 marked the watery graveyard south of Cape Cod, a web of ever-changing shallows that extend 42 miles southeast from Nantucket and loom by the shipping lanes between New York and Europe.
These shoals have claimed some 800 ships and untold lives.
The LV-1 and other lightships, moored in locations where lighthouses could not be built, originally had lanterns with lamps fueled by whale oil housed on their mastheads, visible for miles at sea on fog free nights.
Later, electric lights powered by generators replaced the oil lamps.
Uncovering the facts
Lightship duty was difficult. Crews of six to eight hands lived on scouse (stew) in bitter cold gales and fog and endured the regular din of the ship’s tolling fog bell.
Master shipwright Leon Poindexter, who has restored vessels for the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum and was the set shipwright for the movie “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” has visited numerous historic lightships.
At a Connecticut museum, an old-timer who years ago had been a lightship tender, described to Poindexter what it was like to serve on a lightship.
“He said it was, ‘Months and months and months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror,’” Poindexter said.
The former tender spoke haltingly, his short sentences sandwiched between silences, a habit from years living aboard lightships and synching his speech to the silences between tolls of the ship’s fog bell.
The terror he referenced was born of the crew’s fear of their ships being cut in two if a larger vessel collided with them. They also had to weather all conditions, being pitched and rocked by hurricane winds and mammoth seas.
Some 30 years ago, Poindexter saw the Merrimack River lightship wreck. He was here looking at an apartment and sought the ship out after someone had told him about a “yacht” that had crashed on the riverbank.
Poindexter visited it and knew it was no yacht.
An irony of the Merrimack wreck is how a ship designed to save other vessels from wrecking ended up a wreck itself and has remained a skeletal monument for almost a century.
To get to the bottom of the ship’s identity, McKay and Mastone took onboard measurements and analyzed its materials and construction.
In addition, McKay read books and articles and delved into maritime records at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
The Haverhill wreck’s length, about 80 feet, was shorter than the 103-foot length of the LV-1. Also, it was built of different materials than the LV-1, according to the marine records researched by McKay.
Also, it was highly unlikely that the LV-1, which was auctioned at the end of its service as a lightship for $251 in 1930 in Charleston, South Carolina, would have been towed to Massachusetts at a cost exponentially greater than the price the owner paid for it, McKay says.
Landing on No. 9
McKay’s research determined that the Merrimack wreck is actually Light Vessel No. 9, LV-9, a relief lightship that was stationed at various posts while the regular lightships went out of service to be overhauled or repaired.
The LV-9 may very well have seen service on Nantucket.
Nonetheless, the vessel, like all lightships, played a vital role in protecting American shipping and had an interesting second and third life.
After its retirement from the lightship service, the LV-9 was condemned and sold in 1925 and used as a gasoline barge in Boston Harbor.
McKay based his account of the vessel’s time on the Merrimack River on newspaper archives from The Haverhill Gazette and interviews with old salts who remembered the vessel.
The ship was bought for $800 by the Haverhill Elks Lodge and donated to the Haverhill Sea Scouts for use as a training vessel.
The lightship arrived from Boston to Newburyport the first week in June 1932 and was towed upriver to Haverhill.
Shortly after the ship’s arrival to the Merrimack, in 1932, The Haverhill Gazette reported on large tanks, 3,000 gallons of fuel tankage, being cut from the ship’s hull to make room for people.
“According to newspaper accounts, she was a nuisance to the Scouts from the day of her arrival, demonstrating a proclivity for breaking her moorings,” McKay writes in his dissertation. “She was given to the Groveland Boy Scouts in late 1934 and moved across the river to become their new training platform.”
Somewhere along the line, the ship was named the “Elk,” after the club that donated her to the Sea Scouts.
On Jan. 11, 1935, during a period of high water, the ship broke its mooring and was carried on an ice floe below the Groveland Bridge to where it remains, McKay states.
McKay heard from a fellow, Dick Berkenbush, who lived across the river from the wreck in West Newbury and remembered that the ship was a favorite play spot for local kids who enjoyed the drawings of ships made by crew members on the cabin walls.
Former Haverhill Harbormaster William J. “Capt. Red” Slavit, who died in 2008, told McKay in 2007 that he had stripped sheathing from the wreck during World War II to sell to a scrap metal yard.
He also sold parts of the ship’s chain, sawing it link by link with a hacksaw, each link weighing 18 pounds.
For many years after it wrecked, the Elk produced a petroleum sheen when silt in the hull was disturbed, McKay says.
Lightships are an important part of the nation and New England’s maritime history.
Their use waned in the 1960s and ‘70s, replaced by lighted buoys and advanced navigational technology.
But for more than 150 years, they played a vital role in safeguarding American shipping.
What’s left of the lightship wreck on the Merrimack’s riverbank is a reminder of that role, and McKay’s research is a record of that service.
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