A metal detector turned out to be quite the birthday gift for a Canadian 8-year-old—he seems to have found a nearly two-century-old shipwreck. Back in 2023, Lucas Atchison was testing out his new acquisition at Point Farms Provincial Park, along the shores of Lake Huron in Ontario, when he stumbled upon what looked like a spike in the sand, per the CBC. Initially thinking it was the type of spike used to tie a boat up, Lucas and his dad, Jason Atchison, dug deeper, uncovering even more spikes attached to wood, until Atchison finally made a startling revelation.
"Dad told me, 'Lucas, this is a shipwreck,'" the boy recalls. "When I woke up that morning, I did not expect to find a shipwreck!" Atchison says he and his son reported what they'd found to park staff, then contacted the nonprofit Ontario Marine Heritage Committee, which earlier this month finally began digging at the site to uncover the rest. The assessment of archaeologists? The ship "was likely an old schooner, a type of two-masted, wooden sailing vessel" with "double frames, hinting it was a stronger-built ship to transport goods," per the Independent.
The excavation crew can't say for sure yet, but that means the vessel could be the St. Anthony, which sank in 1856 while transporting wheat from Chicago to Buffalo, New York. An old newspaper clip from that year indicates the ship went down in Lake Huron near the town of Goderich. Scientists now digging at the scene are making sketches of the vessel from various angles and checking out 19th-century insurance paperwork to try to identify it. The scientists plan to eventually rebury it to help preserve it from degradation. The boy's discovery "is a nice reminder that, even today, in our seemingly mapped-out, modernized world, you never know what you might find with a trusty metal detector," notes Popular Science. (More shipwrecks stories.)
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