St. Johns River, Hundreds of Mines... Dozens of Wrecks

[Ocklawaha]

Comforting thoughts? 17 October, Perch received a message from Escolar giving her position and projected track. Nothing further is known of the ship and her crew of 80 after that date. Both the Yellow Sea and Tsushima Strait were assumed to be mined, but the exact location of minefields laid prior to April, 1945 is unknown. Since Escolar's track did not intersect any of the known fields, post-war analysis assumed that she hit a mine in one of the uncharted fields. So who laid the UNCHARTED FIELDS? I know this isn't Jacksonville, but have we ever thought about this?

Just dusting off the 20 or 30Th, volume on the Navy in WWII and came across a very familiar story. Mine fields in the St. Johns River, and off the mouth of the river. How many knew that we mined the river as a defense against German U-Boat (Unter Seeboot) activity. I am certain that we mapped and swept up the mines after the war. The mine story gets a little more nervous when one reads the German Naval accounts of the St. Johns River... THEY MINED IT TOO! Now certainly there were maps so when the world surrendered they could clean up the mess. Only one problem, at least one of the U-Boats on the mining mission was blown to atoms by our antisubmarine patrols. Question so did it sink with the records on board? Have we ever found a slightly lost mine? Could we?

It gets better, the Confederate States Navy, INVENTED both mines and torpedo's as well as electric mines used with crude battery's. The famous wreck of the Maple Leaf off Point Mandarin, and our collection (the worlds largest) of all of the baggage she carried were all due to mines. Many Confederate mines were thick iron drums fabricated from locomotive boilers, were THEY mapped? There we're more then just a couple, because the Maple Leaf isn't alone at the bottom. So is the Harriet Weed, The General Hunter, The Alice Price...etc. We know from Cambodia just how dangerous old discarded mines on land can be. What about our river?

One favorite ingredient of old Mines and Munitions is cordite. All the way back to the French and early Spanish cannon, one can find cordite fuses. So if your thinking, Ock, your a nut, those mines would be soaked, rusted, and harmless, not so! A recent salvage operation on a Spanish ship of the St. Augustine occupation period found a cannon and it's cordite fuses. SHAZAM, it will still light and it still fired! Water doesn't seem to have much effect, when much cooled it certainly burns more slowly than when at the ordinary air temperature, ... Cordite does not appear to change when kept under water... even for 500 years!

I'm not writing this post to start a maritime panic, God knows Savannah, Charleston and every other major port must have had the same treatments. The mystery to me is the years between 1865 the end of the War of Yankee Aggression and World War Two or 1939-40 - when we were active in convoy defense and exchanging shots with the German Navy, BEFORE PEARL HARBOR. What about the Spanish American War? I've visited the huge concrete bunker and battery hidden up on St. Johns Bluff, but did they mine? What about World War 1?
This could be a fun search... Any history buff's on board? Stephendare? Others?

OCKLAWAHA

[BridgeTroll]

As often as that river mouth has been dredged I cannot imagine any old or misplaced mines still in the river.  Following WWII mines often washed ashore for a few years. 

[Ocklawaha]

I agree that the channel would be clean, what I'm really wondering is how many times/nations mined the river?
Where did they mine the river? What were the results? What wars included mining the St. Johns? How many of the wrecks are due to mines? Have we ever found any that could be disarmed and placed in our maritime museum? Does ANY museum have one? How many mines were placed in the river?

So far the USA, CSA and GERMANY all seem to have mined the river. The CSA at Yellow Bluff, Mandarin, and maybe off the mouth of the Ortega. The others around the mouth.

Any other history buff's out there? If your interested I COULD find the U-Boat number, the one that carried the German mines, as well as who sunk it.

OCKLAWAHA

[Ocklawaha]

MINES FOR MONEY?


If you said Titanic, you'd be wrong! This is one of her identical (*see note) sisters, sunk by a mine in WWI while serving as a hospital ship. To make matters worse, it didn't HAVE to sink, captains error.

National Maritime Museum
The hospital ship sank off the Greek island of Kea in November 1916, Simon Mills, a British marine historian who bought the wreck from the UK government in 1996, plans to give submarine tours of the well-preserved Olympic-class ocean liner.

The hospital ship sank off the Greek island of Kea in November 1916, while on its way to collect soldiers wounded in the Balkan campaign of the First World War.

Because the wreck lies at a depth of 122 metres (400ft), visitors will reach the ship in small submersibles.

"Our plan is to start off with three- or four-seater submersibles," said Mr Mills. "The Titanic lies in the cold waters of the north Atlantic and is rapidly disintegrating because of iron-eating bacteria. In a couple of hundred years there will be very little that is recognisable. But the Britannic is completely different.

She lies in warm waters, is very well preserved and wonderfully intact. For so long she has been eclipsed by her older sister but she has her own story to tell."

The four-funnel liner, modified to correct the defects that had contributed to the speed with which the Titanic went down, sank in under an hour after an unexplained explosion.

Thirty people were killed after lifeboats were sucked into the ship's churning propellers. Recent sonar scan studies indicated that the ship had been sunk by a mine, but some historians have maintained that she was torpedoed by a German submarine.

"This project is not just about tourism but also about education, conservation and marine archaeology," said Mr Mills. He also stressed that special care would be taken to preserve the integrity of the wreck, out of respect for those who died in its sinking.

*(NOTE): Titanic, Britannic, and Olympic, were all alike, except for a redesign of the Bridge of the ships after the Titanic went down. Titanic's Bridge (the control room) somehow scooped up huge quantities of sea spray making for a very cold and uncomfortable captain and crew. The others had glass mounted to prevent this hassle. Of the three ONLY OLYMPIC lived out her years sailing the Atlantic until the depression killed the business and she was scrapped. Sadly, every effort was made to sell her for preservation, but in 1932, no one had the money. She was also the only passenger transport to ever sink an enemy submarine by ramming! After the war the Navy boys mounted a beautiful monument in her lounge as a salute to her bravery.

As White Star merged into Cunard Lines, can we find a record of a visit to Jacksonville?

OCKLAWAHA

[jaxnative]

OCK, I'm not an expert or historian of the period, but wasn't cordite developed by the British in the mid to late 1800's?  I believe the smoothbore cannon of the 1500's were fired with the linstock and slowmatch at the breech.  The only thing I can think of that they would have used fuses with would be the shot used in the land batteries or fort mortars and I don't know how well developed those were at the time.  From what I understand they were almost as dangerous to the firing crews as they were their intended victims!

[Dog Walker]

From Wikipedia:

"Cordite is a family of smokeless propellants developed and produced in the United Kingdom from 1889 to replace gunpowder as a military propellant."

Bit unlikely that is would be in Civil War torpedoes or earlier cannon.

[Ocklawaha]

Very cool observations, I was never a munitions guy, but having seen the old Spanish gun fire as well as "something" which I suspected was cordite, I really don't have a clue. Greek Fire, is another one that we don't know squat about. We sort of, kind of, know how they did it, and the Confederates said they used it. I'm thinking they labeled something else as Greek Fire? Wonder if the Spanish guns had some other form of fuse and solid explosive?

As far as the cannon being dangerous, YES, after several shots the cannon became red hot, loading a bag of powder into such a barrel was deadly. In the weak state of hot metal, such an explosion would have turned the cannon barrel into flying shrapnel. These problems continue even to some extent today, where guns overheat and become dangerous to load. WWI machine guns were infamous for blowing up.

OCKLAWAHA

[Overstreet]

.........As far as the cannon being dangerous, YES, after several shots the cannon became red hot, loading a bag of powder into such a barrel was deadly. ..........

OCKLAWAHA

All you really needed to make a bad day was to be pushing a powder charge into the muzzle of a hot barrel and have it ignite and fire the ram back at the crew member. The barrel didn't have to fracture.

A lot of mines left over from Civil war times would be sunk into the muck at the bottom of the river.  They'd be no threat as long as they remained undisturbed.  Much of the later years mines would be at river mouths and harbor entrances. Most would have been cleared by now due to normal clearing operations post war and dredging.

While you are worried about buried unexploded ordnance think about the bombs buried around the WWII practise field off Green Brair road in St Johns County.  Most of them are low power practice bombs. Charges are marker charges about the size of a 10gauge shell. But there are likely some 250# live ones dropped there during the time.

[Timkin]

Id like to know about all of the wrecks and their locations in the St John's ...

[904Scars]

Next time you're at the end of Hogan St, there is the gazebo right on the the RiverWalk. There is a fairly large plaque that tells the story of The Maple Leaf, one of the largest ships sank during the Civil War and in our river!

http://www.mapleleafshipwreck.com/

A pretty cool story about the plaque

http://www.scv-kirby-smith.org/maple_leaf.htm



What's funny is I'm a Jacksonville native who regularly rides my bike down the RiverWalk and I just noticed this plaque for the first time Tuesday night while riding.

[Old Jim]

During the early 1960s, the Times-Union had suppliments in the Sunday papers concerning the war's centennial. One of the last issues mentioned a fisherman hitting a mine in the late 1860s in a tidal creek near Mayport. At the time, they were saying he was the last casualty of the war.