Discovery of the historic Great Lakes schooner Trinidad | Hacker News Reader

Discovery of the historic Great Lakes schooner Trinidad

shipwreckworld.com

88 pointspseudolus32 comments

This article is much better and has full size images:

https://www.shipwreckworld.com/articles/discovery-of-the-his...

and a link to their 3D scan of the ship: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/schooner-trinidad-1867-1881-...

Awesome! That web viewer kind of sucks but the model is amazing.

Here's where they messed up: the orbit is backwards. Clicking and dragging has very well defined behavior: if you drag to the left, then the thing you are interacting with should move to the left, but in their viewer the camera rotates to the left, so the world rotates to the right, which is backwards!

That's just a setting. Click the gear and change navigation to first person instead of orbit.

I think it's a pretty standard paradigm when viewing 3d models as an editor (vs games and virtual house tours and such) isn't it? Felt intuitive to me

> first person

Oh my, so much better. Thanks!

>> Here's where they messed up: the orbit is backwards. Clicking and dragging has very well defined behavior: if you drag to the left, then the thing you are interacting with should move to the left, but in their viewer the camera rotates to the left, so the world rotates to the right, which is backwards!

It works the way you want for me. I drag left, the boat rotates left. Also, while I agree with you that this is how it should work and is the "one true way", I can tell you from working on CAD that there is a whole world of people out there that want the camera to move based on mouse movement. In their mind, moving the object is as strange as moving the camera is for me. It seems there is no "right" way, just a few different ways.

Edit: Oh it's worse. They are using turntable navigation.

Weird, on Mac with a mouse it operates exactly how I'd expect it to.

Ok, we'll use that instead of https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/sep/02/shipwreck-tr.... Thanks!

The Great Lakes seem awash in shipwrecks, but this one is in amazing condition.

That's because the Great Lakes are massive. Lake Superior alone is the largest freshwater lake in the world. It's effectively a sea where wave heights can reach 25 feet (7.6 meters). Winter storms can sink bulk freighters (1).

I grew up in Wisconsin and no one took Lake Superior lightly. The song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" (2) is part of the region's legends and history.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Edmund_Fitzgerald

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI

Largest by area, but only about half the size of Lake Baikal by volume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Baikal

Ah but many people think Michigan/Huron should be considered one lake, in which case it would be largest by area and volume I think. It's a valid point given they are connected by a straight that is 5 miles wide at the narrowest and not very long and also very deep. Their levels are the same because they are essentially the same body of water.

Sure, but for the most part interesting weather phenomena come from surface area, not volume.

No doubt superior has far more interesting weather.

I just always think of this image when I hear Superior is the "biggest" and it really adds some interesting perspective

https://imageio.forbes.com/blogs-images/startswithabang/file...

They're all in pretty amazing condition. Deep, still, low-oxygen fresh water is much better at preserving a wreck than anything in saltwater.

The boat probably rotted more in the 20 years during which it was unmaintained, exposed to the sun and weather on the surface, than it did during the 150 years it spent on the bottom of the lake.

The Schooner Trinidad just doesn’t have the same ring as The Edmund Fitzgerald.

If Gordon Lightfoot had written about it it would.

There was no loss of life on the Trinidad.

Except the poor dog. Surely that dog deserves a ballad!

The pup was the most innocent of all!

“Fellas it’s been good to know ya”

Here's an article on the same topic, but text-only: https://text.npr.org/1197480909

This is the NPR full site with better photos showing how well-preserved the wreck is:

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/04/1197480909/shipwreck-trinidad...

“it still had all the cabinets with all the dishes stacked in them and all the crew's effects”

While reading this, noticed how Shipwreckworld.com has plenty of content. I'm not sure if NPR or The Guardian added a ton of value.

However, I am sure they spend more effort on capturing impressions. In this context, I sympathize even less with advertisers.

Man, it would be so cool to take a chartered/guided dive to the ship, maybe swim inside and check out the wreck yourself.

I'm sure if that was a thing you'd have people trying to scratch their names in the walls and stealing items inside the wreck though. :(

might not be so casual since it's probably sunk at great depth, though the article doesn't mention that. I mean, beyond 10m/33ft isn't out of bounds for a trained deep water diver, but perhaps a bit outside the standard recreational stuff, which tends to stay above the 1 atmosphere pressure depth

The updated link says it’s at 300 ft and once it’s on the National Register of Historic Places it will be a protected place. Then it’s location will be revealed.

I grew up near Algoma and the article is right, I’d never heard of this shipwreck. That said the Door Penninsula is littered with shipwrecks and people there do take their maritime history seriously. Very cool find.

Is it possible to recover the coal?

Taking a trip to Newcastle presumably.

> Trinidad’s owners didn’t invest much in the vessel’s upkeep and her career was relatively short for her era.

> There, Captain Higgins told his story to the marine reporters. Loathe to blame the owners, Higgins speculated that the schooner’s hull may have been cut by ice in the Straits of Mackinac. However, a review of the vessel’s career suggests that she was little more than a floating coffin by the time of her final voyage. Most vessels of the Trinidad’s era lasted twice as long as she did, but they also received regular recaulking and replacement of decayed or rotten wood and rigging. The insurance records suggest that Trinidad received little of the normal maintenance and was essentially sailed into the bottom of the Lake.

A classic tale of capitalist barbarism and how American workers are manipulated and propagandized into shilling for their masters. Disgusting stuff, and sadly nothing has fundamentally changed in over 150 years.

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