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Ship mysteriously sunk off Sydney in 1904. Now, first divers visit ‘holy grail'
On a stormy night in 1904, a steamship off the coast of Sydney, Australia, sank. The ship seemingly vanished, leaving no survivors, no explanations and no trace of its final resting place — until a chance discovery in 2022.
Now, over 120 years after its sinking, scuba divers visited the wreck for the first time.
The SS Nemesis steamship, built in 1880, spent several decades carrying people and cargo along the Australian coast before its mysterious sinking in July 1904, the Sydney Project, a citizen science initiative focused on exploring shipwrecks, wrote in a June 24 blog post. Investigations into the tragedy, which killed 32 people, couldn't figure out why the ship sank or where it went.
'The loss of (SS) Nemesis has been described as one of Sydney's most enduring maritime mysteries and has even been described by shipwreck researchers as the 'holy grail,'' Penny Sharpe, the New South Wales (NSW) Minister for Environment and Heritage, said in a 2024 news release.
But the breakthrough rediscovery of the SS Nemesis didn't come from shipwreck devotees.
Instead, a 'remote sensing company Subsea Professional Marine Services stumbled across the wreck while trying to locate cargo containers lost off the coast of Sydney' in 2022, the NSW Heritage Department said. Experts immediately suspected the wreck was the SS Nemesis and confirmed its identification in 2024 after a series of follow-up surveys.
Enter the Sydney Project: Scuba divers Samir Alhafith, Dave Apperley, Rus Pnevski and John Wooden decided they wanted to see the SS Nemesis — an 'ambitious mission,' the team wrote in a June 20 Facebook post.
The nearly 240-foot long SS Nemesis sits about 16 miles off the coast of Sydney at a depth of about 525 feet, NSW officials wrote in a June 23 Facebook post.
The Sydney Project team had their first dive attempt thwarted by weather conditions, but their second attempt on June 18 proved successful. The dive required advanced equipment and a six-hour process to resurface all for nine minutes of time at the wreck.
It was worth it for the 'history making dive,' according to the team.
'We landed closer to the port bow of the wreck and proceeded towards the midship,' the team said. They saw the mast, lines from a crane, main deck, bridge and the doomed coal cargo scattered around the ship.
Photos show what remains of the SS Nemesis. Overall, the wreck is encrusted, slightly deteriorated and a hub of marine life.
'This shipwreck is a little bit unique to others because the bow and the stern, so the front and the back of the ship, are both collapsed, pretty much to the sand line, which is unusual,' Samir Alhafith, the team leader, told the Australian Broadcasting Company. 'I have never seen that before.'
'It looks like something extremely violent happened to the wreck,' Alhafith told the outlet.
Marine archaeologists are still piecing together what happened to the SS Nemesis, and the Sydney Project's footage — the first taken of the wreck by scuba divers — will help this process.
The leading explanation for the sinking is that 'the engine became overwhelmed in the storm, and when SS Nemesis was hit by a large wave she sank too quickly for life boats to be deployed,' officials said in a 2024 release.
Tim Smith, a director with Heritage NSW, told the Australian Broadcasting Company that 'These four divers have shone a light on the vessel's rich legacy, capturing never-seen-before footage of the ship up close. What they recorded … will help us join the dots in understanding its demise.'
