The Sea Hunters II: More True Adventures with Famous Shipwrecks

America’s Leonardo da Vinci 1792, 2001

Though we don’t often find what we search for, it is satisfying to bring closure to a piece of history that has been surrounded in mystery. One such project was the hunt for Samuel Morey’s boat, Aunt Sally.

Legends persisted for almost two centuries of a boat sunk in the waters of Lake Morey in Fairlee, Vermont, about a mile west of the Connecticut River. With the passage of time, colorful variations on the story have obscured the facts.

What we do know is that Samuel Morey was a true genius whose name and accomplishments are known to very few today. Born in 1763, he became a prolific inventor, whose experiments with light, heat, and steam were half a century ahead of his time. Though it is well recorded that James Watt invented the steam engine, Morey is considered the first to put a steam engine in a boat.

His first patent was signed by President George Washington in 1793, for a steam-powered roasting spit. His next patent was for the use of steam to propel a boat and was signed by Thomas Jefferson, who was then the secretary of state. He constructed the hull and the necessary machinery at the sawmill and iron forge he owned. History has at least credited Morey with creating the use of the first paddle wheels. He is also acclaimed — perhaps grudgingly by some historians — as having built the first successful machine-powered vessel.

His first boat was small, with only enough room for one companion, but it worked. To this day, no one knows what he named this little historic vessel. Morey’s maiden voyage was from Orford, New Hampshire, up the Connecticut River to Fairlee, Vermont, and back. This was as early as 1792, more than fourteen years before Robert Fulton’s first trial trip up the Hudson River.

A short time later, Morey was encouraged to travel to New York and display a model of his boat. He met a wealthy backer of inventions named Chancellor Livingston. The entrepreneur was deeply taken with Morey’s creation and introduced him to Robert Fulton, who was also fascinated by the sight of a working model of a steamboat. Morey was treated with great respect by Livingston and Fulton, who suggested minor modifications. The two New Yorkers then offered Morey $10,000 if he would make the alterations and demonstrate a working model.

He returned home and completed the work with great success, mounting the paddle wheel in the stem, an innovation that was not employed until many years later for boats traveling the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers. It was recorded that, during the effort, Livingston made more than one trip to Morey’s workshop to study the progress and take notes on Morey’s success.

Then, when Morey returned to New York, he was greeted with great coldness and indifference. No mention was made of the $10,000, and Fulton and Livingston simply brushed him off. The two men had seen all they had to see. Morey’s secret invention had been fully acquired and was now no longer needed. The result was that Fulton, backed financially by Livingston and with the influence of powerful men in the New York statehouse, succeeded in building a large boat on Morey’s principles, mainly the paddle wheels, which went down in history as the first successful steamboat.

Years later, it was clearly proved that Samuel Morey had taken out the necessary patents for the operation of steam-powered boats several years before Fulton, so there was an obvious case of infringement. But Morey, described as a warm and retiring sort of person, did not want the trouble or the expense of a court case, and probably realized he had little chance of winning over the powers that be in New York. To be sure, he made appeals, but he never followed through, lacking time and money.

Truth has always been on Morey’s side, but unfortunately his ingenuity has been mostly forgotten, except by local historical organizations.

Morey also devised gaslights and heated his house for years with what he called “water gas.” During his life, no other man was granted as many patents as Samuel Morey. He built dams, intricate irrigation canals, and fish-stocking ponds so he could study their behavior. Remains of a flume he erected to shoot logs down to his lumber mill can still be seen. When the Connecticut River was opened for navigation, it was Sam Morey who designed and built the locks at Bellows Falls, Vermont.

After the debacle with Fulton, he returned home to Orford and continued work on his engines, building a rotary steam engine and then a turpentine-vapor engine. In 1826, he patented an internal combustion engine. Far ahead of his time, Morey installed his first small gas engine in a wagon. When he started it up, the wagon lurched forward and smashed through his workshop wall. He beat Charles Duryea’s first gasoline automobile by fifty years.

He constructed a larger engine and dropped it in a boat nineteen feet long and five feet wide, painted white with red streaks and black gunwales. Fitted with paddle wheels on the side, the vessel was christened Aunt Sally.

After refitting her with a vapor-type engine, Morey operated Aunt Sally on Fairlee Lake, later named after him, for a year or more, hauling lumber and other materials back and forth across the lake.

Then, mysteriously, the first internal combustion-powered craft in history disappeared.

Some said that Morey sunk it in a fit of anger, but a friend of Morey’s said, “No Vermont Yankee would sink something that was still useful just because he was mad.”

Another story is that it was stolen in the dead of the night by Morey’s enemies from New York, filled with stones and scuttled. Still another admission, from a group of three boys who claimed they sank the boat, has added to the enigma.

There was an attempt to find the boat in 1874 by dragging a grappling hook. But the pickerel grass was thick and reached as high as six feet, so the grapple had to be cleaned every twelve feet, and nothing was found.

Other attempts were made, with no success. Doc Harold Edgerton, a trustee of NUMA and a grand old inventor himself, gave it a try in 1984. He used sidescan sonar, which he created and developed to search the lake. But Doc did not find Aunt Sally. As he so eloquently put it, “I don’t like to give up. I’ve been on many projects where we never found what we were looking for, others where we did find what we were looking for, and others where we found things we weren’t looking for at all.”

In July of 1999, I received a call from Michael Colin Moore, who I believe was a descendant of Morey. He related the story of the inventor, and suggested that I might be interested in searching for the lost boat.

After researching the matter with the help of Hester Gardner, curator of the Fairlee Historical Society, I decided to give it a go. I contacted my old survey pal, Ralph Wilbanks, and arranged an expedition. Though Doc Edgerton had swept the lake with his sidescan sonar fifteen years before, Ralph decided to use a sidescan again in hopes that a newer, advanced navigation system might make a difference. I learned that a pole could be easily pushed into the bottom mud up to five feet. This, of course, led me to believe that any chance of finding the long-lost boat would depend heavily on a magnetometer survey to detect any iron that Morey had used to assemble the boat as well as the engine. After 175 years, it seemed likely that the boat had sunk into the soft mud.

In September of 2000, Ralph arrived in Fairlee, Vermont, with Diversity in tow, along with his experienced underwater survey associate Shea McLean. He was joined by writer Jayne Hitchcock and her husband Chris.

Lake Morey is in a pretty setting, set in a valley amid wooded hills and surrounded by picturesque homes. Five hundred eighty acres of water, it is shaped like a sea slug, forty-two feet at its deepest point. Several probes into the bottom revealed it to be very soft up to eighteen feet.

Ralph divided the lake into search lanes on his computer. He began mowing the lawn with a cesium magnetometer towed off the port side, while the sidescan sonar sensor was towed off the starboard stem. Two computers were tied in with the GPS positioning system. The software then tracked the fifty-foot lanes. After two days of recording several small hits, they decided to spend the third day diving on them to investigate. After marking each one with a buoy, Ralph and Shea traded going over the side. They found old barrels at one site and railroad ties at another. The most promising target turned out to be a forty-foot curved section of pipe.

On the final day, while cruising toward the dock, a boat approached and asked if they could search for a wallet belonging to a boater who was lost overboard. Ralph thought that it would be the same as searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, but the man persisted, saying there was a medal in the wallet that belonged to the boater’s son, who had recently died. Ralph and Shea looked at each other, knowing they couldn’t refuse.

The general area where the wallet had sunk was pointed out, and Shea volunteered to go in. Everyone thought it was a lost cause, but in less than three minutes Shea broke the surface with his hand raised in the air, clutching the wallet. The boater had tears in his eyes as he showed everyone the medal. Then he gave Shea two soggy fifty-dollar bills. Shea tried to refuse, but the man would not take no for an answer. That night, Shea treated Ralph and the Hitchcocks to dinner.

Ralph covered the entire lake from shore to shore, even dragging the sensor through the growth along the banks. Over two hundred lanes were searched, with no solid results. Ralph and I strongly believe that Morey’s boat was never scuttled in the lake. Its most likely demise probably involved being broken up either for firewood or lumber.

The real pity is that Morey’s ingenious power plant, possibly the first internal combustion engine in the world, was lost to the engineers of the future, who would have given their eye-teeth to study it.

The residents around the lake believe that Morey’s wonderful boat is still out there, waiting to be discovered. But in our minds, the mystery has been solved. Aunt Sally is not in Morey Lake. The brilliant inventor most likely scrapped her.

As the man suggested, “No Vermont Yankee would throw away a good boat and engine.”