Divers locate long-lost SS Cornwallis wreck off Maine coast
The discovery of the 1944 shipwreck follows a seven-year search by a civilian technical diving group in the Atlantic Ocean.
Divers have located the wreck of the SS Cornwallis, a Canadian merchant ship that sank off the coast of Maine in 1944, according to a report by Smithsonian Magazine in the Times of India. The vessel was found nearly 400 feet beneath the Atlantic Ocean near Mount Desert Rock in the Gulf of Maine.
The Nomad Exploration Team, a civilian technical diving group from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, discovered the wreck on July 11, 2026. The team used side-scan sonar, historical shipping records, and original blueprints to identify the ship after a seven-year search.
The SS Cornwallis was a 5,458-ton steam merchant vessel that was torpedoed by the German submarine U-1230 on December 3, 1944. The attack killed 43 people out of the 48 aboard the ship, leaving only five survivors.
The submarine, commanded by Hans Hilbig, had landed two Nazi spies on American soil near Crabtree Neck in Hancock, Maine, on November 29, 1944. The agents, Erich Gimpel and William Curtis Colepaugh, were part of an espionage mission to gather intelligence on American industrial capabilities.
Colepaugh turned himself in to the FBI on December 26, 1944, which helped investigators locate Gimpel in New York on December 30. Both men were convicted of espionage, though their death sentences were later commuted by US President Harry Truman.