A whaling ship from Massachusetts sank near the mouth of the Mississippi River about 15 years before Herman Melville introduced the world to Moby Dick.
Nearly 190 years later, experts said, it was still the only whaler known to have gone down in the Gulf of Mexico, where the threat of enslavement at Southern ports posed a risk for Black and mixed-race men who often were part of whaling crews.
Researchers, checking out odd shapes during undersea scanning work on the sandy ocean floor, believed they had finally found the shipwreck about 113 kilometres offshore Pascagoula in Mississippi.
