'Drowned voice' of pristine phonograph found at Yukon site of sunken ship

By Randy Boswell

Divers equipped with digital scanners have created a set of groundbreaking, 3-D images of the legendary Klondike-era sternwheeler A.J. Goddard, which sank in a Yukon lake in 1901 and was only discovered two years ago by a team of Canadian archeologists.

The imaging system, similar to one used recently to document the wreck of the Titanic off Newfoundland's east coast, was employed during an expedition this summer to the sunken-but-perfectly-preserved Goddard — a dive that also produced a stunning new artifact: the vintage phonograph used to entertain fortune-seekers on their long, northward steamboat voyage to the Klondike gold fields.

"They're not only stunning and amazing images, they're also an accurate measuring tool," Canadian marine archeologist James Delgado, one of the experts involved in the Goddard project, told Postmedia News.

The precise 3-D model of the wreck was generated with scanning equipment supplied by the U.S. firms Oceangate and BlueView Technologies.

While documenting the boat's pristine condition, the researchers also spotted and collected several relics that were missed during earlier dives to the Goddard, which was declared an official historic site by the Yukon government earlier this year.

Corked bottles with their liquids still intact, leather footwear and other items were added to previous discoveries of tools and clothing.

"There was a bottle with vanilla extract still in it," said Delgado, former head of the Vancouver Maritime Museum and now director of marine archeology with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Talk about the proverbial miner's cabin that you stumble across," he said. "Here's one under water — the Goddard really does represent a time capsule."

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