Wrecked
Kearsarge recommissioned on 2 November 1888, and largely spent her remaining years protecting American interests in the West Indies, off Venezuela, and along the Central Americas. She departed Haiti on 20 January 1894 for Bluefields, Nicaragua, but was wrecked on a reef off Roncador Cay on 2 February. Her officers and crew safely made it ashore.
Congress appropriated $45,000 to raise Kearsarge and tow her home, but a salvage team of the Boston Towboat Company found that she could not be raised. Some artifacts were saved from the ship, including the ship's Bible. The salvaged items, along with a damaged section of the stern post with an unexploded shell from Alabama still embedded in it, are now stored or displayed at the Washington Navy Yard.
Kearsarge was struck from the Naval Vessel Register in 1894.
Read more about this topic: USS Kearsarge (1861)
Famous quotes containing the word wrecked:
“The old man had heard that there was a wreck and knew most of the particulars, but he said that he had not been up there since it happened. It was the wrecked weed that concerned him most ... and those bodies were to him but other weeds which the tide cast up, but which were of no use to him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The Bermudas are said to have been discovered by a Spanish ship of that name which was wrecked on them.... Yet at the very first planting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the first governor, the same year, “built and laid the foundation of eight or nine forts.” To be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship’s company that should be next shipwrecked on to them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)