The wreck of a 109-year-old schooner was recently discovered on the ocean floor near Los Angeles last year after two decades of searching, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The ship, named the George E. Billings, hauled timber at the beginnings of the 1900s from the West Coast to Hawaii and Latin America. After briefly being turned into a sport-fishing barge, it was scuttled by its owner in 1941, according to a paper presented at the California Islands Symposium in Ventura, Calif.
Archaeologists and historians who had been searching for the shipwreck finally found it in February 2011 off the coast of Santa Barbara Island, according to Robert Schwemmer, a NOAA maritime archaeologist.
The five-masted schooner was built in 1903 by the Hall Bros., a shipbuilding company, in Port Blakely, Wash.
