The Nomad Exploration Team found the SS Cornwallis on July 11, 2026, in close to 400 feet of water off Maine. Side scan sonar first revealed the wreck, and later dives identified it as the lost World War II ship.
Danny Allan said, "For the team, finding the wreck was the culmination of years of persistence." He also said, "For the families and communities connected to the ship, it brings renewed attention to a largely forgotten tragedy."
Danny Allan and the wreck site
The team included Ross Baxter, Mark Bowers, Josh Cummings, Don Ferrara, Bob Foster, Nate Garrett, Jeff Goodreau and Ryan King. Their dives ended a search that had stretched for more than 80 years, after the ship disappeared in December 1944.
The Cornwallis was a 5,458-ton steam merchant ship built in Vancouver, British Columbia, and launched in 1921 as the Canadian Transporter. It was later renamed Cornwallis after transferring to Canadian National Steamships. Her crew was almost exclusively Canadian, with nineteen from Nova Scotia.
U-1230 and the sinking
In November 1944, the ship left Barbados loaded with bags of sugar and barrels of molasses bound for St. John, New Brunswick. Forty-eight people were aboard, including seven armed guards, when U-1230 crossed into view shortly after 6 a.m. on December 3, 1944.
U-1230, commanded by Hans Hilbig, fired a torpedo that struck near the forward cargo hold. The blast threw the hatch cover into the air, crew members smelled cordite, and the ship went down by the bow in less than ten minutes. Only five of the 48 aboard survived.
Families and communities
The survivors reached life rafts, were spotted by aircraft, were picked up by fishing boats and were transferred to a U.S. Navy rescue vessel that landed them in Rockland, Maine. The wreck's location now fixes the ship's final resting place for the people tied to the sinking, from the Canadian crew to the families who never had that point of reference.
The Cornwallis vanished after its sinking, yet U-1230 had already landed two German agents, Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh, near Hancock, Maine, four days earlier during Operation Magpie. That link makes the wreck more than a lost ship; it sits inside a wartime sequence that connected the Maine coast, espionage and the sinking that followed.
What proved the identification on the wreck site itself was the combination of side scan sonar and the team's dives. That is the part left for the record, and it is the detail that matters most to families still tracing where the SS Cornwallis ended its voyage.
