Treasure of the sloop Washington

“The cargo of this ship includes a large quantity of valuable antique chinaware worth at least $100,000 in which some of the plates alone are worth $500 each. The strong box with gold bullion and coins are worth $100,000 to $250,000.” “WOW!” I said, as a young diver reading this for the first time in one of the Great Lakes treasure books, “If I could find this ship, I could retire by the age of 30.” Forty years later I retired. In the 1960s as diving became a popular sport, authors began writing books about treasure that could be found on ships in oceans and lakes around the world. As each decade passed, new treasure book authors would typically add another “0” to the previously stated value of the goods that might be found aboard these ships. The ship that my treasure book was referring to was called Lady Washington.

I began my recreational diving career in 1970. After a few years of diving on several known shipwrecks in the St. Lawrence River and Lake Ontario, I wanted to find shipwrecks that no one had been on before. I was working at General Dynamics in Rochester, NY, when a fellow engineer and diver told me about a very special machine called side scan sonar that would create an image of the sea floor similar to an aerial photograph. With this machine, one could identify bottom