Montana

History

The Montana was a fast, Clyde-built iron paddle steamer of 236 ft intended for the Confederate blockade-running trade, said to make 15 knots with twin oscillating engines of 260 nominal horsepower. Like many runners she is recorded under more than one name - later accounts give Nola, Gloria and Paramount - and when she was lost she was sailing as the Nola. That is the only name the Royal Gazette used: its reports of the wreck speak of the iron steamer Nola, master Pittman, from Glasgow (Greenock in the customs entry) bound to Nassau, and never mention a Montana. The wreck is known to divers by the name Montana today.

On what later accounts call her first voyage out from Britain, she was to stop at Bermuda for coal. She had met heavy westerly gales the whole way across and very heavy weather approaching the island, and on the afternoon of Wednesday 30 December 1863 she ran onto the reefs north-west of Bermuda, near Western Blue Cut. Boats from Somerset and the steamer Boston from St George's came to help. They found a hole about ten feet long in her bottom and one compartment flooded, and Mr Murphy, "the submarine diver", was sent for but could not stop the leak as she lay. Her goods were taken out, some landed damaged at Mangrove Bay, but the ship was a total loss: Bermuda's reefs had done what no Union gunboat managed. The Gazette put her cost at 31,000 pounds. A week later, on 7 January 1864, her hull, engines and boilers were auctioned at Mangrove Bay along with 174 packages of dry goods saved from her, and the salvors met the magistrates at the Masons' Hall to have their claims settled.

The wreck was never lost; it was long known to fishermen, and Bermuda Maritime Museum field schools surveyed and mapped it several times between 1985 and 2000. Almost eighty years after her loss the freighter Constellation came to grief on the same spot.

Diving the wreck today

Lying in shallow water, the Montana is one of Bermuda's most popular wrecks for both divers and snorkellers. Her two boilers and paddlewheel frames are the obvious landmarks, along with the partly intact bow. The stern lies a little apart from the rest, and its elliptical fantail is thickly grown over with coral. Everything is covered in hard and soft corals and full of fish.

The Constellation wreck lies alongside, so the two are usually dived together, and the Lartington is just to the north. It suits all levels in good conditions. Hurricane Humberto caused damage to the site in 2019.