The Wreck of the Georgiana

Dr. Spence will share his research and discovery (when he was still a teenager) of the wrecked Civil War steamer Georgiana.The Georgiana, described in some accounts as the most powerful Confederate cruiser and in others as a mere blockade runner, was wrecked on her maiden voyage. Spence’s team recovered over one million individual artifacts (ranging from heavy iron cannons to beautiful examples of Wedgwood china) from the site and did some of the first underwater archaeology in North America. Spence’s research on the Georgiana’s owner, George Alfred Trenholm, made international news when Spence revealed that, despite Margaret Mitchell’s claim that the characters in “Gone With The Wind” were fiction, Rhett Butler was actually based on Trenholm.

Boston Sea Rovers
Boston Sea Rovers