Atlantis, Previous Vessels Named: Difference between revisions

The first vessel on record to carry the name '''''Atlantis''''' was a wooden-hulled motorboat built in 1911 for civilian recreational purposes at Greenport, Long Island, N.Y., and was acquired by the United States Navy on 2 July 1917. She was renamed '''''USS Atlantis''''' (SP-40) and patrolled the Great Lakes region and multiple naval districts around New York State during World War I. '''''Atlantis''''' was decommissioned on 7 May 1919, removed from the Navy list on 7 July, and sold back into the civilian sector on 30 October 1919.

The second '''''Atlantis''''' was one of a dozen freighters commissioned by the United States (ca. 1919) to be built out of concrete. Concrete, a mixture of sand and gravel bonded together with a cement to form a solid heavy mass similar to stone, seems an unlikely substance to be used in aquatic vessel construction. As strange as it seems, a ship of concrete will float as long as the weight of water it displaces is more than its own weight. It is a matter of density. The ships were 76.2 meters long with a draft of 6.7 meters and a beam of 13.7 meters. The walls of the hull were 15 centimeters thick. They required only one-third of the steel necessary for a regular freighter. Some of them were used to transport troops back from Europe at the end of World War I. Soon after the war, when steel was more abundant, the concrete ships quickly became too expensive to operate. In 1926 the '''''Atlantis''''' was bought to be used as part of a dock on a proposed ferry line. A storm hit the region, breaking the ship loose and grounded her off of Sunset Beach, Cape May, NJ. She remains there to this day.