enlarge Doug Jones/Staff Photographer

Maritime archaeologists Matthew Lawrence and Deborah Marx pore over records at the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath. The pair visit about twice a year to find information on shipwrecks off Massachusetts.

enlarge Courtesy of Maine Maritime Museum

The Paul Palmer was built in Waldoboro in 1902. It caught fire and sank off the coast of Cape Cod in 1913.

enlarge Courtesy of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary

Torn fishing nets entangle the windlass of the Paul Palmer, which burned and sank off Massachusetts. The Palmer is the only five-masted schooner lost to fire on the East Coast.

Visibly charred timbers suggest the cause of the wooden ship's demise. But until the archaeologists came to Maine, they didn't know the vessel's name or much else to distinguish it from scores of other wrecks lying on the bottom of Massachusetts Bay.

At the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, the researchers pored over old shipping records and news stories to match their findings with the historical record.

The wrecked ship, they concluded, is the Paul Palmer, a five- masted schooner built in Waldoboro in 1902 for the coal- carrying trade. The 276-foot ship unloaded coal in Bangor and departed Rockport for Virginia on June 13, 1913. The vessel caught fire off Cape Cod and burned to the water line.

A passing fishing boat rescued the Palmer's crew, but the ship sank. It was the only five-masted schooner ever lost to fire on the East Coast.

The records in Bath are part of the rich repository of Maine's shipbuilding history that lies in the state's libraries and museums, as well as buried under mud flats and within residents' attics. Today, historians and archaeologists are delving into these resources to better understand the state's 400-year-old shipbuilding legacy.

Clues to the state's shipbuilding past lie within sets of old photographic negatives and documents as seemingly mundane as a shipyard's insurance records and receipts. In the case of the Paul Palmer, the researchers turned up invitation cards sent out on the occasion of the ship's launching and photographs of its christening that matched their underwater images.

Matthew Lawrence, a marine archaeologist with the Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, an 842- square-mile ocean preserve between Cape Cod and Cape Ann, said this wealth of historical background helped add meaning to the wreckage on the ocean floor and earned the Paul Palmer a listing on the National Register of Historic Places last month.

"The combination of archaeology and the historical record is what makes this shipwreck come alive," he said.

Research into the history of a Maine ship also can illuminate differences between the way people look back on this industry and the way those involved viewed it at the time.

In hindsight, many people see the shipbuilding industry, especially during the era of wooden ships, with an air of romance. Amateur historian William Bunting, who is at work on a book about the Sewalls, a Bath family that owned a shipyard and built approximately 100 vessels between 1820 and the early 1900s, said that he's learned that these shipbuilders took a much narrower view of their enterprise.

"A great deal of this is not romantic at all," Bunting said of the records he is examining. "It all pretty much has to do with money and weather, but it all boils down to money."

The Sewalls are unique among Bath's shipbuilding families because they managed many of their own ships and also made the transition from wooden ships to steel.

In his research for the book, Bunting has sorted through 315 feet of Sewall shipyard records sitting on shelves at the Maine Maritime Museum. From these captains' letters, receipts, lawsuits and other documents, he is trying to craft a social and economic history of the members of the Sewall family.

So far, Bunting said, he has found that the shipyard owners were hard-nosed businessmen who expressed regret that they they had not forsaken wood for steel much sooner than they did.

For two of his previous books, Bunting uncovered history not in a museum's archives but by knocking on doors throughout rural Maine. He found the majority of the photographs reproduced in his "A Day's Work" books by sending post cards to every town clerk in the state inquiring who might have old photographs stored away...