They find a legendary ship that mysteriously shipwrecked more than a hundred years ago

The depths of Lake Nahuel Huapi in Argentina not only contain geological information about its origin and dynamics, but also house enigmas that are part of the archaeological and cultural heritage of the area. This is the case of the steamship Helvecia, a sunken vessel, which had been lost for more than 100 years, and which was recently located.

The discovery was made thanks to the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) of Argentina. Based on the demand of a private production company, which made a documentary about the search for the Helvecia, a mythical ship that sank in the aforementioned lake in the city of San Carlos de Bariloche more than 100 years ago, a team from CONICET provided scientific assistance. and technology that allowed us to precisely locate the site of the shipwreck.

The Helvecia was a tugboat that transported goods between Argentina and Chile at the time the city of San Carlos de Bariloche was founded. The ship was wrecked in 1906 for reasons that are still unknown.

The search for the steamship took shape within the framework of the making of the feature-length documentary “The Search for the Helvecia”, by the audiovisual production company Acuanauta Films. Nicolás Mazzola, director of the documentary and president of Acuanauta SRL, accompanied by Pablo Sigüenza and Lucas Bonfanti, tried for several years to find the location of the Helvecia, in addition to reconstructing the history of the ship. After wondering about the possibility that the ship resting on the lake bottom could have been moved from the original place by an underwater landslide, they contacted CONICET specialists who make up the Environmental Studies Group of the Andean Patagonian Institute of Biological and Geoenvironmental Technologies ( IPATEC, CONICET-UNCo), with extensive experience in the study of the lake systems of northern Patagonia.

In response to Bonfanti’s query, the scientific team reviewed its records: “We confirmed that we have information and analyzed the requested grid but we did not find anything significant. We expanded the search to a contiguous area and there we saw a silhouette of shape and dimensions consistent with the steamboat, so we recommend searching at this point,” says Gustavo Villarosa, CONICET researcher at IPATEC and leader of the team that helped the documentary makers to locate the Helvecia.

The specialists identified the site where the wrecked tug should be located, with such a degree of precision that it allowed the ship to be found on the documentary filmmakers’ next outing to the lake, thus putting an end to a mystery of almost 120 years.

First underwater image of the Helvecia in the depths of Lake Nahuel Huapi after the shipwreck in 1906. (Photo: Nicolás Mazzola. CC BY 2.5 AR)

The collaboration of the research teams and the filmmakers of the documentary with the agents of the National Parks Administration (APN) allowed us to begin the process to follow for the management and conservation of the cultural resource found in the jurisdiction of the Nahuel Huapi National Park, which has already It was incorporated into the National Registry of Cultural Heritage of the APN.

This technology transfer experience shows the possibility of applying the knowledge generated through multiple scientific investigations to a demand from the private sector without a direct connection to the field of knowledge in question. What the documentary filmmakers were interested in was not the geological risks, in which the CONICET team specializes, but rather a search exploration for the production of cinematographic content; However, scientists were able to provide fundamental help to audiovisual filmmakers.

“The search for Helvecia clearly exemplifies the value that the set of activities that begin from a scientific research approach has for a society,” says Villarosa.

In order to locate the vessel, CONICET researchers used their own high-resolution bathymetric records (topographic maps of the aquatic beds), both from the original search area and from surrounding sectors. The CONICET team has been working for several years on limnogeology topics: the study of lake systems from a geological perspective, which includes the understanding of processes related to the origin and evolution of lakes and the geological processes that modify them.

“We investigate events that affect and have affected the region’s lakes in the present and in the past, such as seismic episodes, landslides, floods or coastal instability, lake tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, among others. These investigations are of particular importance to understand the risks for coastal populations and tourist, commercial and recreational activities in the region,” says Villarosa.

With its technical capacity, “the group has studied episodes of great importance for the society of the Andean-Patagonian region, such as the so-called lagomoto in Bariloche, which was the event associated with the great earthquake of 1960. The results were published in 2009 in a work scientist who explains the mechanisms that, associated with the seismic movement, triggered the landslide of the substrate where the port was located, which caused the collapse of the pier along with moored boats and generated a large tsunami wave that was observed by a large number of people,” says the scientist. It was knowledge of this experience, through a scientific dissemination note published on the CONICET website, that led the documentary filmmakers to approach the IPATEC scientists.

The filmmakers of the documentary recover in their work various popular stories around Helvecia. Since its arrival at Lake Nahuel Huapi in 30 carts from Neuquén; to the possible reasons for the shipwreck, which include everything from sabotage to an explosion or a giant wave. All oral records and chronicles of the time.

Mazzola, director of the documentary, relates that before contact with the CONICET research team they had been carrying out surveys with an echo sounder provided by Pablo Vigliano, a professor at the National University of Comahue. At a certain point, after reading the interview they had given Villarrosa about the 1960 lagoon, Bonfanti wondered if the boat could have been moved by a landslide like the one in Puerto San Carlos and been buried in sediment. That’s how he decided to contact the IPATEC researcher.

Regarding the moment of the discovery, after obtaining the information provided by Villarosa and his team, Mazzola relates: “We raked the area several times and used various forms of sweeping, until, passing a certain point, the people responsible for providing the equipment underwater robotics, from the Bariloche company Pancora Robotica Submarina, informed us of the detection of the ship.” After sighting part of the starboard side and the stern of the Helvecia, the filmmakers descended by diving, while they had assistance from the surface of Sigüenza. Finally they were able to see the ship in its entirety: “When I saw the ship my soul was filled with happiness,” says Mazzola.

“The joy I felt at that moment was impressive because something that we were looking for so much was an achievement,” says Bonfanti, for his part, and continues: “Seeing a real shipwreck, which was a tragedy, being the first to see it in so long generated a lot of sensations. Under the water we looked at each other, we started to celebrate, we went around several times and Nicolás (Mazzola) grabbed the camera, pointed it at the shipwreck so that they could see it from the surface, we took photos and filmed it. Afterwards there was a lot of emotion outside.”

Villarosa says that as soon as the filmmakers of the documentary saw the ship, they notified the CONICET group that the discovery had been made at the point they had indicated.

CONICET researcher Débora Beigt, member of the team that collaborated in locating the ship; comments on the challenge of finding sunken ships or other submerged objects, especially in deep environments such as the Nahuel Huapi. “It is not possible to ‘see’ the bottom from the surface because natural light only allows you to see objects a few meters away under the water. Therefore, the search for objects resting on the bottom is usually carried out with small submersible vehicles or cameras connected to the surface operated from a boat, which have powerful lighting sources. These methods only cover a few meters of the surface of the lake or sea bed and require complex systematic sweeping operations of the bottom, which is very difficult since currents and winds, added to the frequent difficulty of having precise positioning, conspire. against search operations.” And he adds: “As an alternative, there are other methods of investigating the lake bed that do not depend on direct visual images, but rather derive from geophysical techniques that, through different methods, allow the morphology of the bottom to be discerned and in some cases a three-dimensional model of the lake can be built. high resolution of the relief, or reconstruct highly detailed images. It was these methods that made it possible to locate the Helvecia.”

In addition to Villarosa and Beigt, Lucía Domínguez, a CONICET doctoral fellow in the IPATEC Environmental Studies Group, participated in this work, whose work topic consists of the reconstruction of seismic and volcanic events that occurred in the last ten thousand years in the region.

“The Search for Helvecia” is an 85-minute documentary feature film. Its director, Nicolás Mazzola, is a documentary diver who is dedicated to communication, planning and audiovisual research in film and television. Mazzola formed a team to make the documentary, compile judicial data, historical archives and all records, including popular stories, that would allow them to access information about Helvecia. As mentioned in the synopsis of the documentary, after the death of his father, Mazzola resumed a search that he had shared with him since he was little: Helvecia. The director of the documentary states that the search was carried out by lovers of history, diving and science who allowed the story to be reconstructed, and like a puzzle he managed to link several stories: the personal ones, the official ones and those that happened while he was leaving. solving the enigma. This project was awarded by the INCAA in the 13th edition of the “Raymundo Gleyzer Federal Feature Film Project Development Competition”, for the Patagonia region. (Source: Mariela Méndez / CONICET. CC BY 2.5 AR)