In October 1776, a Continental Navy fleet under the command of Benedict Arnold deliberately sank the Spitfire, a 54-foot gunboat that had been badly damaged in the Battle of Valcour Bay, one of the first naval clashes of the Revolutionary War. The scuttled vessel, built to defend the nascent republic against a British invasion through Canada, has sat at the bottom of Lake Champlain for nearly 250 years, preserved by the cold, dark water and accessible only to expert scuba divers.
Now, visitors to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes can see the Spitfire without getting wet. The museum has just unveiled a free virtual reality tour of the shipwreck, which sits upright and largely intact in 300 feet of water. The VR dive is part of a larger, revamped exhibit called “Fragments: Voices of the American Revolution on Lake Champlain” that celebrates the nation’s 250th anniversary.
The VR dive was created with the help of undergraduates who are studying computer game development and design at Champlain College. They built the simulation using a three-dimensional model based on thousands of photographs of the wreck, shot by one of the museum’s underwater remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs.
Museum visitors can experience the simulated dive in one of two ways. Wearing a VR headset, they can follow a guided tour of the wreck, in which a virtual narrator highlights the ship’s features. Or visitors can enter a “free swim mode” and move around the shipwreck on their own simply by looking in different directions, then moving hand controllers as if they were actually swimming underwater. Unlike other ROV tours offered by the museum, which provide crisp, real-time video footage of shipwrecks in shallower waters, this VR tour used prerecorded video.
“As a diver going through that experience, it seems real,” said Chris Sabick, the museum’s executive director.
Most of the “Fragments” exhibit focuses on the Battle of Valcour Bay, aka the Battle of Valcour Island, which took place from October 11 to 13, 1776. Though technically considered a defeat for the newly formed Continental Navy, which lost 11 of its 16 ships and nearly 200 sailors, the American fleet succeeded in holding off the British advance on Fort Ticonderoga until the following year. That delay gave the Americans time to reinforce the fort, which they held until June 1777.
The VR dive focuses not on the battle itself but on the museum’s efforts to uncover the Spitfire’s history and preserve the wreck, according to Emma Sipes, a rising senior at Champlain College who was part of the six-member project team.
“The museum let us have a lot of creative decisions,” Sipes said. In fact, it was the students who decided to incorporate one of the museum’s ROVs, nicknamed “Fifi,” into the VR experience as the dive narrator.
The Spitfire, one of about 300 known shipwrecks in Lake Champlain, was discovered in 1997 during a multiyear cultural resources survey to map the entire lake bottom. In 2022, the museum partnered with Kotaro Yamafune, a maritime archaeologist and expert in underwater photogrammetry at Texas A&M University, to shoot 30,000 still images of the Spitfire, then use them to build a three-dimensional model. The Champlain College students used those to create the dive simulation earlier this year.
Though the museum knows a lot about the Spitfire, Sabick noted that the ship has yet to reveal all of its secrets. Based on the artifacts recovered when the Spitfire’s sister vessel, the Philadelphia, was salvaged in 1935, Sabick said he suspects that there are “literally thousands” more artifacts still aboard this wreck. Each would help illuminate what it was like for the average sailor or soldier to live and fight aboard these ships. To prevent damage or looting by treasure divers, the museum keeps the ship’s location secret. ➆
This article appears in July 1 • 2026.
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