Sorry I missed it.
Hope you don't mind but I copied that article and am placing it here, just in case the link goes:
Divers shed light on wreck of Portland
Captain Hollis Blanchard was at the helm of the steamship Portland when it went down off the coast of Massachusetts in November 1898. Nearly 200 perished
By Bina Venkataraman
Globe Correspondent / October 7, 2008
In the cold, black waters 460 feet below the ocean's surface, the divers could not see their hands. They switched on their lamps, throwing light on one of the worst shipwrecks in New England history.
Clad head-to-toe in insulated dry suits, five Massachusetts men recently became the first divers to reach the Portland, a luxury passenger ship that was thrashed by hurricane-force winds and sank off the coast of Cape Ann in one of the 19th century's deadliest storms.
Although the upper decks had been ripped off, perhaps as waves pummeled the paddlewheel ship broadside, the divers found portholes with the glass intact, half-filled medicine bottles from an apothecary in Maine, and stacks of delicate china plates, many of which survived without a scratch.
"It's like somebody set the table, and just left it for 120 years," said Dave Faye, one of the divers and a lawyer at a Cambridge law firm. "It was very spooky."
The five divers trained for more than a year before attempting the dive in mid-August. They reached the shipwreck twice more over the next month, but each time could stay for only minutes because of the conditions. Four other times they failed to reach the wreck because the currents were too strong.
"This lies, really, on the edge of what can be explored directly by humans because of its depth," said Brendan Foley, a research associate in applied ocean physics and engineering at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "It's the extreme edge of human physiology and diving technology."
"These technical sport divers are looking for challenges," Foley added. "There's a certain cachet for getting to deeper shipwrecks that are hard to get to."
The Portland does not measure up to the world's deepest shipwrecks, reached by advanced underwater robots and submarine. The Titanic, for example, lies 12,500 feet underwater.
Still, said Faye, at 39 the youngest of the divers, "I equate it to being the first guy climbing Mount Everest, especially in New England where it was such a significant wreck."
For Bob Foster, the diving team's informal leader and a 52-year-old marketing director from Needham, diving to a shipwreck is more than an adventure. "Shipwrecks are like portals back in time," he said. "Usually they have a story behind them."
Foster, who has done dives to nearly a hundred shipwrecks, said he was surprised by "the sheer number of artifacts" on the Portland.
The Portland lies within the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, about 15 miles east of Cape Ann. Its nearly 200 passengers and crew members included a senator from Maine and members of the black Abyssinian Church community in 19th-century Portland, Maine.
The steamer sank just after the Thanksgiving holiday in 1898, said Matthew Lawrence, an archaeologist for the sanctuary, and many of its passengers were returning from holiday visits to relatives in Boston when the storm hit. No one survived.
"It landed into a sort of 'Perfect Storm' scenario off the coast," he said.
The wreckage was located using sonar in 1989, and the sanctuary's archaeologists began sending underwater robots to investigate in 2002.
But "the divers have seen things the robots were not able to image," Lawrence said. For example, the divers could approach the stern of the ship, which was covered with fishing lines.
To return to the surface after diving to the Portland, it took the men three to four hours, making decompression stops at intervals so that their lungs would not collapse and their limbs would not weaken from caisson disease, commonly know as decompression sick or the bends, a serious illness that results from rapid changes in pressure. The longer divers stay at the bottom, the longer they must endure the frigid water before surfacing.
The spread of techniques used by commercial and Navy divers to hobbyists in recent decades helped the divers reach the Portland. At that depth, the air we breathe on land would be toxic, so the men carried tanks of mixed gas instead of compressed air, mostly helium with small portions of oxygen.
Diving to the Portland was so demanding that Foster is not sure he'll return when the waters warm up next summer. "The novelty has worn off," he said. But, he added, "If the other guys want to go back, I might consider it."
Granted we know better but since the article is so pretty darn good, compared to many others, it would have been nice if the writer had gotten that correct. 
