The bell came up at 4:17 in the afternoon on a flat-calm Tuesday, hauled from 142 meters of cold Atlantic water and laid on the deck of the research vessel Calanus II.

It was green with verdigris and crusted in barnacle scars, but when conservator Élise Doiron rinsed it with seawater, three letters surfaced under the rim: M, A, and a faint G.

By the next morning, the team from the Bedford Institute of Oceanography was reasonably sure they had found the Marguerite-Anne, an Acadian brig that vanished in a December gale in 1798 while carrying salt cod, lumber, and 31 souls between Louisbourg and Boston.

The wreck sits roughly 14 nautical miles north-northeast of Scatarie Island, on a silt plain that has preserved her oak timbers in extraordinary condition.

Marine archaeologist Tomás Reyes-Hill, who led the dive, said the hull lies almost upright, listing only seven degrees to port, with the foremast snapped at deck level and trailing northwest along the current.

The expedition had not set out to find her. The team was mapping a proposed undersea cable corridor for Nova Scotia Power when a sonar return showed a 21-meter shadow with too many right angles to be a boulder field.

The expedition had not set out to find her. The team was mapping a proposed undersea cable corridor for Nova Scotia Power when a sonar return showed a 21-meter shadow with too many right angles to be a boulder field.

When the ROV Comeau descended on April 1, its lights picked out a row of iron deadeyes, a coil of rigging chain, and what Reyes-Hill described as "a galley stove sitting exactly where the cook had left it."

Records of the Marguerite-Anne survive in the Centre d'études acadiennes Anselme-Chiasson at the Université de Moncton. Her master was Jean-Baptiste Doucet, 42, of Arichat. His wife Marie-Josèphe waited eleven years before remarrying.

Among the artifacts the ROV documented but did not lift were a pewter porringer, a brass octant in its original wooden case, and a small leather shoe sized for a child of perhaps five or six.

The shoe is what stopped the deck conversation that evening. There was no record of children aboard. The manifest lists only adult crew and four male passengers, all merchants. Whoever the shoe belonged to was, in the formal record, never there.

Doiron is treating the bell in a controlled electrolytic bath at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax, a process that will take roughly fourteen months before the full inscription can be read.

If, as expected, the casting confirms the brig's name and her 1791 launch at the Forges du Saint-Maurice, the Marguerite-Anne will become the oldest confirmed Acadian-built merchant vessel ever located in Canadian waters.

Reyes-Hill has applied for a five-year survey permit and hopes to return with a sub-bottom profiler in the autumn, partly to map the debris field and partly, he admits, to look for a second small shoe.

The cable route, in the meantime, has been quietly redrawn.

There is something steadying about a bell that has spent two centuries underwater and still, when struck gently with a wooden mallet, rings true.

It rang once on the deck of the Calanus II, just after sunset, and the crew stood without speaking until the sound was gone.