It must have been a dark, dark night at sea, 188 years ago today.

The whaling ship Two Brothers, with captain George Pollard Jr. in command, was running briskly before the wind when it suddenly slammed against something in the water. Caught in the teeth of a low reef, Two Brothers ripped in half and sank in moments.

This morning, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are announcing the discovery of the Two Brothers shipwreck, just a dozen feet down at French Frigate Shoals in the long string of atolls between Hawaii and Midway.

The discovery is the first confirmed find of a sunken whaling ship, a craft that helped change the economy of the Hawaiian kingdom.

Researchers have recovered significant artifacts from Two Brothers. The shipwreck can be connected to not just whaling in the Pacific, but also to American maritime traditions rooted in New England.

As Two Brothers sank on that fateful night in 1823, it must have been a moment of shocking deja vu for Pollard. Just two years before he had commanded the whaler Essex when she was rammed by a whale and quickly sank.

There were but few survivors in lifeboats, including Pollard, and as their shipmates died they resorted to cannibalism.

The notorious, haunting tale of the Essex was later immortalized as the novel "Moby-Dick."

"I’m sure that as the crew scrambled for their lives, as Two Brothers shattered and went down, Pollard’s previous bad luck weighed on their minds," said historian-archaeologist James Delgado of NOAA’s Maritime Heritage Program. "He was a Jonah, and spent the rest of his life as a night watchman. No one would give him a ship again."

A 2008 NOAA marine-life survey of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, led by Kelly Gleason, was going over the wreck of copra transport Churchill, which sank at French Frigate Shoals in 1917. The archaeologists had a few hours free, "and we went tow-boarding," said Gleason: "wearing snorkels and being dragged behind a boat, looking for anything of interest."

They almost immediately spotted a large anchor that dated back to the early 1800s. "And then, three whaling try pots and a whole bunch of bricks. We knew we had a whaler."

Try pots, huge cast-iron beaked vessels for reducing blubber, identified the site. But which one? There are at least three lost whaling ships in the area.

"It’s a very active site, a reef environment — a debris field rather than a Hollywood sunken ship," explained Delgado. "It needs a detailed excavation, but it’s always a question of money. Everything we do is cost-effective, but it’s based on rides of opportunity.

"During a later, longer survey in 2009, we found a whole slew of whaling tools, including a whaling harpoon tip," said Gleason. "I was looking at the harpoon on the bottom and really hated to leave it there, but we needed a permit to remove artifacts."

They returned, with permits, in 2010 and recovered enough artifacts "to conclusively date the ship to 1820s Nantucket," said Gleason. "Two Brothers was sunk the night of Feb. 11, 1823. We had found her!"

Some of the artifacts will go on temporary display in Hilo, but without a maritime center in Hawaii to care for them, they will likely wind up in a Nantucket, Mass., museum. There are future expeditions planned as well, depending on when the archaeologists can piggyback onto marine-life surveys by NOAA in the area.

Other than preserved museum ship Charles W. Morgan, no other whaling ships — or shipwrecks — have been positively identified anywhere in the world. That this wreck has such a personal connection to American literature excites Delgado as well.

"Two Brothers, a whaler, is a unique link in the economic and cultural transformation of the United States," said Delgado. "It was America that industrialized whaling and created a global market.

"Beyond that, anything that connects us to literature makes history real. It has resonance. The bell has struck again. It ceases to be a story and enters the national dialogue. Look at what we’re doing right now — we’re talking about whaling again!"