The SS Carolina was a 380-foot-long (120 m) passenger liner; it was one of six vessels sunk on a single day during World War I by the German submarine U-151 on "Black Sunday".

The original contract was for $500,000, but the vessel ended up being delivered 3 years late and costing $536,000 over budget, and represented the greatest loss (in percentage terms) of any ship built by The Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company.

SS Carolina left San Juan, Puerto Rico on May 29, 1918, with 218 passengers, 117 crew members and a cargo of sugar, bound for New York.

Shortly afterwards, a surfaced submarine was sighted, the SM U-151, which fired three warning shells from her deck guns and hoisted the flag signal for "abandon ship".

However, Chatterton subsequently wrote an open letter Archived 2019-07-05 at the Wayback Machine (at the bottom of the linked page, which is a long treatise on the maritime law issues surrounding salvage) to the diving community saying they were free to take items off the ship, he was simply protecting his position from insurance companies.

In the event, Chatteron would eventually salvage the purser's safe from the Carolina with renowned wreck diver Gary Gentile, which was found to contain gold coin and jewelry.

After relations between the two men broke down, Gentile would later write in his book, Shadow Divers Exposed, that despite the assistance he lent to Chatterton, Chatteron only gave him a token share of the salvage claim.