MADISON, Wis. — Twenty years before the Titanic changed maritime history, another ship touted as the next great technological feat set sail on the Great Lakes.
The Western Reserve was one of the first all-steel cargo ships to traverse the lakes. Built to break speed records, the 300-foot (91.4-meter) freighter dubbed “the inland greyhound” by newspapers was supposed to be one of the safest ships afloat. Owner Peter Minch was so proud of her that he brought his wife and young children aboard for a summer joyride in August 1892.
Then tragedy struck. As the ship entered Lake Superior’s Whitefish Bay between Michigan and Canada on Aug. 30, a gale came up. With no cargo aboard, the ship was light and floating high in the water. The storm battered it until it cracked in half. Twenty-seven people perished that night, including the Minch family. The only survivor was wheelsman Harry W. Stewart, who swam a mile (1.6 kilometers) to shore after his lifeboat capsized.
For almost 132 years the lake hid the wreckage. In July, explorers from the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society pinpointed the Western Reserve off Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The society announced the discovery Saturday at the annual Ghost Ships Festival in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Executive Director Bruce Lynn called the discovery one of the society’s most significant finds.
“There’s a number of concurrent stories that make this important,” Lynn said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “Most ships were still wooden. It was a technologically advanced ship. They were kind of a famous family at the time. You have this new ship, considered one of the safest on the lake, new tech, a big, big ship. (The discovery) is another way for us to keep this history alive.”
Darryl Ertel, the society’s marine operations director, and his brother, Dan Ertel, spent more than two years looking for the Western Reserve.
Lynn said this winter the brothers outlined a search grid. On July 22 they set out on the David Boyd, the society’s research vessel. Heavy ship traffic that day forced them to alter their course, though, and search an area adjacent to their original grid, Lynn said.
The brothers towed a side-scanning sonar array behind their ship. Side sonar scans to starboard and port, providing a more expansive picture of the bottom than traditional sonar mounted beneath a ship. About 60 miles (97 kilometers) northwest of Whitefish Point on the Upper Peninsula, they picked up a line with a shadow behind it in 600 feet of water. They dialed up the resolution and spotted a ship broken in two with the bow resting on the stern. Each section was 150 feet (45.2 meters) long, suggesting they’d found the Western Reserve.
Eight days later, the brothers returned to the site along with Lynn. They deployed a submersible drone equipped with high-intensity lighting and a high-resolution camera. The drone returned clear images of a portside running light that match the Western Reserve’s starboard running light, which had washed ashore in Canada after the ship went down. That light was the only artifact recovered from the ship.
“That was confirmation day,” Lynn said. “It’s pretty exciting.”
Darryl Ertel said that discovery gave him chills — and not in a good way. “Knowing how the 300-foot Western Reserve was caught in a storm this far from shore made a uneasy feeling in the back of my neck,” he said in a society news release. “A squall can come up unexpectedly…anywhere, and anytime.”
The Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that went down in a November 1975 storm that was immortalized in the Gordon Lightfoot song, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” sank off Whitefish Point within 100 miles of the Western Reserve. There were no survivors.
