Exploring the Texture Of Downed Ships & Discovered Treasures Taken By The Storms Of Michigan
On a chilly day in May 1899, the A. Folsom, a wooden steamer, was making her way along the well-traveled trade routes of Lake Superior. She was towing two other vessels, the Mary B. Mitchell and the Nelson, a three-masted schooner. When a storm broke out on the lakeshore, the Folsom’s captain watched as ice continued to build up on the boats he towed, and he made the risky decision to turn his steamer and make for the shelter of Whitefish Bay.
As the massive steamer turned, the captain and his men watched the gap between the Folsom and the Nelson widen until finally the rope between the two snapped. The captain could only watch helplessly as the Nelson was taken over by the waves. News reports and firsthand accounts recall the captain’s observation that, “the Nelson disappeared as suddenly as one could snuff out a candle.” One minute she was there among the waves, and the next, she was beneath them.
“Nobody saw it again until 2014,” Bruce Lynn, Executive Director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, explains as he tells the Nelson’s tragic story. The remarkably intact wreckage of the Nelson was recently discovered through the Society’s marine research program. It first appeared as a shadow on the sonar device towed by the Society’s 50-foot research vessel the R. V. David Boyd. The wreckage is being researched and artifacts preserved so that the story of the Nelson can live on at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, which is operated by the Society.
Members of the Society, a group founded in 1978 by divers, teachers, and historians, opened the museum in 1985. As Lynn explains, quoting the Society’s mission statement, their purpose was to, “honor those who were aboard and who bravely attempted rescue, and discover, document, and interpret vessels which instead took the deep.”
On Lake Superior alone there are over five hundred known shipwrecks, most of them still undiscovered, as their exact sites are unknown. From October to December, the lakes are known to be temperamental, with sudden storms cropping up to bring vessels to final rest under their dark waters. The Shipwreck Museum’s main gallery houses artifacts from thirteen shipwrecks, eleven of which lie along the Shipwreck Coast, the eighty-mile stretch of water between Whitefish Point and Munising, Michigan. Visitors move chronologically from the sinking of the Invincible in 1816 to 1975, when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, the wreckage of which sits fifteen miles northwest of Whitefish Point.
A few years into his chartering business, Pete saw another opportunity. Divers’ family and friends who came along for the boat ride were affectionately known as “bubble watchers,” experiencing the dive vicariously through the bits and pieces they could see from the boat and the first-hand accounts of the divers. It didn’t take long for Pete to realize that these casual observers were as interested in the wreckage as the divers were. So, he decided to find another way for observers from the boat to also experience the tour.
He leased a boat with a partial glass bottom from another diving charter business and offered shipwrecks tours from the boat for those who preferred not to dive. Now, all his customers could enjoy the incredible views of sunken schooners, battered barges, and large debris fields. Today, between the end of May and beginning of October, Pete and his family continue to offer glass bottom boat tours in addition to their diving charters.
Through the 4x10-foot glass bottom of the boat, tour attendees can see the wreckage from a number of different ships. The Bermuda sank in 1870 in eighty feet of water. Twenty years after sinking, engineers lifted it to shallower waters to recover the valuable iron ore it was carrying. The glass bottom boat glides directly over this sunken ship, the bow and stern of the boat coming just seven feet from the glass. Wreckage of the Herman H. Hettler can also be seen, a steamer which ran aground on the rock reef off Trout Point. The remaining debris includes the captain’s tub and commode, which lie settled among the sands under twenty-five feet of water.