University Place

Exploring Three Great Lakes Shipwrecks with ROVs

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, I’m Tom Zinnen. I work here at UW-Madison Biotechnology Center; I also work for the Division of Extension and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it’s my pleasure to introduce to you Caitlin Zant. She’s with the Wisconsin Historical Society. She’s gonna be talking to us about her work on investigating three new Great Lakes shipwrecks using ROVs. Caitlin was born in Peoria, Illinois. We always have a moment of silence for people who were born in Illinois, like me. She went to Richwoods High School there and then she went to Carthage College in Kenosha, where she studied history and geography. Then she went to East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where she majored or got a master’s degree in maritime studies and underwater archaeology.

Five and a half years ago, she came here to Madison to join the Wisconsin Historical Society, where she’s a maritime archaeologist. And there are few things that I think would be cooler than being a maritime archaeologist. You dive deep and go where people haven’t been before, [breath intaking] man, plus you’ve got your ROVs now. So this is gonna be pretty cool stuff, I think she’s got some great video. There are ships at least 600 feet deep that she’s gonna be showing us, and that’s deeper then I can hold my breath, so please join me in welcoming Caitlin Zant to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. [audience applauding]

– All right, thank you everyone for coming and thank you, Tom, for your introduction. Like Tom mentioned, I’m a maritime archaeologist with the Wisconsin Historical Society, and so today I’m gonna talk a little bit about what it is that we do as maritime archaeologists, and then go into some of the most recent work that we’ve been doing with our deep water ROV surveys recently. So, when I first tell people that I’m a maritime archaeologist, this is probably the first thing that people think about. [audience laughing] Pirates are a very important part of maritime archaeology, but the question people usually have is, “How much gold have you found?” Spoiler alert, none. Lake Michigan did not tend to have a lot of pirates in it, but it still is an important part of maritime archaeology.

And moving on beyond pirates, the next thing people ask me about is

– Young Audience Member: It’s the Titanic!

– It is the Titanic, yes. [audience laughing]

– Young Audience Member: It’s my favorite boat!

– And it, well, it’s my favorite boat, too. [all laughing] As a kid, I was obsessed with anything and everything that had to do with the Titanic. But the ship is not in Wisconsin waters, I don’t study it, unfortunately, in my day-to-day career. However, it still is a large portion of maritime archaeology, and it tells a story, and it is part of this overall picture of what maritime archaeology is. But maritime archaeology really encompasses a little bit more than that. It’s not just pirates and Titanic and the Edmund Fitzgerald. It goes a little bit beyond that, and so maritime archaeology, at its base, is the study of the humans’ interaction with the water, be it rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, whatever it might be. But it’s not just shipwrecks. We talk a lot about shipwrecks, but it’s not just shipwrecks that we look at.

We look at docks, we look at prehistoric sites, we look at port cities, harbors, different kinds of cargoes, historic waterfronts. But it’s also non-tangible things like trade routes, and industries like fishing, and the growth of harbors and the growth of ports, and how people interacted with the water and where they moved over time. So then I have this conversation with people a lot of times and then they ask me, “Okay, that’s kind of cool, “but like why do you study this, “why is this an important part of our history, “why do we need this?” And as Tom mentioned, I have a historian in me and I studied history in college, and so I tend to default back to that answer that, you know, if you learn about the past, it can help you know more about the present and then kind of learn a little bit more about the future. But archaeology kind of goes a little bit beyond that. And so history is the history of the written word; it was what people wrote down. And so in many cases, history was written by the victors. And so, archaeology kind of is the ability to be able to tell the story that goes beyond what was written down. And you can kind of look into people’s lives and see what was going on, maybe when people didn’t write something down, or they didn’t think it was important enough to write down. Underwater archaeology really kind of takes that even one step further. So there are things that are preserved underwater that you wouldn’t necessarily see on the surface.

You wouldn’t see a historic building that may have been torn down many, many years ago; underwater, it’s this time capsule, that basically it sank, and it’s been there and it has remained relatively unchanged over that period of time. So much of human history evolved around the waterways. Today, we see water as this kind of a barrier, but for many, many years it was, or for hundreds of years, thousands of years, it was the easiest way to get from point A to point B. And so, so much of human history evolved along waterways, and we can really see how people moved, how they developed, how different cities, why Chicago is where it is today is all dependent on because it’s right next to the waterway, and where river meets that waterway. So how does this happen? What is it, what do we specifically do? So we record shipwrecks and all the artifacts in detail, we try to figure out how the ship went down, we try to figure out what it was carrying, what the crew was doing right before it sank, and we try to place all this information within the larger historical context. We have many, many deep shipwrecks, as you can see here, this one’s the Northerner, but we also have shallow shipwrecks as well. The methods are the same, we basically take pencils, regular mechanical pencils, Mylar, and rulers, and tape measures, and we’re able to record these shipwrecks in great detail. Whether it’s deep, whether it’s shallow, we’re able to do this in the same way, and as you can see here, we kind of cordon off the shipwrecks, and we use volunteers. There’s only three of us in our office currently, and so we rely very heavily on the work of our volunteers to help us record these sites. And so basically these volunteers come in and they record what they see in detail in their little section, whatever they’re given, and we try to preserve this for posterity.

And then we’re able to come out of the water and then we’re able to make technical drawings based on these in the field drawings, and then we can create these site plans that you can see. We don’t just draw these shipwrecks; we also try to record any artifacts that we see. We take pictures, many, many, many pictures. We try to take videos as well, and in recent years, we’ve started using remotely operated vehicles, which I’m talking about today, to look at and use multibeam sonar and side scan sonar to kind of give us a better idea about what we’re looking at. With side scan, we kind of get a preliminary look about what, the areas we’re looking for if we’re searching for a ship, that’s the thing that we use to do that, and then we go a little bit further. And I mentioned these technical drawings that we do, and so here you see the schooner Pathfinder. Once we get out of the water, we draw these on graph paper, and then we’re able to record them and trace them with pen, and then make copies of those and make scans of those so that we have a digital version of that. And so when you’re underwater, you don’t get to see the shipwreck in its entirety, and so what this site plan is able to do is we’re able to take, it’s a scale model basically of the ship, and what it looks like on the bottom, and we can take a look at it and know what it looks like all together as one, when you might not be able to see that normally. Now, for shipwrecks that are a little deeper like the Lakeland up here, we put together photomosaics. And so basically, we take hundreds of photos, and they’re stitched together to create this image that you see here, and it is also to scale, but this is employed when a shipwreck is potentially too deep or too large for somebody to actually draw and record, and so we still have this scale model of the ship, and then you can see us in that bottom corner there drawing our technical drawings.

So we don’t just do all this for academic purposes. We try to analyze these archeological– try to take analysis and do archaeological analysis on these sites. But we also want to share that with the public. We do presentations, such as I’m doing today, but then we also have a system of buoys that we have around the state. Some of the them are specifically for dive boats to pull up to, but other ones just kind of mark the wreck, and so some people like kayakers can go visit the wrecks and know where they are, and we maintain the system all across the state. We also have Maritime Trail signs all across the state as well, and they’re basically adjacent to where a shipwreck is or a important maritime event occurred, so that you don’t necessarily have to be a diver to be included in this, Wisconsin’s maritime history. It’s for everyone, and we want to share this with everyone as best as we can. Now, a lot of times when people think about maritime archeology, if they know what it is, or once I explain what it is, this is kind of what people think about. It’s a metal ship that’s covered in coral. Kind of this colorful image but it’s usually metal, and, again, covered in this kind of growth.

But what people don’t realize a lot, and in the ocean you don’t really see a lot of wooden vessels, and that’s because there are things called toredo worms that actually eat the wood if it’s not covered up by sand relatively quickly, and so primarily what you do see in the ocean are these old, kind of rusty metal ships. But in the Great Lakes we don’t have that, we don’t have toredo worms, and so this shipwreck here, this is the steamer Vernon, it sank more than 150 years ago and it basically looks like it could sail off the bottom today. It’s in 165 feet of water, and it’s been there for over 150 years, and so you have these ships that are remarkably intact and remarkably full of information, and they are these time capsules that you kind of get to see, which is something that you really don’t get to see in the ocean a lot. We also have different types of materials that are preserved in the Great Lakes. We have cold, deep, dark water that doesn’t have a lot of oxygen content to it, and so we have things like, this is on the steamer Lakeland, cars that are remarkably preserved underwater, I’ll talk a little more about that as we get going a little bit further with another shipwreck, but you have rubber that’s intact, you have glass that’s intact, and you have all of these things that you wouldn’t necessarily see in the ocean. And up in Lake Superior we don’t have the invasive zebra and quagga mussels which you saw in the last slide, kind of that fuzzy thing that’s on the shipwreck, but you still have this paint that you find in Lake Superior. And so, one of the things that I like to kind of talk about when I talk about paint on shipwrecks, which I’m gonna talk about the ship today, is our state archaeologist was. . . My co-worker Tamara Thomsen was out on the site and the state archaeologist messaged her, and he’s like, “How do you know “that you’re on the schooner Antelope?” And she sent him a picture of the word Antelope on the side of the ship. [all laughing]

We’re like, “Pretty sure this is the Antelope, “pretty positive. ” And so you have, and you can see here it says Moonlight. You have that, which is really remarkable that ships that sank 150 years ago, you still have this paint that you can see, which is kind of remarkable. Now, why does Wisconsin have so many shipwrecks? I get that question a lot, people are like, “Ah, Wisconsin isn’t really a water state. ” But it really is. It’s basically the westernmost extent of the Great Lakes system, and so for many, many years before roads and railways really became prevalent, the Great Lakes were the major thoroughfare for how people got west. And so in the expansion of the United States westward, Wisconsin was kind of the jumping off point. And so there was a lot of shipping that came through Wisconsin waters, both up in Lake Superior and in Lake Michigan. But, so people were trying to get to places like Milwaukee, Chicago, and then get on, once trains came, to get on trains to go west, or before trains, to get on riverboats to head west as well. And so Wisconsin was really this jumping off point.

And so according to historic records, that’s a moving target, but I like to say we have more then 700 shipwrecks, historic shipwreck losses in Wisconsin waterways. Of those, we know about where 200 are, so if anybody’s interested in going into shipwreck hunting, you have a really good chance of probably finding something ’cause there’s still a lot out there. So we have all these very important shipwrecks, and us as the state of Wisconsin, we have over 70 shipwrecks that are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which is the most of any state in the United States. And so that’s one of the things we try to show that we really have these important shipwrecks and these historically significant and nationally significant shipwrecks here in Wisconsin waters, which is really neat for us to have. Another thing for trivia buffs that I like to point out whenever I give talks is the Wisconsin State Seal. There are three maritime-related items on this state seal. Two of them are pretty apparent right away, we have the sailor on the right hand side and then we have the anchor there. What a lot of people don’t realize is the arm and hammer, which was put on here to note that Wisconsin has prowess in industry, that’s actually a caulking mallet, and that was used to pound oakum between the planks of a ship on the outer hull to make it watertight. And so, that’s a third piece to show that it was from shipbuilding in Wisconsin, ’cause Wisconsin had a lot of shipbuilding industry, or had a large shipbuilding industry I should say, and so that was something that was put on here to show that we really had this prowess in industry, specifically in shipbuilding. So next time you go to trivia you can pull that one out, not a lot of people know that.

So, today I’m gonna really kind of hone in on three shipwrecks that we’ve worked on in the past four years, looking at deepwater wrecks using ROVs. And ROVs are remotely operated vehicles, and this has allowed us to really broaden our scope of what we’re able to look at. So I’ve talked about kind of the traditional methods of how we do maritime archaeology, but sometimes it’s just– wrecks are just too deep, and using an ROV is much safer in many cases, and then we’re also able, you don’t have to necessarily put a diver in the water, but also you can get hours’ worth of footage on a particular site when if you put a diver in the water, you’re only maybe getting a half an hour worth of time, and then that person has to come up and decompress, and it takes a lot of time. And so, you can get a lot more data in a much shorter amount of time using these ROVs. And so we’ve been very lucky over the course of the past four and a half, five years to work with groups that have these ROVs. Now, our program does not own an ROV. We’re able to partner with these other organizations that do have ROVs. We partner with The Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society. We also partner with Crossmon Consulting, LLC and also Marine Imaging Technologies, which works with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute a lot, and so we’re able to kind of have these partners that come work on projects with us. We get this really great data, and then we’re able to kind of look at these shipwrecks.

So, the first shipwreck I’m gonna talk about is the Antelope. The Antelope was built in 1861, and it was built for the Eber Wards line of steamers. It was a three-decked vessel, and it took passengers from Milwaukee to Buffalo and back; that was its main goal. This is an image of the site when it was found; it looks a little different then a steamer right now, and I’ll tell you why. So, it primarily operated when it was first built, it looked like this, this was the Antelope. It was the three-decked passenger steamer, and it operated in this way until 1969, or sorry, 1869, but in 1869 there was a fire, and the fire unfortunately damaged the entire upper deck works, the upper cargo hold, and the cabin structure on the top of the vessel, and so the vessel was rebuilt relatively quickly, this was early in 1869. By May of 1869, it was back out on the water, but instead of putting it back into passenger service, they had converted it to a steam lumber barge. And so, instead of carrying passengers, it primarily was carrying lumber at the time. And so the vessel operated in this capacity until 1883, and then in 1883 the vessel was– Here’s another image of it as a passenger steamer, but in 1883 it began operations as a tow barge, and it had two masts on it. And so they took out all of the machinery.

So it’s kind of the opposite way for a lot of shipwrecks, I’m sorry, a lot of ships in Wisconsin. Primarily you have vessels that were sailing vessels that were then turned to steam vessels. This was a steam vessel that was turned to a sailing vessel, and it looked a little bit like this. This is it in dry dock. And so they took off all of the cabin structure and all of the cargo holds on the top of the vessel, and it looked pretty much just like a regular sailing schooner. However, it was never sailing on its own. It was always towed, so it was considered a tow barge, and it had two masts. And in this capacity it primarily carried grain and stone, and it operated like that for 10 years. And in 1893, the rig was changed officially to a schooner, and then it was listed as having three masts. So they put a third mast on this vessel, and it was scheduled to work in Lake Superior specifically, and this is how the vessel looked just before it sank.

It was specifically for use in Lake Superior, and it primarily carried coal during this part of its life. So then by 1897, the vessel was carrying coal and it was on its way to Ashland, and it was being towed too fast in choppy seas. So at this point in time, the vessel was over 30 years old. And at 30 years old, for vessels like this, they start to get very leaky. And so it was being towed, what the newspaper said was “too fast,” and the seams opened up in the ship. Unfortunately they were unable to keep the pumps working. They weren’t able to keep up with the water that was coming into the ship, and the decision was made to abandon ship. And so, all of the crew members made it off of the Antelope onto the tow barge, and the vessel sank within less than 15 minutes, very, very quickly. So the seams were probably open quite a lot. So while this was happening, it was mentioned that the stern cabin, as you can see kind of over in this area, it popped off and floated ashore, [laughing] [audience murmuring] which was common for a lot of vessels.

But it’s interesting because when we look at this archaeologically, and we have a video coming up here on just kind of why that might have been. And a lot of it is because of the way that when it was converted they didn’t– because it wasn’t originally built as a schooner, they basically just put this cabin on top of the deck, and so there wasn’t really a lot holding it down to the deck and it just kind of popped off. That is a common occurrence. So the site was located in 2016 by Ken Merryman, Jerry Eliason, and Kraig Smith. It’s in over 300 feet of water and they found this vessel, it’s just a few miles west of Michigan Island up in the Apostle Islands, and it was a six-year search for the vessel. They knew that it was somewhere in this area, but they didn’t know specifically where. And so after six years, they were able to find it. This is a multibeam sonar image that was put together of the site itself, and this is how it looks today. Now it’s, hopefully this video works, and it is. When I said Antelope, this is the picture that was given to the state archaeologist. [all laughing]

Pretty sure we were on the Antelope, but it’s pretty remarkable to be able to see this paint that’s still there, which is really, really neat. And so this is a little bit of a five minute video. We’ll move on and I’ll talk a little bit about the different archaeological aspects of the site itself. So it’s a very intact site. You can see some of the coal on the deck that came out of the cargo holds when the vessel sank. There’s some really neat artifacts just kind of placed about this. Since it was only found in 2016 and it’s in 300 feet of water, no one, no divers have been to this site as of yet. We have the wheel; the stern of the ship has fallen off. That’s the one section of the ship that’s broken, so the wheel is sitting off the stern end. Here you have some deadeyes that are still intact.

The two masts, two of the three masts are still standing. The third mast was– we found it’s not there, but it was actually, it looks like it was removed purposefully prior to the sinking. Here we have the deck winch right near one of the masts. That would have been used to help raise, it was steam-powered, would have been used to help raise and lower the sails. Here you have the boiler; this is near the bow of the ship, and so the boiler was used to power the steam winch and help raise and lower the anchors, raise and lower the sails, and then also the steam whistle, as well. It was equipped with that, which was kind of unique to have on a sailing vessel. Not many sailing vessels had steam whistles, which is kind of unique. Here we have the foremast, you can see the mast hoops that are still around there. Those would have been attached to the sails, so when the sail was raised or lowered, that’s what would have attached it to the main mast. The sail is no longer there, having deteriorated over time, but both masts are still standing, or two of the three I should say, masts are still standing, which is pretty remarkable ’cause you don’t have that a lot.

And this particular wreck there’s actually a cable that’s still strung between the two masts, which is, again, remarkable. So in the historic documents, they mentioned that the vessel, the pumps couldn’t keep up, and this is one of the pumps. And that wooden piece above the pump there, they would’ve had to actually take that out and put in into that kind of upper structure there, and so, to be able to work the pump. And so it looks like they didn’t even attempt, they didn’t have enough time ’cause this vessel sank so quickly. They weren’t even able to try to man this pump before the vessel sank, unfortunately, which is really neat that that’s still there. But because it sank so quickly everything’s just, this is quite literally a time capsule that’s still on the bottom, which is really neat to see. I believe the next shot here is going to be, yep, this is the broken stern. You can still see some of the white paint on the interior of the stern section. It had a rounded stern, a lot of schooners had square sterns. This one in particular had a rounded stern, and that dates back to its origins as a steamer, ’cause steamers usually have this rounded stern.

And so, that bottom part of the ship that didn’t burn is actually still in place today. And so, this metal piece here, that is the top of the rudder post. And so the wheel would have been attached to this, and that’s how they would have steered the vessel. You can see, kind of like Titanic, there are rusticles growing on that metal rudder post as well. Then we have like a grate there, and that was basically just a cover for a scupper, which would have helped get any water off of the top of the vessel. So one other section of the vessel that’s broken, up near the bow, part of the outer hull planking has fallen outward, and so it allows us to get this glimpse of what’s beneath the forecastle deck. And so here you have a grinding stone. This is basically like a workroom up in the front part of the ship. You have this grinding stone, and that’s just forward of the Samson post, and I’ll pan over and you’ll see the windlass there, and the windlass was used to raise and lower the anchor. This is also where they would have kept the chain for the anchor as well.

There’s also a shovel in this area that’s kind of fallen outward that you can see. This is basically just like a storage unit or a storage room, I should say, that’s still there. Now, this is the top of the mainmast, again, fully intact. You can see the rigging components, the blocks that are at the top there and that box was just, we saw just a minute ago, that was actually the masthead light, so there would have been a white light that was in there that would have demonstrated to other vessels that this was a sailing ship and that they need to steer clear of this particular vessel. But again, this particular one is in 300 feet of water, how remarkably intact it is and how you can see, and that because it’s Lake Superior we don’t have the zebra and quagga mussels covering it, so we can actually see intricate details of this ship and how it was built. And this is just a quick shot of the multibeam sonar image of the vessel. This data is actually how we’re able to take measurements of the site, so we’re not physically down there, but this particular program allows us to take measurements. And so we’re able to get accurate, detailed measurements of different components of this vessel, and then write up a rep report or a site report just as we would if we had divers in the water, which is really remarkable. So now I’m gonna move on to the Harriet B. This is outside of Wisconsin waters, but we partnered with The Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society to work on this project, along with Tom Crossmon from Crossmon Consulting, LLC.

And so this, to our knowledge, is the deepest archaeological survey that has been done in the Great Lakes, as far as we’re aware. The vessel today rests in 650 feet of water, so well beyond the range of divers. And so this is something that was kind of unique and interesting for us to see, and a little bit of outside what we normally take a look at. So, this is how the Harriet B. looked a few years before it sank, but like Antelope, it went through a lot of changes. But unlike Antelope, it went through a lot of name changes as well, so bear with me; apologies on that. The vessel was actually originally built as a railroad car ferry, and it was named the Shenango No. 2. It was built in Toledo, Ohio in 1895, and it primarily carried railroad cars across Lake Erie between the state of Ohio and Ontario. And it operated in this life for only about three years, and then after that, it was moved to Lake Michigan and renamed the Muskegon.

It was bought out by another railroad company, and then it had service across Lake Michigan, like the Badger, if anybody’s taken that today. The Badger used to be railroad car ferry, and so this was in that service, working between ports on the Wisconsin side and then ports on the Michigan side as well. In 1901, the vessel was actually purchased by the Pere Marquette Line, and it was renamed the Pere Marquette 16. And so, it actually sunk just outside Ludington, Michigan while it was the Pere Marquette 16, but it was raised and kind of rebuilt, and then it continued on for many, many years. And then, this is it again as the Shenango, and kind of its various life, points in life. This is it as the Muskegon, it didn’t really change that much in how it looked, just the name kind of changed. And then as it became the Pere Marquette ferry, you can see the railroad cars kind of there in the stern of the vessel, and this was before they were required to put a sea gate on the back end of the vessel, so you see that in this area here, potentially if the cars weren’t tied down well enough, they could potentially fall off the back end, or any waves could come on the vessel as well. Here it is as it was sinking as the Pere Marquette, just outside Ludington. [laughing] You can kind of see that it does not look like a straight line there ’cause it is trapped in ice. These vessels did operate year-round; they were built to do that, but unfortunately, sometimes the ice was just too strong and then this did end up happening.

So then from 1901 to 1918 it operated for the Pere Marquette Line, but in 1918 it was purchased by the Hammermill Paper Company. And Hammermill Paper Company was based in Ohio, or, I’m sorry, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and so the vessel was homeported in Erie and it was renamed the Harriet B. Now, Harriet B. was the daughter of the owner of the Hammermill Paper Company at the time. And so it was completely taken down and converted to a tow barge at this particular point in time. So it was no longer a railroad car ferry, but they basically just enclosed that kind of open stern end that I was talking about, they enclosed that, and they took off most of the upper deck workings and then made it just a bulk freighter. And then it carried pulpwood for the Hammermill Paper Company for many, many years. And so, it operated in this way and on the morning of– And you can see this is how it looked working for the Hammermill Paper Company, a little different. While it was a railroad car ferry, it had a bow propeller as well, and if you can see kind of right here in the bow of the vessel, that bow propeller was actually removed when it was turned into a tow barge, but you can still kind of see that different bow structure than a lot of other vessels have. And so, the vessel operated in this way for the Hammermill Paper Company for about four years, and then this is an image of what it looked like before it sank, and what we’ve since found is that the smoke stack and that kind of stern cabin was actually removed at some point in time, there’s no historical record of it being removed, but in looking at the site today, that’s no longer there, and so the machinery was completely taken out of the vessel, probably to allow it to have more cargo capacity on board.

And so, it carried this pulpwood for the Hammermill Paper Company until May of 1922. And on May 3rd of that year, the vessel was sitting seven miles outside of Two Harbors, Minnesota. And so, the vessel was in tow, they were waiting to go, it was a dense fog, they were waiting to go into Two Harbors, but they didn’t want to go and try to navigate the harbor entrance in the fog, so they were trying to wait until morning. Unfortunately, during this time the Quincy Shaw, which was another steamer, was also operating in the same area in the fog, and it was trying to get to Duluth, and it struck the Harriet B. on the portside, and it almost cut the vessel in two. It was too late before anybody could see anything, for anybody to warn each other that the vessel was coming, and it cut it nearly in two. And similarly to the Antelope, the vessel sank within eight minutes. I’m sorry, less then 20 minutes, the vessel. So there were accounts that multiple sailors on board the Harriet B. actually jumped onto the bow of the Quincy Shaw because they were afraid that they would be lost with the vessel, but the rest of the crew was able to actually get rescued by the tow vessel that had been nearby, and so no, none of the sailors were lost during this event.

But, the pilot house did wash ashore, it, again, popped off and washed ashore, almost completely intact with the wheel there, as you can see. And so, it sank though, just about seven miles offshore there, and in that particular area, the depth of Lake Superior is 650 feet. And so, in the spring and summer of 2015, we were able to work with the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society and Tom Crossmon to go out and do this archaeological survey of the site itself, and so this is us on the research vessel. You can all see we look very happy ’cause we had just gotten the ROV tangled up in something. [audience laughing] Everything ended up being fine but, [laughing] everybody’s looking a little sour at that point in time. Then we used a similar multibeam sonar to get data and measurements of the site itself, and here you can see, it’s just a screenshot of the site, but you can see the cargo holds as well, and again, except for the giant gaping hole in the side of it, the vessel’s very well intact just sitting on the bottom. And so here I’ve got another like five minute video again for you guys. This was put together for a show about four years ago, and so it’s just got some shots of the Harriet B. , but you can also see again, similarly to the Antelope, you have a lack of zebra and quagga mussels and you can see paint. You can see that the bulwarks or the sides of the ship are very tall, and that was basically to be able to let them put pulpwood on not just in the cargo hold, but also on the deck as well, to kind of not allow it to fall over.

Here’s a toilet; I like talking about toilets when they’re on shipwrecks ’cause it’s just interesting to me. [laughing] This is the room that was just below the pilothouse, and so that was the captain’s quarters, and so this is the captain’s bathroom. We have the toilet cistern that’s still there; you saw a radiator a little bit before, and it’ll pan up and there’ll be a sink that you’ll see. So the walls of this room, when the pilothouse kind of popped off, the walls of this room kind of fell outward, and it’s the uppermost part of the ship. Otherwise, everything’s intact. There’s a bathtub, there’s a saw underneath the bathtub too, which is a little interesting, I’m not sure why the captain took a saw to the bathtub, but he did. [all laughing] So here we have the vessel’s anchor, it’s still in place. It’s actually kind of interesting how the anchor would have been deployed. There was this, well there we go, [laughing] there was an arm that would have lifted or helped to lift the anchor, and then you see this kind of door, and that would have been removed, and then the anchor could be kind of pushed over the side of the vessel, which is a little bit different than a lot of other vessels and how they were incorporated. But again, you can see the paint on the stem post there, and then here’s another shot of the anchor.

It was actually foldable so it could, you know, it would have been folded and would have been unfolded to be used. But here, you can see Hammermill Paper Company still printed on the side of the vessel, which is really neat. And then we’re gonna pan down a little bit, here’s a little bit better shot of it. We’ll pan down and you can actually see it say Pere Marquette 16, so they literally just painted over this again and again and again, and you can see the draft marks there on the bow of the vessel, so you would have known how much the vessel– or how heavy the vessel was, or how much cargo was loaded in the vessel. There’s a mushroom anchor still attached to the vessel as well. And then we’ll kind of pan over a little bit to some more of the internal parts of the ship. The vessel was empty when it sank, so there’s nothing in the cargo holds currently. You can tell how it was painted white above the waterline and a darker color below. The glass is still intact in the portholes, which is really neat. And in the main kind of crew’s quarters area at the bow of the ship, as well, you have this intact glass, which is really neat.

And in the next shot, I believe, we’ll be looking into the galley area, and you can see the chairs are kind of tousled around during the sinking. Yep, there we are. Kind of, things kind of fell and things are all cattywampus but, because it’s in 650 feet of water, again, no one has been to this site since it sank, so everything is exactly how it was when the vessel went down in 1922. You can see kind of, there’s a shelving unit that had fallen over at this point. It was really interesting, they had these barn doors kind of that would slide side-to-side all over the vessel, which was really neat. This particular window, the glass has broken and it’s not there any longer, but it allows us to look into the galley area. And so you still have all these pieces of furniture that are kind of cattywampus in there. There’s a multitude of these wheelbarrows that are remarkably just sitting on the deck of this vessel. You would think that something kind of more lightweight would have lifted off when the vessel sank, but it happened so quickly that these pieces of equipment were still left just sitting on the deck, probably where they were just before the vessel was hit and started sinking. Here you can see that really tall bulwark or the side of the vessel and that, again, let them put a lot of cargo in there to kind of have more cargo on board.

This is actually the break, that was kind of a quick shot, but that was the break where the Quincy Shaw actually hit the vessel, and you can still very clearly see that on the vessel. Another wheelbarrow near the stern. The stern cabin area still intact as well with the barn doors. This is just in front of one of the open barn doors. Again, white paint you can find kind of everywhere, and then this was a steam-powered winch on the stern of the vessel. There’s also a very thick piece of line that’s still hanging off the side of the ship that was attached to this, and so that would have been used to either load cargo or raise and lower different components. You can see that braided rope right there. And then you have the masthead light that has fallen off the mast, the mast is still standing, the stern mast, but the mast light is still there, and what’s remarkable is that the glass is still intact on that lantern, which would have been at the top of the mast. So now that was the stern of the vessel, and you can see here it says Pere Marquette, and then just below that, you can see the layer of paint that says Harriet B. , and then below that you see Erie, Pennsylvania, which is really kind of remarkable, just that they didn’t strip the vessel when they were changing its name; they just painted on top of it.

And now in the intervening years that the paint has kind of started to deteriorate, you still have these different layers kind of coming through of this vessel, which is something completely unique and you don’t see in Lake Michigan. It’s pretty unique to Lake Superior. Now this particular component, if anybody’s ever been on the Badger, when it docks, it docks stern in, and that was a part of when it was a railroad car ferry, and this is still on the Harriet B. today. They didn’t take that component off; it would have been where it would have latched into the dock while it was a railroad car ferry. And so it’s interesting that they didn’t take that component off; they basically just walled in the stern component of this vessel, which was kind of interesting, but so, you know, to show that they just used it as they could. They tried to, I won’t say as cheaply as possible, but they basically did it as easily and as quickly as they could to switch it over to this paper company service. All right, and so that last shipwreck that I’m gonna talk to you guys about today is called the Senator. It’s actually pretty timely that I’m talking about this. The Senator sank 90 years ago tomorrow.

[audience murmuring] It was on Halloween, also the same weekend that the stock market crashed in 1929. It was a very bad week for Wisconsin shipwrecks. There were actually three shipwrecks that sank in the span of a week, the same week that the stock market crashed. And they were some pretty important ships in Wisconsin’s shipping industry, and so Wisconsin was hit pretty hard that particular week. So, the Senator itself, it was purpose-built in 1896 in Wyandotte, Michigan and it was 410 feet long, metal shipwreck, and it was built to transport automobiles. And so, it was a little bit later in the grand scheme of the shipwrecks that we’re talking about. So it primarily worked between Chicago, Milwaukee, and Detroit, and so throughout most of its career, it carried autos, and you can actually see in this image it had a dual car elevator right here, and so those two different components, they would have allowed vessels to, I’m sorry, cars to go on to the elevators and then be lowered down to the lower decks. Now this had three different decks, two inside and then one on the upper deck. You can see that there are cars lined all along the top of the vessel. Here’s another image of it.

Again, you can see all the car elevator back here, and then all the cars on the deck of the vessel. And so, it built in 1896 and it operated in this method until 1929, October 31st of 1929. And again, as similarly to the Harriet B. , it was a foggy night out on Lake Michigan. The vessel was attempting to sail from Milwaukee to Detroit. It had a load, 268 Nash automobiles on board, brand new, we’re not positive if they’re 1929 model Nash automobiles or if they were 1930 Nash automobiles because it was the end of October, it could have been either one. And it was sailing from Milwaukee to Detroit, and it was off of Port Washington in the fog when another vessel was found to be nearby. And they signaled each other and everybody thought everything was fine, but then the other vessel that was named the Marquette unfortunately turned a different direction than the Senator thought that it was turning. And so, at speed, the Marquette then rammed into the side, on the port side, of the Senator and nearly cut the vessel in half. Again, very similar to the story that happened with the Harriet B.

And so, the vessel, the Marquette, thought it was going to sink as well. The Senator immediately started filling with water as it had a giant hole in the side of it, and it, this one did sink in eight minutes. The Marquette pulled off because it thought it was going to sink, and there was a nearby fishing vessel that didn’t see the accident occur but heard it in the fog. And so he, the captain, went over to the area that he thought it was, and then he said he saw the Marquette off to the side. It was not rendering assistance to any of the crew members. The fishing vessel picked up 16 crew members from the water. It sank too fast to get any of the lifeboats out, so all of the crew members were just holding onto pieces of wreckage that had floated to the surface. And by the time, it took about a half an hour to an hour for the fishing vessel to pick up all of the survivors, and by the time it was done, the Marquette was gone. And so, the captain of the vessel did not know if the vessel had sank or if the vessel had headed away.

Turns out the vessel had just headed away because it thought it was sinking, so it was trying to make it as fast as they could back to shore so they wouldn’t sink as well. But they didn’t render any assistance to the crew members. So where the vessel was was in about 450 feet of water off of Port Washington. And what’s interesting about this area is on nautical charts, it says it’s only 250 feet in this particular area and so we, going over it and searching for it and re-finding the site, we actually discovered that there is a sinkhole in Lake Michigan. Lake Huron has a lot of them that are documented, but in Lake Michigan, there aren’t really any sinkholes that are documented, and so we believe that this particular vessel is actually located in a sinkhole within Lake Michigan. And so because of that, visibility is not great on the site, and so we were able to, the vessel was first located in 2005 but it wasn’t positively identified as the Senator. It was kind of, they thought that this might be the Senator. Then it was relocated in 2015, and then we were able to go out and do a survey with Crossmon Consulting and Tom Crossmon, with his ROV in 2015 and 2016 to get data, and so this is a photomosaic of imagery that was collected from the multibeam sonar of the wreck itself. And so, one of the things you can initially see is the bow section here is still, again, the vessel’s very much intact. You can see the car elevator right here in the center of the vessel, and then you can see this giant hole in the side of the ship where it was struck by the Marquette.

What’s interesting though, is in all those images, and when it left port it was full, this vessel was full of cars up to the point where there were cars lining the top deck. As you can see here, it’s a empty top deck here, and in video data that we have from the site, every once in a while you’ll see a fender or you’ll see some bit or piece of a car, but there’s no evidence of the cars themselves. And from our knowledge of what we believe, the cars would have been lashed down, and so we’re not entirely sure what happened to the cars that were on the top of the deck, but presumably they’re nearby. And one of the interesting things, too, about this image is that right here next to the bow, you have this little kind of canoe looking thing, and that is actually one of the vessel’s lifeboats that did not get very far from the vessel. So, in addition to Tom Crossmon and Crossmon Consulting, with this particular site, we actually were able to work with Marine Imaging Technologies and a gentleman by the name of Evan Kovacs. And he was testing a new piece of equipment, a new ROV called the Pixel, which recently did some work in the Atlantic, but to test it, he brought it here to Wisconsin to try to see what it could do and if it worked properly. So, we were able to bring Pixel with us to the Senator site and get some additional imagery of the site in 2017, which was really great. And so, again, I mentioned that the visibility was pretty bad, it was pretty bad in this area. One of the nice things about Pixel that you can see, these right here and right here are the lights. And so the farther the lights are away from the main viewport or the camera of the particular ROV, you’re able to see through sediment better.

And so when we were using ROV, the initial ROV work that we did with Tom Crossmon and the lights were very close together, and so visibility was just not great. But the sonar data allowed us to get imagery and allowed us to take measurements and do a full analysis of the site. So then when Pixel came back, it’s not equipped or at the time was not equipped with any multibeam sonar or anything like that, but we were able to get some really neat imagery, which I’ll show you just a few snippets of here. As you can see, Pixel’s not small; it took up most of– this is Tom Crossmon’s boat here, it took up most of the back or stern section of the vessel. But it was able to, it’s a 3-D equipped 4K camera and so it’s quite large. But one of the first things that they saw when they went down with Pixel was the cars inside the hold of the vessel. And so we were able to confirm that the hold of the vessel was still filled with Nash automobiles, which we like to say is the largest collection of Nash automobiles anywhere [audience laughing] now lies on the bottom of Lake Michigan, [laughing] but that was really neat to see; we’d seen it before on the sonar imagery, what we thought were vehicles, but it was really nice to have confirmation of that when Pixel went down there. So, I’ve got three videos here, they’re much shorter than the other ones, they’re only about 30 seconds each, but because it was a 4K camera we could only show very short clips of the video just because it was too large. But here’s some imagery, this is at the break, so where the Marquette hit the Senator, you can see some of the cars kind of hanging precariously between decks. You can also see, it will pan down a little bit here, you can see the clay sediment that makes up the bottom of Lake Michigan, it’s just, it’s all kind of pockmarks.

And that just shows kind of the violence with which this vessel sank, because it did sink in only nine minutes or eight minutes, I’m sorry, but because it had a giant hole in the side of it, that’s why it sank so quickly. Here’s another image of a hardtop Nash automobile, the very top of the vessel’s gone, but you can see that some of the glass is still intact in the vessel, I’m sorry, in the car, and again, this is right at the break. So it really allowed us to see kind of what these vessels are and we kind of have, we haven’t figured it out quite yet, but we’ve sent these images to actually to Nash car guys to try to figure out whether or not these are 1929 or 1930 Nash automobiles. So we’re still waiting to hear back on that one. And this is just another short video of the lifeboat which I mentioned. It’s interesting because, again, they didn’t have time to man the lifeboat at all, and so the oars are still underneath the seats and there’s a bucket kind of hidden underneath a seat as well, so they really just didn’t have time. So the reason that this vessel or this lifeboat is off the side is that when the vessel sank, it probably floated a little bit and then went off the side of the vessel, but the Senator sank too quickly for anybody to do anything really with it. But it’s again, remarkably intact, and then one of the interesting things about this site, too, is that it’s in 450 feet of water, and we have this video data of the invasive zebra and quagga mussels that are 450 feet underwater, which when it was just the zebra mussels, they didn’t quite proliferate that deep underwater, and so it’s interesting for us to be able to see that there is that much of the bottom of Lake Michigan that’s still covered with the invasive zebra and quagga mussels. So, those are the three most recent wrecks that we’ve done, or three of the most recent wrecks that we’ve done, I should say, using ROV research. If you wanna learn more about the three shipwrecks that I talked about today or any other shipwrecks in Wisconsin waters, we have a website, it’s wisconsinshipwrecks.

org, pretty easy to remember. On there, we have an interactive map so you can look at different shipwreck sites, you can search by a particular ship if you’re interested in that specifically, otherwise you can just browse if you’re interested in a particular area. We have images if we’ve done archaeological surveys of the site, we have our drawings of it as well. We have some brief historical and archaeological analysis of the site, too. We also have a list of maritime attractions on there, so you don’t necessarily have to be a diver, but if you want to know where lighthouses are or the maritime trail signs or any of our buoys, that’s also located on the site. And then if you’re really excited about archaeology, we have our technical reports that we publish on there as well, so if you want something to read before you go to bed you can look up our technical reports on there. [laughing] – Young Audience Member: Good! – Good, he’s excited about it, that’s good. So yeah, with that I’d just like to thank you guys so much for having me here tonight and letting me talk to you guys about our shipwrecks and what we do here in Wisconsin, so thank you so much.

[audience applauding]