Ships only become famous after they sink

Most of the time, ships that ply the Great Lakes do so in anonymity.

It’s only when some tragedy befalls them that their name and their service record become history for the rest of the world to learn about.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was just another ship carrying iron ore through the Great Lakes until it famously sank in 1975 in Lake Superior. Singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot took it on a rocket ride to legendary status.

Even the Titanic, perhaps the most famous shipwreck of all time, would have been just another luxury steamer until it sunk in the mid-Atlantic in 1912. Sure, at the time it was lauded as one of the biggest, fastest, most luxurious ships ever made. But a lifetime of safe, comfortable ocean crossings would have surely helped it vanish into a mere footnote of history.

Valerie van Heest of Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates, an award-winning author and filmmaker from Holland, Mich., spoke about how ships become famous at a presentation titled “Lost and Found – Legendary Wrecks” at the 32^nd Great Lakes Shipwrecks Festival.

“The fact is we learn more about the ship from the discovery of the wreck and the evolution of diving rather than the incident that put the ship on the bottom,” van Heest said.

Archeologically, van Heest said, we can study artifacts and personal objects left in the vessels after they have foundered.  We can learn more about the crew on board than simply a list of the names of those who perished. She described one vessel she dived in which she found personal objects, such as a crew member’s sock with a hole in it, indicating the man wasn’t well-to-do and couldn’t afford new socks. She’s found ships with an array of coins inside from various Scandinavian countries that provide a window into the geographic makeup of the crew.

“These are tremendous artifacts that speak to us by allowing us to study them,” van Heest said.

 Today, shipwrecks owe their survival in large part to relatively new state and federal regulations enacted to protect them from scavengers and treasure hunters looking to either remove things from the ships or lift the vessel itself out of the water altogether.

In 1987, the Abandoned Shipwreck Act was introduced in Congress and signed into federal law in 1988. That law mandated that each state write its own laws to protect shipwrecks and turned  over ownership of the wrecks from the federal government to individual state governments.

In Michigan, for example, the Aboriginal Records and Antiquities and Abandoned Property statute, which includes the Natural Resources and Environment Protection Act which protects shipwrecks, only became law in 1994. That law updated legislation that had been enacted in the state in the late 1970s but was not as comprehensive in scope.

Prior to that, anyone who had the wherewithal to lift a wreck, and the money to pay for it, simply had to obtain the salvage rights. Prior to the writing of the Shipwreck Act, “looting was standard practice by divers, including myself,” van Heest said. But doing so would gut the wreck of important artifacts, and bringing it to the surface would almost certainly spell an end to the vessel.

Van Heest cited as an example the case of the Alvin Clark, a ship that went down in Green Bay, Wis., in 1864. In 1969, a team headed by scuba diver Frank Hoffman lifted the Alvin Clark from the bottom of the bay in what was considered an extraordinary event that was praised by the government, the press and the public alike. The ship was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1972 and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

The ship was raised legally in extraordinary condition, completely intact and actually floated once water was removed from its holds. It quickly became a tourist attraction after Hoffman built a museum nearby and exhibited the ship as a tourist attraction at the "Mystery Ship Seaport" in Menominee, Mich.

But neither Hoffman nor its crew accounted for the environmental damage the ship would suffer out of the water – from weather, wind, extreme hot and cold temperatures – much different conditions from the cold, low-oxygen environment at the bottom of Green Bay.

The ship quickly began to deteriorate, decayed and started to fall apart. Hoffman had neither the expertise nor the money to restore the Alvin Clark. His search for grants to pay for repairs fell upon deaf ears.

Finally, in 1994, the same year shipwreck protection was updated in Michigan, the ship was considered beyond saving and deemed a hazard. The Alvin Clark, one of the oldest merchant ships to ply the Great Lakes, with its origins in 1847, was bulldozed and lost to history. And everyone involved learned a valuable lesson. According to van Heest, states across the country were influenced by the story of the Alvin Clark and used it as an example of what could go wrong while authoring their own legislation.

They don’t make them like that anymore

Thanks to improving side-scan sonar technology, van Heest believes all existing shipwrecks will be found in the next 15-20 years. In addition, she said it will take at least another 100 years before time and zebra mussels break down the oldest shipwrecks and turn them into a pile of planks. But fortunately, van Heest’s research has shown the older the shipwreck is, the better it’s made.

Remember how your parents would constantly complain things aren’t built the way they used to be? Well, according to van Heest, that also applies to shipwreck building nearly 200 years ago.

Not only are ships that sit in deeper water better preserved due to colder temperatures and less environmental activity, but older ships, in van Heest’s experience, were simply made better.

“In the heyday of the schooners in the 1870s-‘80s, they were cranking these things out, and I don’t think they were all that well built compared to the ones built in the early 1800s,” she said. “Back then, they weren’t as plentiful, and they were building them better.”
To learn more about legendary Lake Michigan shipwrecks, check out van Heest's book, titled "Lost & Found Legendary Lake Michigan Shipwrecks" by clicking here.