CC >> Welcome, everyone, to
Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on
behalf of our other sponsors, Wisconsin Public Television, the
Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the Division of Continuing
Studies, thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you Tamara
Thomsen. She's a 20-year veteran diving
instructor, and she's one of the handful of female technical
diving instructors who are teaching advance cave,
rebreather, and mixed gas diving.
Her expertise in scientific diving allows her to dive the
globe discovering, photographing, and documenting
submerged caves and shipwrecks. A maritime archeologist for the
Wisconsin Historical Society, Tamara has joined exploration
project on the USS Monitor, the RMS Titanic, and the TN Andrea
Doria, as well as numerous other wrecks.
She hasn't been to my house yet. [LAUGHTER]
Her work has resulted in listing 26 Minnesota and
Wisconsin shipwrecks to the National Register of Historic
Places. Her photographs have been
featured in National Geographic New, in Science, in Forbes
magazine, in Popular Science, and in the Wisconsin Magazine of
History, and most popular dive magazines.
She speaks and writes regularly about dive exploration and, in
particular, in the Great Lakes where she spends the majority of
her bottom time. She is also an alum of the
genetics department at UW Madison, the building in which
we are in. Please join me in welcoming
Tamara to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
[APPLAUSE] >> Well, thank you
for having me, and I wanted to start with a couple questions so
feel free to answer back. How many of you knew that
historically there are 750 shipwrecks that are ship losses
in Wisconsin waters? How many of you knew that?
Did you guess more or did you guess less?
Less, yeah. And of those 750 known losses of
ships in Wisconsin waters, would you guess that 150 have only
been found? We only know the location of 150
of those lost shipwrecks. Would you have guessed more or
less? More, wow, okay.
Less. So actually it's an open market
for people who are searching for shipwrecks, there's an awful lot
of them out there, and there's probably a good percentage that
you would be able to find them. Good reasonability.
Of those 150 that we know the location of, Wisconsin has 44
listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
That's actually more than any other state in the country.
So what we have that's on our bottom lands that's below the
surface of the water that's under the waves is something
that's historically significant and really special.
Our maritime history, our maritime heritage is Wisconsin's
history, and it says a lot to the founding of our state.
So tonight I wanted to talk to you about one of the 44
shipwrecks that we have listed on the National Register of
Historic Places. It's the bulk carrier
Appomattox. As part of my job working for
Wisconsin Historical Society what I get to do is really look
at these shipwrecks as a time capsule.
They went down with everything that the crew would have had
aboard, everything the captain would have had aboard, all of
the cargo, and really a point in time is there now on the bottom.
It's really interesting to look at the cultural history, the
items that are left on the bottom, but another thing that
we do is we look structurally at what we see.
And so we look at the puzzle pieces that make up the
archeological site, and we try to think about why was it
constructed this way and how was it constructed this way,
especially for wooden vessels. There really isn't a lot known
about how these wooden vessels were constructed.
There isn't an archive of all the ship plans that were ever
made that's out there. What there are is there's just
sparse things that you can find that you can use to make
determinations, but a lot of what we know we actually learned
from looking at the archeological sites that are on
our bottom lands. So tonight we're going to look
at the wooden bulk carrier Appomattox.
She was built in 1896, and she's listed on the National Register
for a couple of reasons. But at the time of her build she
was the largest wooden bulk carrier ever built, and we
believe that that's not just on the Great Lakes but that's in
the world. And so there's a lot of really
special things that we learn about this vessel and how it was
constructed. She actually rests on the bottom
in 20 feet of water just north of Milwaukee.
Does anyone know where Shorewood is, the village of Shorewood
just north, and there's Atwater Beach?
If you go off the beach about 200, sorry, about 150 yards,
you'll actually find the wreckage there.
So it's a really interesting place to snorkel or kayak or go
scuba diving and explore. This gentleman that we have up
here is James Davidson. He was the builder of the
Appomattox, and he wasn't just the builder, he was actually the
owner of this ship for a good majority of her life.
And he developed a lot of techniques for building these
vessels which allowed them to become longer and longer and
actually exceed what a lot of people thought were the limits
for wooden shipbuilding. And we'll go into these a little
later. Captain Davidson actually had
about a 40-year career sailing himself on the lakes.
And when he built and he owned the Appomattox, he ran her under
the Davidson Steamship line, and they used her to carry bulk
cargoes around the lakes. And she wouldn't just carry the
iron ore or the coal by herself. She towed another boat behind
her, a schooner barge. So schooner barges were big
vessels. They had a few masts that could
sail independently on their own if they had to in the event of a
storm, but they were most commonly towed behind a
steamboat. And he also built, and when
they're towed behind they're called a consort.
So the consort for the Appomattox was called the
Santiago, and James Davidson also built the Santiago.
So here's a picture of the crew of the Appomattox at one of the
coal docks. The Appomattox led a pretty
uneventful career. She really isn't noted for
having many mishaps on the lakes.
The only one that really stands out is she did have an accident
on the St. Clair River, and what happens when there's a wooden
barge that's being towed behind is it makes it a little bit
difficult to steer your vessel. So they were running in a fog.
They were trying to steer, and this was in August of 1905, and
the Santiago veered off and hit another schooner barge called
the Fontana. And they immediately sunk the
Fontana, and unfortunately one of the crew members died in the
accident. So after that, really the only
other accident was the accident that caused the loss of
Appomattox. The Appomattox was lost on the
2nd of November, 1905. She was approaching Milwaukee
with the Santiago in tow, and as they were coming and getting
closer to the city they encountered a fog, a combination
of fog and industrial smoke from the city.
And they got confused in their navigation when they were
approaching North Point, and she ran hard aground up on the
shore, up on the beach. And she actually grounded and
then she also grounded the Santiago.
But she wasn't the only vessel that was lost in this fog.
There was actually another steamer, the Iowa, that was
lost. So now there's these three big
vessels that are up on the beach, and so they sent tugs
from Milwaukee to try to free the vessels.
And they were able to, it was moderate weather conditions.
Not too rough. They were able to get the
Santiago off. They were able to get the Iowa
off. And the Appomattox still
remained hard aground. So they sent for some barges,
and they offloaded some of the cargo.
They call this lightering, and they took the coal off and began
putting it onto barges. It took them about 13 days.
Over that 13-day period weather starting getting rough, the ship
started breaking up. Actually, the bottom broke out,
and they got as much coal off as they could, but they decided to
abandon the salvage attempts and leave her there.
It took about two years for someone to come back and to
recover her boiler and then recover her engines.
And in the meantime, any coal that had been left on the ship
had been washed ashore, and then people from Milwaukee were
scavenging the coal to heat their buildings over the winter.
So it was definitely going to good use.
So to give a perspective on how big the Appomattox was, I know I
had said that it was the largest wooden bulk steamer that was
ever built. We can take a look at this ship
here. This is actually the British
ship of the line Victory. Have you seen Master and
Commander? Yeah?
So this is Victory from the Battle of Trafalgar.
She was 228 feet in length, and she had about the same tonnage
as the Appomattox. At the time, this was considered
to be the most advanced in wooden ship technology.
And it was thought that this would be the absolute largest
that you could go, biggest, largest, in wooden shipbuilding.
But if we add the Appomattox behind, you can see that the
Appomattox was a little narrower than the Victory, but she's 313
feet in length. Again, about the same depth of
hold, about the same tonnage. So quite a bit longer.
And when you think about wooden vessels, you have to think about
stresses that occur on the vessels.
And so we can just talk about those a little bit for the
engineering people that showed up today.
We can talk about wave action. And so as you have a normal wave
cycle that passes over these mammoth wooden vessels, you
actually will have the ends, the bow and the stern come up and
the middle sag, and as it passes, vice versa.
So there's quite a bit of stress that happens.
When you're looking at the Great Lakes, you're looking at,
actually, a shorter period between the waves.
So you're looking at even more stresses.
And to add to this, if you think about the planking that they
would put on the outer hull, these are running
longitudinally, and they're butted to each other.
And so when you have these stresses from the waves, that's
going to open up the joints, and it's going to allow water to
come in. That's one of the things that
these wooden ship builders would have to think about.
The other thing they would have to think about is what's called
hogging and sagging. So as a vessel gets older, a
wooden vessel, it starts losing its strength and its rigidity.
And so they need to accommodate for certain things.
Hogging is when the bow and the stern would drop, and it would
rise up in the middle. Sagging is where the bow and the
stern stay up, and it sags in the middle.
And so these can be accounted for age, age definitely does
this, but also these two things can be caused by loading,
improper loading of a vessel. So, again, you need to
structurally add things to the vessel to be able to accommodate
this. So let's talk about how they
would normally longitudinally deal with these stresses.
Normal shipbuilding, if we take a look, let's see if I can get
this guy up here, we look up here in the upper corner and we
start here. That's going to be how you would
build a smaller wooden vessel. You would lay down these keelson
assemblages, you would lay down what they call the backbone of
the ship, the keel. On top of that, you would lay
the floors and then put a single keelson.
As you get longer in vessel, you then add more structural support
to this. So you would add timbers on
either side of the keelson. Those you would call sister
keelsons. If you would put another
structural member on top, a timber on top, that would be
called a rider keelson. Then we go down to the next one
below that over here. You can see then that, again,
you can add even more riders. So you put two additional
timbers on top and astride of the rider.
Those are called sister riders. And then we can go down to even
a longer vessel in the bottom corner here, and we would have
the sisters with the rider keelsons on top and yet another
rider on top of the rider. So it would be a first rider and
a second rider. Okay, so here's your question,
your quiz question: if you were going to put members outbound of
the sister keelsons, what would those be called?
Any guesses? >> [INAUDIBLE]
Cousins. Close.
Good guess, though. So James Davidson had a
different approach to this. So what he decided to do, again
if you're going to add all of those timbers in the center of
your vessel, what are you going to take away?
You're going to take away room for cargo.
If you take away room for cargo, you're going to not make as much
money. So he took a different approach
to this, and he went with the single keelson.
This keelson, of course, was absolutely mammoth.
The biggest piece of wood you can think of.
It was actually 17 inches across and 18 inches high, and just a
really big piece of wood. And then on either side of that
he added iron plate. So this iron plate was an inch
thick and ran the length of the keelson.
And then he went ahead and added, for additional support,
these six floor keelsons. These six floor keelsons are 13
inches by 13 inches. So, again, a lot of oak there on
the bottom. So in 2003 the Wisconsin
Historical Society did a survey, a phase two survey of this site.
So that's documenting everything to scale in place.
And we were able to develop this site plan of what the wreck site
looks like. So you have the lower bilge
section, which is the majority of it, which is going to be
right in this area, and then you see here that the port side has
sort of fallen away. So that's fallen outward from
the lower part of the bilge. So if we want to take a look at
this lower bilge section and kind of look a little closer,
you can see that here's your keelson, and here's going to be
your six floor keelsons, and if we look at this under water, and
this is actually what it looks like on the bottom of Lake
Michigan, you can see that we have here the keelson and then
you have the iron plating which is on either side of that.
And this is bolted in place with drift pins and really
stabilized. We're going to talk about those
drift pins in a little bit too. So another look under water
you'll see the six floor keelsons here.
And to give you a little bit of perspective, this gentleman is
actually one of our longtime volunteers, Kimm Stablefeldt,
and in this picture he's about 250 pounds, about a 6-foot tall
gentleman. So to use the diver for scale
you can see those are some really, really big pieces of
wood that's on the bottom of the lake.
So there's like a forest down there.
We want to also look at additional support that they
used to really help structurally with the vessel, and what they
have is triple framing. Normal wooden vessels are the
ones that we typically would see would have double frames.
So two pieces of wood side by side that are kind of bolted
together and that would form sort of the ribs of the vessel
as it's spread out. These they use triple frames and
they also space them a lot closer together.
So each one of these pieces of wood is five by five.
So when they're put together, you're going to have five by 15
or 16, and then a short space in between and you'll have that
again. This actually provided a lot of
stability. Here you can see the triple
framing here. But also what they could do with
this is then on the bottom of the boat to make the floor of
the ship where you put the cargo on top, they could lay out the
planks athwart ship, across the ship.
So that allowed them to use cheaper lumber to be able to put
on the floor. It also allowed them to replace
and make repairs a little bit more easily.
In your normal shipbuilding, that would be lengthwise on the
ship. So as I said before, you can't
find these plans very often, but there happens to be ship plans
that exist for the Thomas Cranage.
This is a James Davidson built vessel.
She was built three years prior to Appomattox, and she's about
20 feet shorter. So she employs a lot of the
construction techniques that you see in Appomattox, and we think
that it was very similarly built to Appomattox.
So take a look at some of this combination of things that he
was doing to make the longer vessels, and one of the things
he was doing was adding the steel in to be able to
strengthen the weaknesses in the wood.
And you see what he has here is he adds in a hogging truss.
So this prevents that bending or bowing of the vessel and brings
the ends up. We'll take a look at where there
is a remnant of this that exists on the main site.
Just a small piece of it. This is 30 inches wide.
It's about three-quarters of an inch thick.
So it's a really big and strong piece of metal, and it runs from
the bilge up in an arch along the vessel line and will kind of
round out just under the weather deck or the uppermost deck.
Here's a picture of it under water.
You can kind of see it underneath these hanging knees.
This is going to be, this piece right here that's running along,
that's going to be your hogging truss there.
So the other thing that he did was he utilized a basket weave
or a basket truss that he put internal into the ship.
And so we have this on the inside of the outer hull
planking. And these members were actually
five inches wide and about half an inch thick.
And then they were peened through in order to create sort
of a sandwich. So that would make up the hull
side. So if you take a closer look at
this diagram, you can see how everything was lined up, and
then it would be bolted through and used to keep the whole hull
side together as a unit. >> Are those wooden or metal?
These are metal. So these are made out of steel.
Or iron, sorry. And so you'd see here, here's
where the pin would go through, and that's on the inside of the
outer hull planking. That's going to provide some of
the rigidity in the outer hull. So we've been talking about
these, they're called roves or clinch pins, and this is how
they worked. They would drive the bolt in.
They would put a clinch ring, a two-inch clinch ring, and then
they would peen it over. And, really, what Davidson did
was he made, as I've been calling it, a sandwich out of
his hull. So you have the outer hull
planking, then you have the basket truss, then you would
have the frames, then you would have the ceiling planking or the
planking on the inside of the ship, and then over the top of
that you would have the hogging arch, and then all of that would
be peened together with these bolts and clinch rings, or roves
as they call them on the Great Lakes.
And this type of connecting with the bolts and the clinch rings
was pretty common. They'd use them a lot to hold
the keelson assemblages together in the smaller ships, but
Davidson used them everywhere. And that was one of the things
that's very typical of his designed ships.
So when you take a look here, you can see that there are these
rows and rows of roves that are going, you see them all lined up
here, going down every one of the frames that's holding the
sandwich together. If you think about the bilge,
the bilge was three feet thick because of this sandwich that he
had created holding it all together.
So there was quite a bit of buffer there and quite a bit of
strength, but an awful lot of wood and probably a very, very
heavy vessel seeing that it was made of oak.
So, as I had stated earlier, this is one of the shipwrecks
that we listed on the National Register, and that's kind of a
result of our archeological work is to examine the site,
determine if it's eligible for the National Register, and then
hopefully list it on the State and the National Register.
So it was listed in 2005, and as part of that we wanted to add it
to what we call the Maritime Trails Initiative in the state
of Wisconsin so as to draw attention to maritime heritage
sites. And we wanted to put up a
Maritime Trail sign and a buoy on the site so that people would
know where it was and be able to find it pretty easily.
And so I went out and we were taking some pictures to be able
to promote it on our website and to put up this sign that's
there, and while we were done, and this was in 2006 that we had
done the photography, and while we were out there it was a
really calm day and really beautiful, and I looked at our
GPS and it said that there was another vessel that was pretty
close which is called the Josephine, and in a lot of the
dive guides it's called the Josephine.
And I said, since we're out here can we just go over here?
It's like, I don't know, maybe 500 yards northwest of the main
site, and take a look at the Josephine.
We'll get some pictures for that if we need it someday.
So we headed over to this site, and this is actually where it
is. You can see how close it is to
the beach. It's nearly right up on shore,
just north of Atwater Beach. And we took a look at this site.
Does anybody see in this picture the hogging arch?
Yeah. If you remember back to the site
plan, it was the lower bilge and the port side, and it was just
noted the starboard side isn't there.
It must have gotten broken up and blown away or salvaged or
something. And then this is the Josephine.
Well, the Josephine was a large steamer and it might have had a
hogging arch, and it did have two decks so you can kind of see
in this area is where the deck stanchion would have been.
But this isn't the Josephine. And if you go down and take a
look at a lot of the construction details of this,
they match up exactly with the Appomattox which is 500 feet
away. And so we decided we're going to
make sure. We're going to take some
measurements and make sure that this matches exactly with the
other vessel. So we did a survey of this in
2010. Actually, it started in 2008.
An avocational group out of Milwaukee called the Great Lakes
Shipwreck Research Foundation went out there, and they started
surveying it. And we went back out in 2010 and
helped them finish this survey. But if you go down and take a
look at this site you can see it has, here's the hogging arch,
you can see the hogging truss here, and then you can see that
you have the roves that are here, the peening, very, very
similar to what you saw on the port side that was out at the
main site. Oops, went back there.
And you also see the basket truss here.
You see some zebra mussels on this one, but you can see you've
got the Xs there. Sorry, I went a little fast
there. The Xs, everyone see those?
The crosses from the basket truss.
And so we went out and we surveyed this, and we actually
found something really interesting because there was a
lot more of the starboard side that remained on the bottom.
So we were able to get a lot more information out of just
this little piece that remained. You're taking all the puzzle
pieces and putting them together.
I don't know if you can see this right in this lower corner down
here? Okay, so we knew that Appomattox
had a hogging truss and hogging trusses were very typical to
James Davidson vessels, but all of them were slightly different.
All of his vessels he changed some things because he was
learning, and he had learned from making the previous one.
So what we discovered was this actually had an internal hogging
truss as well. So if you see down in this
corner that this would be the internal hogging truss, the one
that would be on the inside of the ceiling planking, or the
planking that would be on the inside of the hull.
And then you see that there's a hogging truss that's right below
it here that's inside of the sandwich.
So now we were able to better describe how that hull sandwich
worked. There's the outer hull planking.
There's the basket weave. Then there's the inner truss.
Then there's the frames. Then you have the ceiling
planking, and then you have the internal truss.
So we were able to add a little bit more to the description of
what he did differently when he built Appomattox than he did
when he built Thomas Cranage or the other ones.
It's really interesting to do these surveys because there are
five, six Davidson vessels that are lost in Wisconsin waters, so
you can actually go and dive all the different ones and see all
the different construction techniques and be able to
compare them. So a lot of them are within
recreational diving range too, and one of them is still lost
out there if any of you guys want to go shipwreck hunting.
It's off Sheboygan. So there's a lot of things that
you can do as far as comparing them as well.
Did you decide that that was a piece from the Appomattox?
It is and we actually did an amendment to the National
Register nomination, and it was amended in I think it was
January of 2011, and this is the boundary extension.
So you have here, these are the piers or the breakwaters that
they have at Atwater Beach, and Atwater Beach is going to be
right in here. So you can actually swim out to
it, and it's buoyed. And then this point here is the
starboard hull section that was formerly the Josephine.
And then we started interviewing a lot of people who were diving
the site, and they said that the debris field was opening up.
Sand was shifting. There's a lot of things that
they started finding that were out in the debris field.
So we decided to include the debris field, and the most
notable would be the propeller and that's the furthest outbound
piece. So it's quite a big expansion to
what they boundary is of the historic zone for this
particular wreck site. Here's a picture of the
propeller. Again, here's Kimm Stablefeldt,
the diver from the first one, posing in it for scale.
So really, really beautiful wreck site again.
Now, there's two of us that work for Wisconsin Historical Society
as maritime archeologists. There's me and then there's
Keith Meverden, raise your hand. And we're in the office daily,
but most of our work is done by volunteers.
These guys help under water. They do the surveys.
They do historic research for us.
You name it, they're there for us.
And there's a core group of about 12 guys that rotate
through all of these surveys, and we are greatly appreciative
to them, and there's a lot of the guys in the audience today
too. So thank you.
So, again, a result of this is that these are really cultural
sites. A lot of people find it really,
really easy to say this is a natural resource, we should
protect natural resources, but they don't really understand
that cultural resources are non-renewable resources too.
So we want to do whatever we can do to protect them.
So one of the things that we do is, and we don't want to hide
them. We want you to experience your
history. So we put these buoys out, and
Appomattox has one of them. It's a safe mooring buoy, so you
can tie your boat to it. It also marks the site so it's
easy to find so you can kayak out to it or you can snorkel it
or swim from the beach or go diving.
And so we added this mooring buoy to the site in 2005, and
then we also do Maritime Trails markers.
So these markers, I think we have 36 of them now that are up
around the state, and they really try to connect you with
the place that you're at and what history happened there.
And so this is at the top of the bluff at Atwater Beach.
I don't know if you guys can see this on the screen, but if you
look right above my arrow there, do you see the little white dot?
Yeah. >> Yeah?
That's the buoy. So you can actually stand on top
of the cliff from this sign and see the buoy that marks the
shipwreck site so you can know what history happened.
Here's a little closer look at the Maritime Trails sign.
So it tells a little bit about the history so you can connect
to it, and then we also, at the bottom of the sign here, have a
site plan that we had from the archeological survey.
We actually have these on little underwater slates that you can
take out there so you can learn the shipwreck parts or see what
it is that I'm talking about up here.
Remember it, recall it when you're there and under water.
Okay, so everything that I told you we try to incorporate into
our two websites, Maritime Trails and Wisconsin Shipwrecks.
Maritime Trails has sort of a clearinghouse that tells you
about maritime heritage sites that you could visit wherever
you're at. So you can type in whatever town
you're from around the state, and it will tell you maritime
related resources that you can go and visit.
Appomattox, the buoy and the Maritime Trails sign are both on
this site. This site is recently updated,
and we're including sites along the Fox River now and the
Mississippi and the Wisconsin River as well.
And then we work with University of Wisconsin Sea Grant
Institute. They've been our long-term
sponsor on these projects. They funded the 2003 original
survey, and they also funded the updated survey that we did in
2010. And they have a site which is
called Wisconsin Shipwrecks, and we work with them to provide
them with information. In fact, almost everything that
I've told you here in the lecture is up on their site.
You just need to click on lower Wisconsin and Appomattox, and
you can review what I have given you here.
And it talks about the service history of the vessel and what
the site looks like today, and it really, really is a great
resource. And it also has a database of
newspapers that's on there from Door County Advocate and from
the Manitowoc Herald. So if you have a relative that
was involved in maritime trade or if you have an interest in a
particular shipwreck, you can search the database and get a
lot of information there. So that's what I have for you
tonight. Do you guys have any questions?
[APPLAUSE]