- 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. ; however, in this case,
both vessels were moving at the time.
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]