Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Tamara Thomsen Diving the Wrack of the Appomattox February 22, 2012 UP693   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]