- [Voiceover] Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ The Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen.
I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center.
I also work for UW Extension and Cooperative Extension.
On behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers,
Wisconsin Public Television,
the 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's a pretty special night,
because we get to have two speakers.
One
flies ultralights,
and that's a pretty cool thing,
because ultralights were invented where?
In Wisconsin.
If you've ever gone to the EA
up in Oshkosh, it's a pretty good place
to see
very fragile
little craft in the air.
The second type of craft are ships,
ships that sank in Lake Michigan.
To have these two types of things come together
in one night is pretty special.
I'm going to start by introducing Tamara,
who is the second speaker,
and then we'll go to Suzze, who's the first speaker.
Tamara Thomsen was born in Bethesda, Maryland
and grew up in Carmel, Indiana
where she went to high school.
She got her undergraduate degree here
at UW Madison in horticulture
and her master's degree in genetics,
and this is the Genetics Biotechnology Center building,
which explains why she works
for the Wisconsin Historical Society as a diver
in Maritime Archaeology.
(audience laughing)
Suzze Johnson was born in Manitowoc
and went to high school there.
She came here to UW Madison and then
lived in Whitewater for a while
and then returned up that way by Manitowoc
to Two Rivers and ran a business there
for about 37 years.
She is an ultralight pilot.
Tonight we get to hear about
speeding Maritime Archaeology using ultralight aircraft.
We're going to start off with Suzze Johnson.
Please join me in welcoming Suzze Johnson
to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
(audience applause)
- Good evening, everyone.
When I first saw a powered parachute,
I was driving along the shore of Lake Michigan,
and I looked up and I said, "What is that thing?"
I was just mesmerized.
I remember thinking,
"Some day I want to ride on one of those."
Well, little did I know, about three to four years later
I ended up working with a guy who owned one,
and I would listen to his stories and just go,
"Oh, my goodness,"
and I was just mesmerized by the whole thing.
Well, he took me up for a ride end of January.
(audience laughs)
Yes, it is a little bit chilly,
and if there is snow on the ground, we can put skis on.
We can fly all year long.
In fact, winter is the best time, and I loved it.
He handed me a book, The Bible of the Powered Parachute.
That was in January, and I was bound and determined
to learn how to fly one.
There's a lot to learn, a lot to know,
but by March a month-and-a-half later, I did my solo.
It was a fantastic thing.
There's a lot to know.
You need to know how to set the chute out right
so it flies up.
There's a lot of gauges on the instrument panel.
You have to know what they're for,
what their temperatures are.
There is a lot to know and remember,
and when you first start flying,
you've got to go through all of this, keep it straight,
and you really don't get to enjoy in the beginning
what it's really all about.
The more you fly and everything falls into place,
it's peace and serenity.
It is just unbelievable.
I feel like I have gone to a psychiatrist for an hour
after flying 10 minutes in the air.
The plane, itself, weighs about 400 pounds.
There's a 582 Rotax engine.
It's 45 horsepower, and there's a 500-square-foot chute.
There are, if you can see the black straps coming up
from the white plane,
that is what holds the plane in the air.
This is another one that I fly.
It's a little bit smaller.
This is the field that we take off from.
It's about five miles from my house.
It's a privately-owned registered airfield
called Woodland Field.
It's 900 feet long and 600 feet wide,
and this airfield is about a mile from
the shore of Lake Michigan.
This is taking off, getting ready to fly to the lake.
This is the city of Two Rivers.
With the two rivers, the harbor is on your
right-hand side
and then the two rivers split.
This is a picture of the shoreline heading south
along Lake Michigan.
It isn't advantageous to fly the lakeshore,
because you get a steady breeze off the lake
and it's not as turbulent as inland.
I have flown many different terrains,
and the lakes are still my favorite.
This is south.
You can see, if you look towards the shoreline,
you can see the different sandbars.
We fly in the morning and in the evening.
That's when the winds are most favorable.
My time to fly is I like early morning.
It's just when things are waking up and the sun
is coming up over the lake.
It's beautiful.
This is flying along the lake.
If you can see that little thing that's perpendicular
to the seaweed, there is the Major Anderson.
This is the shipwreck that started the whole thing off.
The conditions have to be really good or almost perfect
to be able to see these in the water.
The water needs to be clear, it needs to be calm,
and hopefully there will be no ripple.
A slight ripple is okay, but in order to see these,
the conditions have to be right.
You can even see fish.
You can count the number of fish in a school
if the conditions are right.
This is one of the wrecks
that Tamara and her team identified,
three ships in one week.
This is the Lookout,
and here's another picture of it.
You can see where the shoreline is down in the corner,
so it really isn't that far out.
This one is the scow, Alaska, which is
closer to shore.
I think it's in about four feet of water.
If the water were warm enough,
you could walk out there to see it itself.
The Major Anderson was also...
I think the bow was in four feet of water.
I don't remember.
Oh, this is the Lookout also.
This is what we see
when we first see these boats in the water.
This was taken at about, I would say, 500 feet in the air,
and this one's in fairly deep water.
You're not sure if you're looking at a shipwreck or not.
You take a picture and send it to Tamara
and let her say, "Oh, yeah, I think it is."
(laughs) She's been a lifesaver.
This is also a picture of the Lookout,
that little blob down in the left-hand corner.
These are a picture I took of two wrecks
in one picture.
This was taken two years ago.
When Tamara first saw this, she goes,
"I've never seen these before,"
so there are two more out there
that need to be identified,
but it's really, with the way Mother Nature has been
and the way that the wind has moved all the sand
on the beach, it's going to be real surprising to see
if they're going to be uncovered again
or if new ones are uncovered.
That's really all I have.
It's been really eventful, and I have loved flying in.
Tamara's been a big help with this,
and really, you got me excited in the whole thing.
Here we go, Tamara.
You're next.
(audience applause)
- You want to stay up here with me?
You want to stay up here with me?
You can sit here,
and if you want to add anything into the conversation,
then you can, yeah?
- Sure. - Thanks.
My job is to come back and explain what it is
that Suzee and Mike found for us.
These are some really amazing shipwrecks
and really amazing finds.
As underwater archaeologists, we tend to hear about
one shipwreck a year or maybe every two or three years.
To have them continually
find new shipwrecks
is pretty amazing,
and to have
such enthusiasm for going out and looking.
My task now is to explain to you what it is they found
and a little bit about the history
and why these sites are so important.
Of the five shipwrecks that we've looked at now,
two of them are already listed
on the National Register of Historic Places,
and we've just last week turned in the applications
for the remaining three that we looked at this summer.
All five, we believe, are very significant
and explain a good part of our Wisconsin maritime history.
I want to take a quick second and talk to you
about this region that they're looking in.
Is everybody familiar with Rawley Point?
Rawley Point and Two Rivers is going to be
sort of the thumb that sticks out,
the little nub that sticks out on the top end
of the screen there.
If you see all of the yellow and red dots
that are around there, those are all of the shipwrecks
that Suzee has notified us about.
This region,
in October of last year,
President Obama made the decision to go forward
with a National Marine Sanctuary.
We're going through the process of designating this area.
The reason that this is qualified for that is
because this is an area that contains a number
of significant shipwrecks, and they're really vital
to our understanding of our history.
In the area, in this whole band here,
which includes the three counties
of Manitowoc, Sheboygan, and Ozaukee County,
there are 139 known
vessel losses,
so that's by historic newspaper reports
and insurance documents, that type of thing.
Of those, we only know where 38 of those are.
Five of those are ones Suzee has come forward with.
That's a pretty big chunk,
and she's just flying Rawley Point
in that little area in there
and more and more keeps coming out of the sand.
In this area, too, there are 16 in total
that are listed on the National Register.
Again, two of those are Suzee's.
There are three that are going forward.
They're somewhere in the process of either
federal or state review, various stages.
Those, we'll see also come and have judgment on them
as to whether they could be listed in the very near future.
A good question is why do we have
so many shipwrecks that are there?
It's really because we're along
this major shipping routes.
This was a way for
the grain trade,
as the frontier moved west and we started
developing farms, and produce was being produced here,
grain in particular, in Milwaukee and Chicago.
This was a very, very easy way for us
to get that grain back to the eastern markets
that were very hungry for this product.
Then in return, a lot of these vessels came back
carrying coal to fuel the factories.
Then we also had this intra-lake trade as well.
The ships would stay just on Lake Michigan
and they would only do commerce within the individual lake.
When I get a little bit more into the history,
you'll be able to pick those little things out.
The other thing we really enjoy exploring
when we're looking at all these shipwrecks
is really the immigrant involvement in them.
A lot of times, these vessels were the entry point
of the maritime trades.
They would come here from whatever country.
They would begin work as a sailor.
Maybe they had a background in it
or they had a background as a ship builder,
and they would continue those practices here.
It was an easy way for them to get in and begin feeding
their families right when they arrived here in Wisconsin.
We simply have to,
and I remind this on every one of my presentations,
to look only to our state seal to know
how important maritime is to our state.
We see, obviously, the sailor.
We see the anchor.
Anybody else know what the other icon
of maritime history is?
- [audience member] Caulking mallet?
- The caulking mallet. All right! Good one.
Yeah, the arm and hammer was introduced
to represent prowess in
industry, but that industry actually is
shipbuilding, because this is a very important tool
that was integral to that trade.
Let's start looking at some of the shipwrecks
that Suzee has reported to the state.
The first one started out with the Major Anderson.
The Major Anderson is right off of Molash Creek,
which is at the southern end of Point Beach State Forest
if you're familiar with that area.
She's in about 7 to 10 feet of water.
Very reasonable depth if you're
into snorkeling in Lake Michigan-- brrr!-- or kayaking.
We find that a lot of people like to come out
and kayak this particular wreck.
Suzee's daughter, Erin, works at Point Beach State Forest,
and I received an e-mail through them,
saying that her mother had
taken these pictures
and was wondering what it was she was looking at,
because she had this natural curiosity
as you probably have gained from her presentation.
She wanted to know what this was and if it was a shipwreck.
I can imagine her, "What is this?
"I don't know what this is,"
and they go back and forth nagging each other,
and so she finally came forward and gave me this picture,
and I'm like, "Yup, that's a shipwreck.
"Where was it?" She told me where it was.
It's like, you know, there's nothing catalogued there. (laughs)
We don't know where everything is, obviously,
so I fit it into our schedule at the end of
one of our surveys to go and take a look at it.
We put a tape measure down the middle of it.
We determined that it was 153 feet in length
to try to do a little sleuthing to figure out
which one's missing in this area that would fit this length.
It's like Cinderella. (laughs)
It ends up being one called the Major Anderson,
so for our history fanatics in the audience...
Most people, by the way, name the ship for their mother
or their sister, or it's an important person
in the maritime industry, but I was curious.
The name, Major Anderson, rang a bell to me,
but I couldn't put my finger on it.
Does anyone know who Major Anderson is?
Oh, yeah.
I bring you back, right, to...
Okay, this is...
He is the commander of Union forces
when South Carolina seceded from the Union,
and so he marched his troops
to Fort Sumter
and held the fort
for several months
without provisions or reinforcements.
Finally,
on the 12th of April, 1861,
10,000 Confederate troops converged and fired
on the fort
for 43 hours,
and he finally
surrendered.
That's what began the Civil War,
or the War of Northern Aggression
if you're from the southern states.
(laughs)
I thought, well, that's really an odd name
to name your ship, but if you're a Union supporter,
this ship was built in 1868.
Maybe?
Then I started looking into it,
and there were actually four ships that were built
on the Great Lakes that were all named Major Anderson.
I was like, "That's kind of interesting,"
but this one was the biggest one of all of them,
and
the owner
was very, very proud of his vessel,
so he commissioned a local artist to paint
The Battle of Fort Sumter across the stern of the ship.
He flew the largest American flag that he could find,
and he sailed into every port with it flying in the breeze,
so a very, very strong
Union supporter.
This particular vessel is also
really unique to Wisconsin history,
because it is a barkentine, so it's square-rigged,
so it would be like kind of ocean-rigged vessels
were more typically square-rigged,
not Great Lakes vessels,
and so it would have looked pretty similar to this one.
We don't have very much evidence of these
in Wisconsin waters.
I think we know of two or three other ones
that are located anywhere within our state.
The other thing that's really neat about this ship
that brings us around to local history
and telling this story of the lumber industry here
and why this ship was sailing here
is when she sank, she sank
on October 7th,
1871.
Does anybody ring a bell with that one? Yes?
- [Voiceover] Chicago fire... - Yeah, yeah, exactly!
The captain got lost in a fog over Lake Michigan,
so there was a lot of smoke.
There were these regional fires
that were burning everywhere here.
On the 7th of October,
the captain became lost
and ran aground south of what's now Rawley Point
or Two Rivers Point
and grounded there.
It did not look anything like this picture out on the lake.
It would have been very, very foggy and smokey,
but it's an interesting rendition.
Now kind of an interesting tie
to the Chicago fire is that...
so this went aground on the 7th.
The Great Chicago Fire started on the 8th,
and the owner was living in Chicago at the time,
and he had a wharf.
When he heard that his vessel had become stranded,
he put a pump aboard a tug and he sent the tug
up to Two Rivers to try to remove his vessel.
That saved the pump and the tug,
because his wharf completely was demolished by this fire,
so kind of an interesting thing.
When we go, we look at...
I'll take you down to the shipwreck.
The reason they couldn't get it out
and they couldn't get the pump to work
is that it was so stuck in the bottom.
They claimed that it was stuck in quicksand,
and it was like,
"Oh, yeah, what's quicksand really?"
It kind of sounds like something that maybe Bugs Bunny,
stuck in quicksand.
We went out, and we started to survey this,
and as you're kneeling on the bottom
and you're taking measurements,
you literally sink into your waist.
If you touch the shipwreck, it moves like it's in jelly.
It's kind of crazy, so you have to be
very, very careful not to move sediment around.
Unfortunately, I don't have very good pictures,
because if you get down there
and you just look at the shipwreck,
it obliterates the visibility,
so Suzee has the best view of these shipwrecks.
When you're underwater, it's not so great.
The other thing that's really cool that I think
about this shipwreck, I'm going to geek out
on Maritime Archaeology for you here,
is this little door that's in the side here.
This is what's called a lumber port.
They were only on the starboard sides of the vessels.
This was used as they pulled out to the lumber pier
that they could put the dimensional lumber
into the hold of the ship more easily than coming in
through the top through the cargo hatches.
I think this is really cool. It's iron-framed,
and it's got some decorative work that's done on it.
It's got pins on the inside.
I then started looking at all these other vessels
that we had looked at that had been involved
in the lumber industry to go back and try to figure out
if they had had lumber ports and compare them.
That's kind of one of those little geeky things.
The other thing that was really cool was that
a few months later, Erin sent me this picture.
Again, they couldn't get the ship out,
because they had sent the pump up, and they had
such strong storm conditions on the site
that they only really got to work on the vessel
for a little bit, and they struggled
because it was stuck in sand, but they also lost the pump.
Here's the pump,
or the boiler for it.
It's actually up on the beach, so right...
If you decide to walk the beach at Point Beach State Forest,
you likely will run into this
top of the boiler.
Sometimes it's in waist-deep water.
Sometimes you can walk to it.
Here it's surrounded by ice.
It's kind of one of those unique features
that you can tie together
amongst the landscape that's there.
This is what the Major Anderson looks like,
so she was, again, quite big for a schooner.
The stern, at the time of the survey of this, was covered.
When we went back out there this summer,
I'm pointing at Caitlin Zant,
the other Maritime Archaeologist
at the Wisconsin Historical Society, waving.
When we went out this summer,
the stern had become uncovered a little bit,
but the transom was not exposed.
I just can imagine that if that thing's been buried
in this quicksand for that long,
there just might be some remnants of that mural
that was painted on the stern.
That's my little dream that's out there,
so we go back year after year.
Again, it's one of those very popular sites
for kayakers now.
Suzee found this in 2013,
and now it's become this thing to go to,
which is great.
I don't know if you can see this.
It's kind of hard with the lighting in here,
but you can see the bow and then the kayakers over it.
We ran into those kayakers out there,
and they were going in circles,
and they're, it was like, "What are you guys doing?
"We're surveying the shipwreck over here."
They said, "Well, we're looking for this other..."
I drove them down to it and said, "Follow us!"
We had a powered boat, of course,
and they followed us down to it.
We heard about this in 2013.
I went out and surveyed it.
It was listed on the National Register
in October of 2014, and I think right about that time
I received another e-mail from Erin.
It had this picture in it, and it said,
"I don't think I ever sent you this.
"I think this is something my Mom took this fall." (laughs)
I'm like, "Oh, my gosh!"
We're trying to figure out where is this?
There's not a whole lot of land references.
Went back and started talking a little bit.
I think we chatted by e-mail then about it.
Turns out that this is the Pathfinder.
This is a schooner.
It was a known site, so this one was listed,
but it had been covered with sand for a number of years
and people were not going to it.
All of this sand has moved out.
If you live on the shoreline
or you've been to the shoreline,
you know there's quite a bit of erosion that's happening.
In 2013,
we had a record low
or near-record low on Lake Michigan.
Then the next year in 2014, it came up to normal.
It wasn't a slow recovery.
It was a really fast recovery that happened.
What happens is that if you stand
on the edge of a beach and you look
and then there's a sandbar that's out
and then there's another sandbar that's out there,
if you lower the water level,
those sandbars move out comparatively.
They continue to move as well.
This is really causing a lot of shoreline erosion,
but it's also causing a lot of shipwrecks
to either be exposed or covered.
There's always changes.
It's like, "Surprise!
"What are we going to get this year?"
We took advantage, and so Gail Warner,
who's back in the back, raise your hand, Gail,
and Caitlin and I went out to this
summer before last.
We spent 4-1/2 hours, and we surveyed the whole thing.
You see Caitlin here on the bow.
She's wearing a rebreather,
so it's sort of a recirculating device.
What it does is as you exhale
and you exhale carbon dioxide,
it goes into this chemical that removes the carbon dioxide.
It has an injection system that puts oxygen back in.
You can stay down for about 4-1/2 hours
and that's your limit.
It's pretty funny, because we had this guy that lives
in one of the cottages that's just on shore from here.
It's maybe, I don't know, 400 feet to the shoreline,
and he had a skin canoe.
Sorry, it was a kayak, a skin kayak.
He came out and he kind of circled around.
I guess he came out two or three times while we there,
because we were down underwater for a very long time.
Most scuba divers will stay for like 30 minutes,
get their fill and leave,
but we were actually doing work.
We were trying to get it done.
We had one day to do it.
Finally, when we came back out, he put in again
and he came out to see us.
He was like, "Oh, thank God!" he said.
"I kept coming out and circling around
"and I couldn't see any bubbles."
Well, this thing doesn't produce bubbles.
Remember, it's an enclosed system.
(laughs)
He was like, "I was worried about you,
"but then you were moving, so I thought it was okay."
(laughing)
Really nice guy and he looks after the resource,
which is great.
One of the really, really cool things
about this particular shipwreck is
it's 188 feet
in length,
so it's a little bit longer.
It's kind of starting to move to
these very gigantic
wooden vessels.
They end up having problems
with longitudinal strength on these.
If you look at the top one,
this is what your normal ship would look like.
You'd have a keel with a floor on top.
It's on the bottom of the ship,
and then a keelson to provide longitudinal strength.
As it gets bigger, you start stacking timbers
on either side and the top.
Then by the time you get to really big
and really kind of the extent of what you can do
for wood in this kind of longitudinal strengthening method,
you get down to the lower corner,
and that's what we actually have on the Pathfinder.
If you see on the far right side of the screen,
that's like six timbers that are stacked up.
This takes up a huge amount of room
within the hold of the vessel.
It's actually counterproductive
to putting cargo in it.
The other thing that we see that's really interesting
is that they switched it over to the iron ore trade
and actually sunk with a cargo of iron ore
in November of 1886.
You can see that
the frames
and like the ribs of the vessel,
there's actually,
normally there's one or two
pieces of lumber or timbers
that go with them, and here there's four and five,
so they were very much strengthening this ship
in order to survive the weight of the iron ore
that they were putting in this to carry.
The other thing that's really kind of cool
is that it has a brass gudgeon.
A lot of these shipwrecks that are this shallow
has a lot of stuff taken off of it, salvaged or
looted,
and this still has that gudgeon in place.
If you see just
to the left
of the tape measure, that would have been
where the bottom of the rudder would have been
held in place, so that's pretty cool.
This is our drawing of the Pathfinder
and what's left.
We believe that there's quite a bit still
that's left under the sand.
It was, again, lost in quicksand,
so they couldn't recover this,
so it began to ice up.
They parted the lines.
It drifted ashore, and then when they reconnected
and tried to pull it free, they couldn't
because of this quicksand that was there.
This is another one where it's huge.
There's this massive thing on the bottom.
You touch it and it wiggles around,
so it's a little creepy.
Again, we're kind of sinking into this bottom substrate
as we're doing the survey of the ship.
Now let's get to this year.
This year it just got a little out of hand, Suzee.
(laughing)
You know, one drizzled in now and again
is easy to accommodate, but three?
Wow!
We thought three is like
an awful lot.
I'm not sure you...
Our program is grant-funded.
We have to sort of beg, borrow and steal
to be able to do this sort of external work.
It's one of those priorities that you have to make,
because again, the bottom and the sand
is changing so much that when these things are exposed,
you really have to go and get the information,
because after the next storm, which may be tomorrow,
this thing's going to be covered up or will have changed,
and so it's very, very important
to get the information while you can.
I'm not sure, can you see?
Can everybody find the shipwreck in here?
It looks like a little amoeba in the middle.
Yeah, so this is what she sees when she's flying.
This is my friend, Suzee.
She sees things.
(laughs)
If you squint and use your imagination,
maybe you can see a shipwreck in this picture.
Actually, she'll send this to me, and like,
"Oh, Mike and I went flying. Look what we found,"
and like, "Is this a shipwreck?"
"Yes, that's a shipwreck.
"That's definitely a shipwreck."
You can see the Rosa Cladophora,
so that natural algae that's in Lake Michigan
that are stacked up along the ridges
of the sandbars as you go out from the beach.
The beach is in the lower right-hand corner.
As you work your way out, you see the shipwreck.
You can see that the Cladophora has built up around that
and that's what causes that sort of halo
that you see from above.
Again, it doesn't look like this when we're underwater.
This is like, you know, snot.
(laughs)
It's really, really difficult to see things,
so the better way to look at it, really,
is with a side-scan sonar.
We got ourselves one of the Hummingbird Side Scans
which is one of the little cool gadgets
that you can have now on a boat.
You can really see the outline of the hull here,
and you can actually see the frames sticking up
in the lower part of the image.
We spent our morning dive working on this,
and there were a bunch of volunteers.
One was Matt Schultz, who Tom talked about earlier
and Gail and
another gentleman named George Mayhew.
We surveyed the shipwreck. This is the only picture
I was able to get of it,
because as soon as everybody else got down there,
this silty sandy stuff suspended up in the water.
All these guys are cave divers,
so they're really good divers,
but your movement across the water
is enough to bring
the bottom up
sort of in a Venturi behind you,
and it just wipes it completely out.
We did a lot of this survey by feel.
When we started looking at,
again we put a tape measure on it,
we measured it, and we figured out what the losses were
in this vicinity,
and it was
126 feet long.
The only one that was south of the point
that we had within the inventory
of known lost vessels is the Lookout.
This was built in 1855 in Buffalo, New York.
It sailed for 42 years,
so it's extraordinarily long for a wooden ship
and sank in 1897.
They came aground,
again, an error in navigation by the captain.
They were sailing a little bit too close to the point,
and they came aground here.
They sat here until the morning.
This was in,
I think it was in May.
They came aground at night.
They sat here until morning.
They'd set off no distress signals.
It was blowing a gale.
The lifesaving service patrol was out on the beach
and he noticed this ship grounded.
This was 5:00 in the morning,
so he sprinted 5 miles back to the station
and got everyone up.
By 6:10, they had gotten a team of horses,
and they were try to drag their breeches,
going up the beach.
The guys had taken to the rigging, the sailors.
They had lashed themselves into the rigging,
and they had waited all night.
They see these guys slowly working their way up the beach.
It gets to be about 7:00 in the morning,
and they can't wait any longer,
and so they launch their boat.
They were able to bring themselves ashore,
but all of them were completely drenched and wet
just at about 7:30 when the lifesaving station arrived.
They took them back to the lifesaving station.
They fed them for a day and then sent them on their way.
They determined that the ship was so badly damaged
that they salvaged her anchors and some of her rigging
and then left her there.
That's why we see her now.
We surveyed the ship.
You see that most of the starboard side is present,
but the port side is missing,
and we believe that that's under the sand.
Probably another storm event or two,
and we'll be able to get a little bit more
and be able to add to this drawing.
Okay, so then the next picture she sends me is this vessel.
Can everybody see that in the center?
She says, "I found a square thing."
(laughing)
"I don't know if it's a shipwreck."
I said, "Well, yes, Suzee.
"It is a square thing.
"It's probably a scow schooner."
Scow schooners were square things.
They had a very square bow, very square stern.
There was this adage that if you could build a barn,
you could build a scow.
It took very little shipwrights man skills
to be able to put one of these things together.
It was really the entry point for maritime trade
for an awful lot of immigrants.
We know that this vessel was built...
This one ends up being the scow schooner, Alaska.
She was built in
1869 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
She was built for a gentleman named Adolph Hoechner.
He kept the vessel for one year,
and in the spring of 1870,
I found a suit against him that was put forth
by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company,
and he lost.
It caused him...
I don't know the circumstances behind it,
because I haven't been able to find the exact case.
This is all very new, because remember,
we looked at this just this summer,
so we're trying to quickly write the history with no money.
(laughs)
I found this case and we looked at it.
It said that he had to sell the vessel right away,
and he ended up selling it to a gentleman
named Frederick Vogel.
Vogel was a partner in
Pfister-Vogel Leather Company
out of Milwaukee, and he used the vessel
for bringing lumber into Milwaukee.
He kept the vessel for three years.
He ended up selling it on
to newly-arrived Norwegian immigrants.
They sailed it for three more years,
and in a storm, they came aground north of Rawley Point.
When they came aground, they tried to hire
two different wrecking companies,
two different salvage companies to come and get them free.
One came for 10 days but couldn't get them free
because they were stuck in quicksand.
Then they hired another outfit to come up,
and they were there for eight days.
Again, they could not get them free.
They're racking up bills.
These guys are new immigrants,
and the U.S. Marshall comes in and seizes the vessel
because their bills are too high
and does a fire sale on the vessel.
It becomes the property of a gentleman
named Captain Matheson out of Chicago.
He then hires, he says, "Well, these salvage companies
"don't know what they're doing,"
so he goes into Manitowoc,
and there's a guy there that's a house mover.
Again, if you can build a scow, you can build a barn.
If you're going to move a barn,
you hire a house mover named Ella Cohen.
Ella comes out there, picks it up, puts it on the beach.
They spend the next two years trying
to make the vessel seaworthy.
Then they try to re-launch it,
and it fails miserably
and they abandon the ship.
It ends up floating around the point
and comes to rest here.
In case you're wondering what a scow schooner looks like,
we have two scow schooners that are in
this picture of Milwaukee Harbor at Lumber, Pierce.
You can see that in the bottom of the screen,
so you can see that they don't have that beautiful
sort of wine glass cutwater
of normal schooners that you would think of.
They are square.
Like Suzee said, "There's something square."
(laughs)
This one is very close to the beach, and again,
it makes for very, very nice kayak,
so we've seen a couple people come out
while we were there, trying to look at it.
I don't know if you can see, there are four divers
that are underwater
in this picture
if you can find the divers.
Sounds like Where's Waldo.
(laughs)
They're all working underwater, so I'm sitting on the boat
and getting a suntan at this point, I guess.
(laughs)
Caitlin and Matt drawing to scale.
We draw to scale.
We do what's called Phase II Archaeological Surveys,
so we document everything in place.
We do no recovery.
What's very interesting about this is that the chain,
the chain goes out and under the sand.
Well, it's not really sand.
It's sort of this gelatinous stuff.
As you follow it out, we followed it out for quite a while
and we could not find the end to it,
so there might be an anchor down there.
The chain comes over the bow, and they're on the bow.
See, it's very flat, and it goes to the windlass,
which is sticking upright.
All the ratchet mechanisms are still there,
the bits and everything else.
Another quick little view of this one.
Again, I got down before everybody else.
That's probably why I'm on the boat is
because I did the pictures first.
We were getting smarter now.
I'm not going to try to do the pictures
while everybody's drawing.
I'm going to take the pictures first
and then let everybody draw.
This is what the scow schooner, Alaska, looks like.
Again, a lot of this is done by feel,
because they're waist-deep in this quicksand.
Okay, so the last one,
does anybody see the shipwreck picture in this?
This is again going to take some imagination.
It's outbound from the beach a little bit.
It looks almost like a smear or a thumbprint
or that I had a smudge on my camera lens or something
and it's out a little bit further.
This took us a little bit of time to find.
Suzee and Mike, we were working with them
to try to get more pictures of the shoreline
so that we could sort of georeference
where some of these things were.
I can just imagine you guys flying
and Mike hanging overboard with the GPS
or try to snap pictures.
Of course, she can't fly the plane,
take GPS coordinates and take pictures.
We multi-task, but not that much.
This ended up being a canaller,
and so it's a different vessel type.
The canallers were a very, very
specifically built
vessel for the Great Lakes.
These were designed to transit the Welland Canal.
By the hull shape, we could tell,
and the length and beam on this vessel,
so it was 139 feet long, 26-foot beam,
11-foot depth of hold.
That is a canaller.
You can also tell it has a very bluff bow,
so a very upright bow on this vessel,
and it probably would have had a very sharp
turn of the bilge to it.
Canallers were also built with a lot of features
that were sort of unique
to allow more cargo
through the Welland Canal locks.
These were built to the dimensions of the Welland Canal.
If you could fit your boat in,
the more boat you could fit in,
the more cargo you could get into the lock
and the more money you could make.
The Welland Canal, if you don't know,
is the canal that bypasses Niagara Falls.
This particular ship actually has pins
on either side of the bow,
and so that would allow you to
un-step the bowsprit
and you could put block and tackle in the rigging
and then be able to cant the bowsprit up.
Again, that wouldn't impede what you could
put in this lock box to get the vessel through.
We started looking through the historical documents,
and we came up with two vessels that this could be.
The others ones have been easy, right?
It's this length, it's in the right spot.
This one took a little bit more,
because there were two of them.
One was called the Tubal Cain,
so son of Cain from biblical, yeah,
and there was another one called LaSalle.
It was very, very difficult to determine which,
because they're all built the same, right?
Individual builders have sort of these nuances
in their construction, but this,
we couldn't figure it out.
Then I ran across sort of this obscure
newspaper clipping that explained in excruciatingly
painful detail how the ship was built,
like how many nails,
and it went into iron knees,
and this was very odd
because when this thing was built,
which in 1874,
they weren't building vessels with iron knees.
Most of them were wooden hanging knees,
so this was a little bit weird.
We hadn't found any other references to when
the transition to iron knees happened, but this probably
was on the early end of it, because it was written up
as sort of a novelty.
"Oh, and it was built with iron knees,"
and here they are, the iron knees.
The other thing you see, too, is right along the timber
that goes up the center of the screen there,
that's the ceiling planking, so the inside
of the hull of the ship.
You see those holes that are evenly spaced and going up?
Those are salt channels.
In this age,
they would have
created a brine
within the hold in between the outer hull planking
and the ceiling planking
or the planking on the inside of the ship.
Then that was believed to pickle the wood,
so or preserve it.
This particular ship only was around for a year.
It sailed up until 1875,
and in, I think it was November of 1875,
it slipped its rudder
while off of Twin Rivers Point, Rawley Point.
Before they could set anchor, it came aground.
Again, they sent tugs.
They tried to relieve the vessel
from the quicksand it was stuck in,
and they were unable to, so they did some salvage.
We did go out, and we did a full survey.
It's amazingly beautiful.
I don't know if you've seen some of the other presentations
I've given, but what do you notice in particular?
What don't you notice in particular on this vessel?
Mussels.
No mussels.
That's like in 10 feet.
That post, like from the sand to the top of the post,
probably eight feet, ten feet there.
That much sand has moved out of this area,
because mussels will colonize
on these exposed surfaces
in just a season, and we see none that's here.
This looks very pristine.
Kind of crazy, they took all of the rigging.
I guess they decided not to salvage,
or they tangled it when they started pulling it up,
and they balled it all up,
and they through it inside the ship.
It kind of is there.
We couldn't get into the forecastle,
so up forward to see if there's anything there,
but I believe if more sand moves,
that might be a really cool place to look.
The missing part of the port side
is probably still buried under the sand there.
Everything we do is with volunteers,
so we worked our volunteers a lot this year.
We actually had,
four of those last three vessels, we were out.
We had money,
grant money from University of Wisconsin
Sea Grant Institute to look at the S.C. Baldwin,
which is also off Rawley Point,
but it's in about 75 feet of water,
and so it's sort of away from shore.
For three days of the survey of the S.C. Baldwin,
we had really strong winds,
which there was a small-craft advisory for open water,
but because we were inside the point
and because we were so close to shore,
we had amazingly flat conditions
that were in there,
so we were very fortunate
to be able to sneak these surveys in.
Caitlin didn't do a good job with that tape.
Yeah, don't notice that.
(laughs)
I hope you can see why we think this area is so special.
There's a huge potential for discovering shipwrecks.
We know of, what, 176 shipwrecks in Wisconsin waters,
and there were 750 known losses?
You have pretty good odds in your favor,
if you want to take up shipwreck hunting
and you have a little bit of care
to be able to do some of the research
to look for some of these,
you might be pretty successful.
Our website is WisconsinShipwrecks.org.
I'm with the State Historical Society and we're in the
Maritime Preservation Program.
We run this site jointly with University of Wisconsin
Sea Grant Institute.
They've been our partners for 25 years
of the 28 years of our program.
This has information on all of the shipwrecks
that I've just shown you and more.
It also has information or as much as we can find
on those 750 losses.
We've tried to get all that updated.
We're adding information every day onto this thing.
It also has information on all of
the other maritime features of the state,
lighthouses, historic piers,
and anything that we can come up with
that we can stick in here to make it
more meaningful to everyone.
That's what I have for you tonight.
Thank you very much.
(applause)