Explorers discover wreckage of cargo ship that sank in Lake Superior more than 130 years ago
Twenty years before the Titanic changed maritime history, another ship touted as the next great technological feat set sail on the Great Lakes.
The Western Reserve was one of the first all-steel cargo ships to traverse the lakes. Built to break speed records, the 300-foot (91-meter) freighter dubbed 'the inland greyhound' by newspapers was supposed to be one of the safest ships afloat. Owner Peter Minch was so proud of her that he brought his wife and young children aboard for a summer joyride in August 1892.
As the ship entered Lake Superior's Whitefish Bay between Michigan and Canada on Aug. 30, a gale came up. With no cargo, the ship was floating high in the water. The storm battered it until it cracked in half. Twenty-seven people perished, including the Minch family. The only survivor was wheelsman Harry W. Stewart, who swam a mile (1.6 kilometers) to shore after his lifeboat capsized.
For almost 132 years, the lake hid the wreckage. In July, explorers from the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society pinpointed the Western Reserve off Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The society announced the discovery Saturday at the annual Ghost Ships Festival in Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
'There's a number of concurrent stories that make this important,' the society's executive director, Bruce Lynn, said in a telephone interview. 'Most ships were still wooden. It was a technologically advanced ship. They were kind of a famous family at the time. You have this new ship, considered one of the safest on the lake, new tech, a big, big ship. (The discovery) is another way for us to keep this history alive.'
Darryl Ertel, the society's marine operations director, and his brother, Dan Ertel, spent more than two years looking for the Western Reserve. On July 22, they set out on the David Boyd, the society's research vessel. Heavy ship traffic that day forced them to alter their course, though, and search an area adjacent to their original search grid, Lynn said.
The brothers towed a side-scanning sonar array behind their ship. Side sonar scans starboard and port, providing a more expansive picture of the bottom than sonar mounted beneath a ship. About 60 miles (97 kilometers) northwest of Whitefish Point on the Upper Peninsula, they picked up a line with a shadow behind it in 600 feet (182 meters) of water. They dialed up the resolution and spotted a large ship broken in two with the bow resting on the stern.
Eight days later, the brothers returned to the site along with Lynn and other researchers. They deployed a submersible drone that returned clear images of a portside running light that matched a Western Reserve's starboard running light that had washed ashore in Canada after the ship went down. That light was the only artifact recovered from the ship.
'That was confirmation day,' said Lynn, the society's executive director.
Darryl Ertel said that discovery gave him chills — and not in a good way. 'Knowing how the 300-foot Western Reserve was caught in a storm this far from shore made a uneasy feeling in the back of my neck,' he said in a society news release. 'A squall can come up unexpectedly…anywhere, and anytime.'
Lynn said that the ship was 'pretty torn up' but the wreckage appeared well-preserved in the frigid fresh water.
The Great Lakes have claimed thousands of ships since the 1700s. Perhaps the most famous is the Edmund Fitzgerald, an ore carrier that got caught in a storm in November 1975 and went down off Whitefish Point within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of the Western Reserve. All hands were killed. The incident was immortalized in the Gordon Lightfoot song, 'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.'
Assistant Wisconsin State Climatologist Ed Hopkins said that storm season on the lakes begins in November, when warm water meets cold air and winds blow unimpeded across open water, generating waves as high as 30 feet (9 meters). The lakes at that time can be more dangerous than the oceans because they're smaller, making it harder for ships to out-maneuver the storms, he said.
But it's rare to see such gales form in August, Hopkins said. A National Weather Service report called the storm that sank the Western Reserve a 'relatively minor gale,' he noted.
A Wisconsin Marine Historical Society summary of the Western Reserve sinking noted that the maritime steel age had just begun and the Western Reserve's hull might have been weak and couldn't handle the bending and twisting in the storm. The steel also becomes brittle in low temperatures like those of Great Lakes waters. The average water temperature in Lake Superior in late August is about 60 degrees (16 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The summary notes the Titanic used the same type of steel as the Western Reserve and that it may have played a role in speeding up the luxury liner's sinking.
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'There is a danger in the kind of cult of personality, particularly the tech bro, 'move fast and break things,'' Monroe said. 'When other people's lives are in the balance, I think we should all take a step back and be careful about that. It's one thing to put unmanned spacecraft into space, but you're taking money to provide an expedition.' One has to wonder, given all the dissent, given the fact that the sub would produce loud cracking sounds with each descent (which Rush called, unscientifically, the carbon fiber 'seasoning' with use) – did the CEO actually believe it was safe? 'I'm not in Stockton's mind, so I don't know,' said Monroe. But he took into account Rush's public personality as a maverick, the media tailwinds in his favor. 'When you say you're going to go to Titanic in a new submersible that no one's ever done before, and the sound of your own voice resonates year after year while you're trying to figure out how to do it, I think there's a pressure that builds, that suggests 'I have to do this.'' What is clear, from numerous interviews, was that 'if you went against the boss, there were going to be repercussions.' Lochridge knows this well; after he filed a whistleblower complaint with the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), OceanGate sued him for improperly disclosing confidential information to regulators. The legal costs, and Osha's protracted investigation, forced him to withdraw his complaint, ending what could have been the one regulatory oversight on the company. OceanGate continued apace; the film lingers only briefly on the dive in 2022 which seemed to damage the sub, even according to the company's own 'real-time monitoring system'. Titan imploded on its next dive to Titanic depths a year later, after several aborted attempts due to inclement weather. Though the 'delamination' of the carbon fiber hull is the presumed cause, the US Coast Guard's official written report, including recommendations for the prevention of a similar tragedy, has yet to be publicly released. 'I don't know what those recommendations could be,' said Monroe, 'but you would think they would have to do with how to run an experimental submersible when offering it to the public.' Such as, perhaps, oversight, or a healthier sense of skepticism when the only safety assurances come from the company itself. Rush 'believed in the ethos of move fast and break things. Rules don't apply when you want to change the way things work,' said Monroe. 'That's dangerous when other people's lives are at stake. There are certain rules that do apply, like the rules of physics, the rules of science – these rules do apply to all of us.' Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is now available on Netflix
