There wasn’t supposed to be any family up there, but we were taking no chances. I removed his mask and Murphy stopped every ten feet so he could squeeze the victim’s chest and vent the fluids. In the green gloom of the reservoir water, he appeared to be exhaling a black smoke. We knew its true color would be dark red at the surface and nobody needed to see that.
So we brought him home. We were right to prepare him for the surface because though his family wasn’t allowed near our boat, they were five minutes away at the marina. You think you can steel yourself for a father and brother’s grief, but you can’t.
“Jesus, he’s laying there like a big stiff mackerel, can’t we do something about that?” Nordby was upset that we couldn’t make him more presentable but the law enforcement specialists just shook their heads.
“Can’t move anything till the coroner examines him.” I was glad we had taken the steps we had underwater, he could have looked a lot worse.
When the flurry of ambulance sounds, death bureaucracy, and grief-stricken moans of the bereaved were behind us, we began to process the experience ourselves, each in our own way. The good news is that our efforts brought closure to a family’s trauma. They could begin grieving without the added stress of not having the mortal shell of their loved one to grieve over. This, I have come to learn, is very important.
The young diver is a rubber-suited symbol to me, a sad statement about man entangled in the web of his own dreams. But as divers aren’t made to last forever, neither are dams. As some unfortunates living downstream of older dams in the United States have found out, the river always wins eventually. Until then, we ply over water on fiberglass hulls where once, had we wings, we would have ridden the wind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ISLE ROYALE: MISSION IMPOSSIBLE
Isle Royale National Park is an island wilderness area forty-five miles long and two to six miles wide. It’s known for its wolf and moose and rugged backpacking trails and for being one of the most visually striking, yet least visited, areas of the national park system. Though its original founders were not thinking of shipwrecks when it was set aside as a park, they could not have designed a better underwater museum had they tried.
Ten major shipwrecks lay sprinkled around the island dating from some of the earliest steam navigation on the lake to as late as the 1940s. They include wooden and metal passenger/package freighters, bulk haulers, and passenger vessels. There are also the remains of a dozen or so small boats built by local craftsman—a sort of vernacular version of naval architecture as interesting to archeologists and historians as some of the larger vessels.
The fresh, frigid water acts like a deep freeze, ensuring spectacular preservation of organic remains. The wooden vessels at Isle Royale have been disarticulated from storm, ice heaving, and salvage tugs. Some of the metal steamers are almost totally intact. The water below fifty feet down never varies in temperature. It’s 34 degrees Fahrenheit—two degrees above freezing in midsummer as well as under the ice during the long winter. Along much of the shoreline of the archipelago the ice shelves up in noisy, crusty piles, grinding against the rocks until spring. This causes ice gouging as deep as forty feet on some of the sites.
As we began to focus on the Isle Royale expedition I felt both increasing excitement and anxiety. Jack Morehead had been superintendent of Isle Royale for several years, including 1978, when he came to take part in one of our dive workshops in Texas. He regaled us with photographs of the Isle’s extraordinary shipwrecks and impressed upon us their value as both historic and recreational resources. He made it plain the park staff knew too little about them and intrigued us with how challenging it would be to document them fully.
He showed us slides taken by sport divers and park staff of intact vessels in deep, cold water—other wreck sites seemed like hopelessly confused piles of ship structure where more than one vessel had come to grief. “The intact shallower ones will take a lot of work . . . . The deep ones and these jumbles of timbers here, I expect they will be impossible.”
Larry and I, entwined in Jack’s silver-tongued web, studied the images and flinched in concert on hearing the word “impossible.” Jack smiled and went on. At breakfast the next morning he asked what we thought. While Murphy quietly poked eggs and grits around his plate, I mulled his question for a while and replied, “You get the money, Jack, and we’ll not only do the doable ones, we’ll take a closer look at them there ‘impossible’ ones.”
Jack left Isle Royale shortly after his visit to Texas to become superintendent of the Everglades but not before he had secured the funding for a full-scale submerged cultural resources survey. It was to be a multiyear core project for the newly christened SCRU. Shorter, one-time commitments like Kosrae and Biscayne could be fit around work at Isle Royale. Doug Scovill, NPS chief anthropologist and our chief Washington office supporter, agreed with the choice. It would involve a resource that was recognized in the diving community as world class; the job was a high priority to the park manager and it couldn’t be mistaken for a summer vacation. No one would question the seriousness of a park research team that cut its teeth on the ships of Isle Royale.
The complexity of the science and the problem of depth were issues with which we already had considerable experience. But then, there was the numbing cold, to be endured for long working dives. This park closed for six months of the year because it was too ice-bound to reasonably support visitation. I had dealt with cold water before in deep reservoirs, even worked diving for oysters under ice in Maryland, but one taste of Great Lakes cold and I knew it was going to be a major factor in everything we did at Isle Royale.
On my first visit I dived in Lake Michigan with my friend Jim Quinn. We explored the remains of some wooden schooners, but I had little recollection of the wreck sites—my overriding memory was the bone-piercing chill. Wearing a standard quarter-inch-inch thick wet suit with hood and gloves, I had the impression I was swimming in a huge punch bowl full of crushed ice with an icicle thrust through my nose into my brain—a condition that compromises the quality of one’s concentration.
Consequently, I resolved to look closely at the use of the latest dry suits available in the industry. By the time the Isle Royale project began in 1980, I had my entire team fitted with “unisuits,” the state of the art in underwater thermal protection, manufactured in Sweden. These were bulky, neoprene dive suits that permitted wearing of thermal underwear. They had neck and wrist seals, which kept water out, and a hose from the regulator first stage was fitted to the suit, allowing the diver to inject air in as the depth increased and the ambient air in the suit compressed.
Aside from cold and depth, many of these wrecks were intact, which would mean there would be a significant call for under-ceiling diving. The reason for the presence of these more recent vessels is the special nature of navigation problems on the Lakes.
Called “inland seas,” the Great Lakes can be particularly treacherous. Lake Superior is known for violent storms that create short-period waves highly stressful to ship hulls. The water is cold enough year round that survival time for an unprotected swimmer is usually measured in minutes. Much of the coastline, if reached by a desperate survivor, would be too steep to allow egress from the water.
The size of Superior is another problem, both too large and too small for safe navigation—large enough to permit great wave height and compound the difficulty of finding vessels in distress, yet too small to provide adequate sea room for vessels to maneuver against high seas and ride out a storm’s fury. Bitter cold accompanies most Great Lakes storms and freshwater spray freezes faster than salt water, permitting buildup of huge ice castles on the superstructure of ships. This makes them topheavy and more subject to capsizing.
Even after the advent of radar and various other ship-positioning and navigation aides, Lake Superior was considered by knowledgeable skippers one of the most dangerous bodies of water anywhere. I recall reading a reference to the Great Lakes while perusing the log of
a ship captain in the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. The coast pilot refers to the Aleutians as having the worst weather in the world, so it interested me when this man wrote he had “never seen anything worse than the Aleutians except, perhaps, for my years in Lake Superior.”
We first put our heads underwater at Isle Royale on the site of the Monarch, an 1890-built wooden freighter that slammed into an area called the Palisades during a snowstorm in 1906. The perfectly preserved wreck timbers were spread out below us as if they were part of a giant ship-building kit some kid had finally lost patience with and had walked away from.
It was a good place to start because some portions of the wreck were very shallow. Near the surface in this area, the temperature shot up to almost 50 degrees Fahrenheit in late summer. Larry gasped when he hit the water. “This is the warm one, eh?”
“Roger.”
Toni, already swimming around on the surface, looking down at the spread of massive ship timbers disappearing below her into the depths, heard Larry’s comment, and added, “This is the easy one, eh?”
“Roger.” She didn’t look convinced. “Ole Uncle Jack says this is only one wreck. It gets real complicated on Rock of Ages reef where there’s two intermingled.”
“Could of fooled me. Looks like about twelve wrecks here.”
We found this to be the reaction of many visiting archeologists over the years. They usually had experienced only much smaller, older vessels in saltwater with significantly less surviving structure. I splashed in beside her, and the three of us began to descend, following the filet-of-ship, its apparent backbone leading us on a forty-five-degree angle toward the bottom. It’s a good thing we had the bottom to orient us; flattened pieces of ship disappearing on each side of us in fifty-foot visibility seemed to have no rhyme or reason. The good news was that we could see everything—it wasn’t covered with silt. But that was also the bad news—these conditions made the huge site seem overwhelming.
Weightless but bulky in our canvas and neoprene dry suits, we moved with little effort as long as our movements were slow and deliberate. As we cruised down to the apparent remains of the fantail, or stern of the ship, we were hitting seventy feet on the depth gauge where the water temperature had that classic 34-degree Lake Superior nip. Such cold greatly limits the useful bottom time of divers. The same factors of cold and depth that defined our limitations also, however, enhanced the archeological potential of the sites. Wood-boring teredo worms and most of the bacteria that attack the fabric of shipwrecks in warmer, saltwater environments are absent in these inland seas. Lack of light penetration at depth enhances preservation even more.
The oaken ribs or frames of the Monarch have so much structural integrity , I bent a ten-penny nail pounding it into a timber for a survey datum point. Larry wanted to remove a wood core and brought along a device we used for that purpose on land sites in the southwest. Within minutes, his vigorous efforts resulted in a bent, and then broken, tool. I showed my partners leather boots in Vincent de Pauw store condition except for the cotton thread that had rotted even in this deep freeze. The shoes, seemingly sound, disarticulated in our hands when we lifted them from the bottom for inspection. Each section of leather was pliable and intact but the stitching that gave the shoe form was gone.
We surfaced from the dive and began reconnoitering other wreck sites around the island. One particularly mangled metal vessel was the Algoma, on which forty-five people died in 1885, the greatest tragedy on record for Lake Superior. In shallower portions of the site we found long stretches of scoured granite bottom. Toni swam below me, tracing her finger over streaks of red iron-oxide staining the rock where metal ship structure had been dragged along the bottom by the heaving ice, and rudely deposited as twisted piles of debris in deeper water.
Bolts and rivets torn from tortured metal were wedged in cracks in the basaltic lake bed. As Jerry Livingston and I swam over the Glenlyon, he clutched his everpresent slate, trailing a mechanical pencil held by a piece of surgical tubing. I felt as if we were medical examiners visiting the scene of a violent crime.
Then, in stark contrast to the mechanical mayhem caused by the Lake’s dynamics on the shallower sites, there was the pristine condition of those ghosts of a maritime past that lay a few feet deeper. A light rain of particles suspended in the fresh, cold water slowly but relentlessly rained down on what seemed a fantastical underwater theme park. Here the massive anchors of a bulk freighter hung heavily from their hawse pipes, there we saw a ship’s telegraph and binnacle on the bridge. On the most modern vessel, the 1947 bulk freighter Emperor, Larry Murphy and I swam past staterooms. Mattresses in bunks 130 feet below the surface would never know the warmth and weight of another tired voyager. This really was swimming into history; Jack Morehead hadn’t exaggerated a bit.
Most of our work at Isle Royale involved mapping and photo-documenting the sites, not excavation. Our intent was to inventory what was on the sites, then make them even more accessible to recreational divers. We created maps for diving visitors and installed mooring systems so they could safely dive without damaging the vessels with anchors. You can’t be a good steward of a resource you don’t understand. Jack acknowledged he had as much responsibility to care for these shipwrecks as he did the moose and wolves of Isle Royale. He already had a major research program in place to monitor the predator-prey relationships of the latter.
Sometimes, mapping was necessary at Isle Royale simply to tell apart the remains of different ships. A case in point is the site where the wooden bulk freighter Chisholm, in 1898, joined the wooden side-wheeler Cumberland, which had been there since 1871. The wreckage of the later screw vessel seemed hopelessly intermixed with similar wooden features of the earlier ship. Over a quarter mile of wreckage—this was the site Jack had specifically referred to as “impossible” to map and interpret.
Also in the impossible category for systematic recording and documentation were ships like the Kamloops because of their extreme depth. We had our first run-in with the Kamloops’s site only several days into that first field season in 1980, and we didn’t even have to get wet for the experience.
We leased a tugboat, the LL Smith from the University of Wisconsin, to ensure we had plenty of vessel under us in case things got rough. After reconnoitering a number of sites underwater, we decided to do some side-scan sonar imaging of several of these deeper wrecks. After scanning vessels on the north side, including Monarch and Emperor, we headed for Kamloops Point. Many think a shallow reef in the area was the cause of the Kamloops’s demise.
Our plan was to find the wreck and the reef and do a brief assessment dive. We succeeded nicely at imaging the wreck. But the problem with towed instruments that tell you clearly about the bottom where you’ve been is that they are mute regarding the bottom where you are heading. Mesmerized with watching the sonar image of the ship take dramatic form on the maroon and white paper, emerging still damp from its birth in the sonar console, we felt ourselves come to a grinding halt.
Larry, Toni, side-scan operator Gary Kozak, and I, all in an aft cabin with the console, looked up, mouths agape. We could hear yelling in the pilot house and Jerry Livingston’s feet pounding up the deck from the stern where he had been monitoring the cable to the towfish. Murphy remarked matter-of-factly, “Uh, I believe that would be the reef.”
At midnight, under a full moon, we were sitting hard aground on Kamloops Reef. But we were not preparing for a dive; we were preparing to abandon ship. The lake was absolutely flat but famous for changing moods in minutes. While we waited for a park tug to scramble in response to our radio call and come to our aid, we had plenty of time to reflect on the fate of those who, over the past 150 years, grounded their vessels and didn’t have access to niceties such as park radios.
Soon the park maintenance staff stationed at Amygdaloid Ranger Station came chugging to the rescue. The skipper of the LL Smith only thought he was distraught before this merry band showed up. We had obviously roused them from their ha
rd-earned rest after they had indulged their prerogative for some off-duty consumption of alcohol. It wasn’t that they weren’t competent and in control of their faculties, it was just that they were enjoying the occasion far too much. They couldn’t get into a spirit appropriate to the gravity of the situation. The hooting and hollering and thick Upper Peninsula accents had an unnerving effect on the captain.
About 2 A.M. our heroes succeeded in securing a line to our stern and, with the Osprey, their “little tug that could,” were hauling for all they were worth to free us. The helmsman and his deckhand were sober as judges, but they brought the Amygdaloid cheering squad that definitely wasn’t. Truthfully, by this time, the SCRU Team had benefitted from the generosity of the Amygdaloid lads. A case of Moosehead lager helped us grow considerably more relaxed about our plight.
The hull beneath us scraped about for quite some time on the rock reef from the efforts of the tug. Occasionally we heeled over at a crazy angle, and our research instruments came tumbling out of lipped shelves that were designed not to let things tumble out in heavy seas. “Geee whiz,” said Jerry Livingston.“We’re gonna go over if they tip us broadside anymore!”
Quickly strapping down the most expensive and delicate of our gear and letting the remainder of our equipment fend for itself, Jerry and I ran to the back deck. There, the skipper and Larry and Toni were helping reset the heavy hawser line for another burst of power from the little tug. The latter was backing off from the last pull and drifting towards our bow for some reason. I saw ranger Ken Vrana, mumbling under his breath, walk to the side of the Smith that was opposite the towline and lower the Moosehead into our rubber dinghy While my mind was processing all this, I heard a new series of war whoops from the direction of the Osprey and here they came out of the dark, engine whining, revved to the max. Now , we all knew what the new strategy was, and I could see Jerry Livingston heading to join Vrana while Murphy laid out flat on the deck. Our skipper could only say, “Lord, they’re gonna try to jerk . . . ” and he crouched into a stoop as the tug roared by on its way to try the last resort maneuver: using sheer momentum, to jerk a sixty-foot tug off the rocks.
Submerged Page 15