On May 4, 1891, when hurricane-force winds and waves raged on Lake Superior, the crew of the barge-schooner “Atlanta” left the sunken ship. Six men and one woman, a cook, clung to their lifeboat for nine hours, fighting at the oars to get her to the Michigan coast.
As they neared shore, the lifeboat capsized within sight of a distant rescue patrol, who mistook it for a tree trunk bobbing in rough water, according to archived news reports. Six crew members managed to get back into the boat, but it capsized again. Only two men survived.
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society said this month that the wreck of the USS Atlanta has been found after it went undetected in the cold depths of the lake for more than a century. The announcement revived the story of how Atlanta’s crew fought for their lives on the world’s largest freshwater lake.
“Suddenly our cameras were on it,” Bruce Lynn, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, said in an interview. “We were the first human eyes to look at it since that dramatic moment. I almost jumped out of my chair.”
Lake Superior, which also borders Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Canada, has historically been crossed by shipping lanes. The high volume of traffic meant collisions, which meant hundreds of ships sank, turning the deepest part of the lake into a maritime graveyard ready to be discovered.
In 2021, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, the non-profit organization that runs the museum, had its best season for finding wrecks in 2021, helped by good weather and side-scan sonar that sends and receives acoustic pulses that help make a map. seabed and detection of underwater objects. It found nine shipwrecks, including Atlanta, the most in any season, after towing sonar 2,500 miles, said Darryl Ertel, the society’s director of maritime operations.
Hundreds of wrecks are estimated to lie in the nearly 32,000-square-mile lake, many of them near Whitefish Point on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which Atlanta’s crew desperately tried to reach with their lifeboat.
Last July, the Society’s researchers dragged a sonar reticle across the lake. They found a feature 650 feet deep that they could not immediately identify and marked it for future research.
Atlanta slowly made itself felt.
Mr Lynn returned with the team in August. The weather was calm. They lowered a remote-controlled device into the water. As his camera zoomed in, a ship came into view, curls glistening in the clear water. (There are no invasive zebra mussels in Lake Superior that cover shipwrecks in other Great Lakes.)
The letters in the ship’s name read “Atlanta”.
“It was a target we found earlier, but we weren’t sure exactly what it was,” Mr Lynn said. “You never know until you see a smoking gun. Here is the nameplate. He stated without any vagueness: “This is what I am.”
The shipwrecks of Lake Superior are intertwined with history. In 1918, as World War I drew to a close, two minesweepers built in Canada for France sank, killing dozens of sailors. In 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the largest freighters on the Great Lakes, sank in the snow with 29 men on board without sounding a distress signal, becoming a cultural legend thanks to Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting ballad.
According to local historian Fred Stonehouse, the Atlanta’s voyage was typical of the era of the Industrial Revolution, when schooner barges carried iron ore and coal across Lake Superior.
About 550 shipwrecks have been found in the lake, and up to 40 ships remain missing. Their travels were recorded by officials in the locks – the passages connecting the lakes – and in newspaper reports about the movement of ships. “Sailed into a crevasse in the lake” is a phrase you often saw a century ago, Mr. Stonehouse said.
According to him, sometimes they found bodies or debris.
“It’s really about solving historical mysteries,” Mr. Stonehouse said.
The discovery of Atlanta, about 35 miles offshore, has intrigued explorers due to first-hand accounts of survivors. In early May 1891, the Soo Democrat weekly newspaper published a series of reports about the ill-fated journey and rescue.
The 172-foot Atlanta, loaded with coal, left Buffalo, New York, for Duluth, Minnesota. On May 3, 1891, she encountered a light breeze. During the night, “one of the most powerful hurricanes raged, sweeping over the greatest of all lakes,” Soo Democrat reported. The storm hit the Atlanta, which was being towed under sail by another ship, the Wilhelm.
The towline broke, and the Atlanta began to take on water, which the crew tried to prevent with a pump.
At 9 am on May 4, the ship with 10 feet of water in the hull was abandoned. Due to a severe storm, the crew remained in the lifeboat for nine hours. About 200 yards off Whitefish Point, a lifeboat capsized in front of a US Coast Guard forerunner, US Life Saving Service, who mistook it for a tree trunk rolling through the waves.
All but one member of the Atlanta’s crew returned noisily to the lifeboat. After driving another 100 yards, it rolled over again.
“It was here that the struggle for life flared up most fiercely,” the newspaper reported.
The newspaper reported that the remaining crew members were seen swaying in the water before drowning under the waves. Two of them, identified as John Pickel and “Nellie” Waite, were pulled out of the surf “more dead than alive” and were “all that’s left to tell a story of struggle that dwarfs fantasy in its gruesome detail.”
Atlanta will remain untouched. Michigan law makes it illegal to salvage shipwrecks, but Mr. Lynn said it would also be like raiding a burial ground.
“It’s like graves,” he said. He added that finding Atlanta was “fortunate. There were survivors who can tell us what happened.”