John Odin Jensen - Stories from the Wreckage: A Great Lakes Maritime History Inspired by Shipwrecks

Stories from the Wreckage

STORIES
from the
WRECKAGE

A GREAT LAKES MARITIME HISTORY INSPIRED BY SHIPWRECKS

JOHN ODIN JENSEN

Featuring the Photography and Fieldwork of the Wisconsin Historical Society Maritime Preservation and Archaeology Program

WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS

Published by the Wisconsin Historical Society Press

Publishers since 1855

The Wisconsin Historical Society helps people connect to the past by collecting, preserving, and sharing stories. Founded in 1846, the Society is one of the nations finest historical institutions.

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2019 by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin

E-book edition 2019

Publication of this book was made possible in part by funding from the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

Photographs identified with WHI or WHS are from the Societys collections; address requests to reproduce these photos to the Visual Materials Archivist at the Wisconsin Historical Society, 816 State Street, Madison, WI 53706.

The following cover and front matter photos are by Tamara Thomsen: front cover, Home shipwreck, WHI IMAGE ID 119678; page ii, Australasia shipwreck, WHI IMAGE ID 141640; page vi, Wisconsin Historical Society diver, WHI IMAGE ID 141641; and back cover, Wisconsin Historical Society diver, WHI IMAGE ID 140132, and historical photo of the Australasia, C. Patrick Labadie Collection / Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, Alpena, MI.

Designed by Percolator

23 22 21 20 19 1 2 3 4 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Jensen, John Odin, author.

Title: Stories from the wreckage : a Great Lakes maritime history inspired by shipwrecks / John Odin Jensen.

Description: Madison, WI : Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018049438 (print) | LCCN 2018058801 (ebook) | ISBN 9780870209031 (ebook) | ISBN 9780870209024 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: ShipwrecksGreat Lakes (North America)History. | NavigationGreat Lakes (North America)History. | Great Lakes Region (North America)History. | BISAC: TRANSPORTATION / Ships & Shipbuilding / History. | HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI). | TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Marine & Naval.

Classification: LCC G525 (ebook) | LCC G525 .J47 2019 (print) | DDC 917.704dc23

To my father, Captain James Nordland Jensen, and all my other shipmates from Alaska and the Great Lakes who have sailed on the eternal voyage but taught me so much before they departed.

CONTENTS

The famous schooner Rouse Simmons foundered on November 23, 1912, in Lake Michigan near Two Rivers, Wisconsin, while bound for Chicago with a cargo of Christmas trees. An estimated sixteen crew members and passengers lost their lives. Local divers place a Christmas tree on the bow once a year. TAMARA THOMSEN/WHI IMAGE ID 120451

Heartbreaking and often tragic events, shipwrecks have occurred since people built the first rafts from reeds, sticks, or animal skins. Although common in history, shipwrecks affect us in deep psychological and even mystical ways. We do not build museums devoted to automobile accidents or airplane crashes. Yet maritime museums feature shipwreck stories wherever mariners in large numbers faced angry seas and deadly coasts. As narrative events, shipwrecks feature high drama with epic struggles against elemental forces of nature, tales of individual heroism or cowardice, disaster or deliverance, life or death. This book includes several such stories, some of them highly detailed.

However, rather than a history of shipwrecks, this book is a maritime history inspired by shipwrecks. Beyond the final disaster or abandonment, each shipwreck is also the consequence and the convergence point of larger patterns of historical events, factors, processes, and social networks. In some respects, shipwrecks are like the individual blocks that make up the complex patchwork quilt of Great Lakes history. While many blocks look similar and others unique, the completed quilt projects a larger design illustrated by the relationships of its many parts. In this book, I have approached Wisconsin shipwrecks as component blocks in a larger unfinished historical patchwork, one that illustrates the contributions of the Great Lakes to the American maritime experience, the influences of Atlantic maritime culture on midwestern history, and the economic and technological changes of industrialization that slowly separated Great Lakes maritime technology and culture from its oceanic origins. This is a shipwrecks book, but one that also explores the personal ambitions, cultural influences, and innovations of a collection of shipbuilders, ship owners, and entrepreneurial captains representative of the type who helped to transform the Great Lakes from an isolated western maritime frontier to an industrial maritime frontier. Among their actions were the building and the wrecking of thousands of ships.

The foundations of this book are the more than six hundred wooden ships lost or abandoned in the Great Lakes waters of Wisconsin and the three decades of marine archaeology work carried out by the Wisconsin Historical Society, a state agency headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. While important underwater archaeological studies have taken place throughout the Great Lakes region, Wisconsin is notable for the consistency of its pubic efforts to study and preserve its historic shipwrecks. For three decades, the Wisconsin Historical Society has spearheaded a systematic and unbroken program of maritime and underwater historic preservation protection and public outreach. I began my career as a historian and underwater archaeologist during the formative years of this program and, while I have since moved on, I have retained a strong professional connection and personal commitment to its public mission. This book is an effort to share what I have learned from the study of Wisconsin shipwrecks about the Great Lakes region and the wider maritime world as it developed between 1820 and 1920.

The stories that unfold in the following chapters read principally as traditional historical narratives; however, they emerged through research that combined historical sources with questions, insights, and data inspired and provided by the archaeological record of shipwrecks. When the Wisconsin Historical Society began the active protection and study of historic shipwrecks in the late 1980s, the body of scholarship work on Great Lakes ship design and shipbuilding methods was thin. For most of the nineteenth century, wooden shipbuilders did not work from formal ship plans. Their work was based on collective knowledge, skills, and practices that had evolved in Atlantic maritime communities over several centuries. In spite of this lack of formal design work, shipbuilding innovations, small and large, were the norm on the Great Lakes during this period. They were tested, refined, accepted, or abandoned through the observed performance of the specific ships and in response to rapidly changing conditions of a westward moving and industrializing North America. The proof was in the pudding and not the recipeand while the recipes might never have been recorded, the end results can still be found underwater.