“It is more of a game, such as solve the puzzle.” That is the line, given by old wreck hunter Paul Ehrenreich, which best suits the Great Lakes of all the metaphors. The deep cold basins of Lake Michigan conserve timber, and ironwork and human decisions in a patience almost archival then conceal them once more in darkness, silt and overgrowth. The steamer Lac La Belle of the 19th century, so long pursued in pieces of rumor and logbook conjecture has been the most recent testimony that engineering history still could be as well as told.
The ship entered the world as a Cleveland-constructed passenger steamer in 1864 that had a 217-foot (66-meter) hull and machinery that was characteristic of an age that was still struggling with the transition between sail and steam. It sailed between Lake Superior and made a mark in the inland seas: its design was of the early type of propeller-driven Great Lakes vessels to carry twin stacks of steam, the symbol of strong force, swiftness, and a degree of prestige. But such was never its smooth sail. The ship was rebuilt after a sinking caused by a collision in the St. Clair River in 1866, then refitted as a bulk freighter, an engineering resurrection that remodeled luxury as usefulness without losing the bones.
That re-invention determined its last journey. It was 53 people on board and a varied cargo, which reads the story of a floating inventory of local industry barley and flour, pork and whiskey, feed and sundries, when Lac La Belle, leaving Milwaukee on an October evening in 1872, was bound for Grand Haven. The ship started to take water on board after two hours and returned. The lake did not cooperate. As the gale winds increased, waves moved on board forcing out the boilers that powered the vessel, and leaving it to the wind and waves to propel it. Lifeboats were lowered about the time of daylight; one sunk before reaching the shore and eight persons lost in the capsizing of a boat. The place of the wreck has defied precise location during decades and that indecision became part of its legend with the searchers.
Ehorn, 80, had been in shipwreck ever since his teenage years and had been attempting to locate Lac La Belle since 1965. The breakthrough was eventually achieved by reducing the search grid using a clue by both author and wreck hunter Ross Richardson who was on the area using side-scan sonar. The discovery itself was fast the sonar pass found the ship in about two hours of searching, but the overall work was almost six decades of doggedness, poring over records, and measuring up against a lake that is most often unresponsive but the larger task was decades of tenacity, decades of reading records, and months of triangulation.
It is an engineer of a surprise what the divers recorded upon being underwater. Although the ship ended violently, it is straight and structurally sound at the hull. The cabins have been removed above, but the interior is of oak, which Ehorn has said is in good condition, and the surface is covered with quagga mussels another intruder that has become a new factor in the maintenance of the underwater structures. Cold weather slows decay in the Great Lakes, yet biology continues to set its own time and schedule and the scramble to chronicle wrecks is increasingly incorporating concerns about mussels modifying surfaces and increasing disintegration.
The following course of action does not concern treasure as much as it does measurement. Ehorn has outlined the idea to create a 3D photogrammetry replica, or an in-depth digital document, which would be able to record the layout, the damage, and the features that survived of the wreck prior to the passage of time, currents and other organisms inhabiting them, altering them further. Such documentation creates permanence in the popular consciousness, a method of investigating design decisions, failure modes, and working life, without lifting a plank, in a lake that is thought to contain 6,000 to 10,000 shipwrecks.
The process by which Lac La Belle was brought back into sight can be called a resurrection of the past not quite so much as a better drawing of it a more comfortable or commercial or commercialized object, and at last archived by the depth and now made legible once more by sonar and light.
