When Shipwreck Hunters Explored Lake Michigan, They Made A Startling Discovery In The Deep

The two men leading this particular expedition were Ken Merryman and Jerry Eliason, both highly experienced on the waters of the Great Lakes. Friendship between the two stretches back many years, and they’d been working together to track down underwater wreckage for more than two decades. It’s a partnership that’s certainly produced many fascinating results during that time.

And both men had high hopes that they’d found something truly significant at the bottom of Lake Michigan on that summer’s day in 2020. They hadn’t chosen the spot to anchor their boat by chance. Plenty of preliminary work had gone into identifying this particular site. The months of painstaking research had included poring over archive materials from the early 20th century.

Some of the material they read was of little help, though. Old reports contradicted each other on key details. But in the end their principal source of information had been old papers from the U.S. Life Saving Service. That was the organization that went on to become the U.S. Coast Guard. And the info its archive put Eliason and Merryman on track to make their amazing discovery in Lake Michigan.

The next step for the two wreck hunters, after their archival research had given them a good idea of where to look, was a little more high-tech. It involved what’s known as side scanning. To do this, you tow a sonar scanner through the water, hitched to your boat. The sound waves create images that can detect if there’s something unusual in the water.

But when Eliason and Merryman went out on to Lake Michigan to start their search, the equipment actually brought more confusion than clarification. While they did find something unidentified in the water, it seemed more likely to be a group of fish than what they were hunting for. They’d have to come back the next day to check it out again. So that’s just what they did. And just as well, since they then uncovered something astonishing.

They’re a fascinating pair these two old salts, Merryman and Eliason. For s start, both were already well past conventional retirement age at the time of our tale in the summer of 2020. Eliason was just a teenager when he started diving in Wisconsin’s lakes back during the mid-1960s. And he was only 15 at the time of his initial Great Lake dive in Superior in 1968.

Confirmation of Eliason’s seemingly unquenchable appetite for wreck dives is confirmed by the fact that he made 700 of them between 1976 and in 1989. But it was in the latter year that a dose of the bends, every diver’s nemesis, put an end to his diving career. And that episode’s a hair-raising tale in its own right.

Eliason was exploring the wreck of S.S. John B. Cowle, a freighter that went down in Lake Superior in 1909 in 200 feet of water with the loss of 14 men. Recounting the experience to the Star Tribune in 2019, Eliason recalled ruefully, “I did that deep diving so often I got sloppy at it.”

The result of Eliason’s lapse of attention was that he ran out of air. Not a great situation when you’re more than 200 feet under the waters of Lake Superior. To avoid drowning, he was left with no choice but to return immediately to the surface. But doing so quickly and skipping 60 minutes of decompression meant a severe case of the bends. That’s a potentially fatal outcome that divers dread.

When Eliason surfaced, he’d lost consciousness and was airlifted straight to hospital in Milwaukee. “They told my wife and son that when you get here, don’t expect him to be alive,” he recalled. Eliason didn’t die, but doctors advised him that he’d be in a wheelchair for life. It’s a tribute to his tenacity that he can still walk, albeit with the aid of a stick.

But even this serious setback didn’t snuff out Eliason’s tireless enthusiasm for shipwrecks. It did change his focus, though. From then on, he concentrated on searching for undiscovered underwater wreckage. And along with his buddy Merryman and other colleagues, he’s had considerable success in that field. The pair have since discovered the lost resting places of many of the hundreds of vessels that have ended up at the bottom of the Great Lakes.

The Star Tribune pointed out that Merryman’s seen by the divers of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society as something of an elder statesman. The group not only searches for lost wrecks but also works to safeguard them. As time passes, wrecks deteriorate and there’s always the threat of looters preying on sunken vessels as well.

But what makes these two men and their colleagues search so painstakingly for lost wrecks? Frederick Stonehouse, who’s written extensively on Great Lakes shipping history, thinks he knows. Speaking to the Star Tribune, he said, “The search for the unknown, that’s what drives them. They get no income from it. They don’t get a bunch of glory. But they do solve the question.”

So how was Eliason and Merryman’s wreck hunt in July 2020 going? As we’ve seen, their side scan sonar had definitely identified an anomaly in the depths of Lake Michigan. But just what it was remained to be seen. There were a few problems with this sonar reading. Problems that meant it didn’t seem likely to be a shipwreck.

Whatever the searchers’ sonar had picked up appeared to be quite far above the bottom of the lake. That’d be a very unlikely position for a sunken ship and was one of the reasons that the wreck hunters thought they might actually have spotted a shoal of fish. As Eliason was later to tell the MLive website, “We couldn’t imagine a wreck being almost 100 feet off the bottom.”

Despite their doubts, Merryman and Eliason still returned to the Lake Michigan site the next day aboard their vessel Heyboy. This time, they were armed with an underwater camera. You’ve probably seen high-budget documentaries about explorers scouring the ocean depths for shipwrecks. They’re generally equipped with sophisticated remote-controlled underwater vehicles mounted with video equipment.

But that’s nothing like the kind of gear that our searchers had at their disposal. Lacking funding money from TV production companies, Merryman and Eliason have to build their own equipment. The self-made video camera they used that day was attached to a 500-foot cable. And while the gizmo did sport rudimentary fins, it still wasn’t capable of changing direction underwater.

Now the wreck hunters lowered their camera into Lake Michigan, maneuvering it across the spot where they’d seen the sonar anomaly the day before. And it turned out they’d hit pay-dirt. The flickering green images on their monitor showed the bow of a ship. “It’s pretty dramatic,” Merryman told the U.S. News website. “It’s speared in – we’re both guessing around 30 to 40 degrees, that it sits into the bottom... And a fair amount of it is buried in the mud.”

The first things they spotted on the monitor were parts of the ship’s railing, which were twisted into strange shapes. In November 2020 Eliason recalled the moment when they sighted the railings. “I call it the hand,” he told Sheboygan Press. “It looked like it was ready to grab the camera.” In fact, that’s what nearly did happen.

The cable attached to the camera became tangled up with the jagged remains of the Pere Marquette’s railings. It was a critical moment since 450 feet of the cable’s entire 500-foot length had already been laid out, leaving little room for maneuver. After a tense ten minutes they managed to release the camera. Then, just to keep things interesting, the cable spool cracked and they had to haul the camera in themselves.

But the searchers had succeeded. From the images captured, they were able to see that they’d located the very ship they’d been hunting for: S.S. Pere Marquette 18. So they’d actually found their quarry on the very first day of hunting. This alone made it a remarkable project. Another unique feature was way they’d located the ship.

“It’s probably the closest we’ve ever gotten to finding a ship based on research alone, and not more time spent covering a search grid,” Merryman later told the MPR News website. “Stories get mixed up and so you still have to sort the wheat from the chaff. But after all is said and done, I think this – of any of the wrecks we’ve found – we got closer to with research.”

Stonehouse, the Great Lakes historian we met earlier, told MPR News that locating the wreck of the Pere Marquette was “an incredible find.” He added, “I find it amazing that Lake Michigan divers have been looking for her forever. And it took the boys from Minnesota to go down and literally in a matter of a couple of days... discover that wreck.”

Thanks to some typically inclement Lake Michigan weather, though, it was some time before Merryman and Eliason were able to capture more detailed images of the wreck. Video confirmed that its stern was buried in mud and that the ship sat at an improbable angle of around 30 degrees. The film also shows eerie details of the sunken ship.

A thick blanket of mussels shrouds the Pere Marquette, lending it a ghostly air. The twin anchors on the ship’s bows are clearly visible and the camera pans over portholes and doorways on the vessel’s superstructure. It’s a chilling thought that many went down with the ship, which then became a watery grave.

Eliason described other features of the wreck revealed by the video footage. He told the West Central Tribune that the scene includes “a lot of wreckage laying around; there’s bathtubs, there’s two lifeboats laying on the bottom.” He also described how the pilothouse had been torn off by the impact of sinking and lay near the stern. The tops of cabins had been ripped away as well.

So what was the story of S.S. Pere Marquette 18, the sunken vessel that Merryman and Eliason had spent so much time and effort in locating? The American Ship Building Company of Cleveland, Ohio, built the 350-foot long steel craft at the very start of the 20th century. One of eight ferries purpose-built to carry railroad cars, she was devised by a Scottish naval architect, Robert Logan.

Pere Marquette first sailed in 1902, with Logan’s daughter Beatrice leading the ceremony. She started her working life for the Pere Marquette Railroad, plying routes across Lake Michigan. Destination ports included Ludington and Milwaukee. As well as the 30 boxcars she could ferry, she could also accommodate passengers in her 50 staterooms.

Despite her design, though, Pere Marquette didn’t always sail with a cargo of railroad cars. Often in the summer she was hastily converted into a kind of pleasure steamer, sailing from Chicago. The deck normally used for the cars was turned into a dance floor and passengers could waltz the night away to live music. It was a ready source of easy money for the company. But as we’ll see, some believed that this eventually contributed to the vessel’s grim fate.

In 1910 Pere Marquette had just completed a summer tour carrying passengers on short trips from Chicago. On a September day, the ship set out for her first regular voyage of the new season carrying railcars and passengers. She embarked from Ludington on the eastern side of Lake Michigan and headed for Milwaukee. Onboard the ferry were 29 railroad cars and 62 people.

In the early hours of September 9 the ship sprang a leak and water began to flow into the rear section. It soon became clear that the Pere Marquette’s situation was serious. The ship’s skipper was forced to order a change of course. Abandoning her scheduled destination of Milwaukee, the stricken ship now made for the western side of Lake Michigan instead, in the hope she could reach it before disaster struck.

In a drastic sign that things were rapidly becoming critical, the captain now ordered the crew to start jettisoning some of the rail cars. Four of them were manhandled overboard into the lake. The hope was that lightening the ship’s load would keep her afloat. At about 5:00 a.m. the ship sent out a distress message via Morse code: “Carferry 18 is sinking mid-lake – help – help.”

More railcars were heaved over the side. Some of the ferry’s lifeboats were launched. Then a sister ship S.S. Pere Marquette 17 arrived on the scene, having picked up the distress message. But to the horror of those aboard the would-be rescuer, the stern of Pere Marquette 18 quickly sank beneath the waves, the bow tipped upwards and the ship disappeared under the water.

Pere Marquette 17 managed to rescue 35 people. But 27 perished in the tragedy, including Captain Kilty and every one of his officers. So that’s the story of the tragic demise of the Pere Marquette 18. And after she sank so suddenly, she lay on the muddy bottom of Lake Michigan for 110 years until our two wreck searchers Merryman and Eliason tracked her down.

But a puzzling question remains unanswered: just why did the Pere Marquette sink? One theory’s that the ship was over-used for a prolonged period. Some say that a lack of maintenance made her vulnerable to mishap, even catastrophe. You’ll remember those summer-month pleasure trips from Chicago. Normally, this quieter time of the year would have been reserved for routine maintenance and repairs. But Pere Marquette was fully occupied instead.

Then there were those who pointed a finger of blame at Captain Kilty. It was said that he’d handled his vessel without sufficient care. For instance, there’d reportedly been several collisions during landings. And the damage caused by such incidents allegedly hadn’t been properly repaired. Again, though, this may have been due to a lack of time caused by the vessel’s busy summer program.

Some crew members later stated that the ship’s pumps were already running even before she left Ludington on that fateful September night. This implied that all may not have been well with the Pere Marquette prior to its final voyage. It was said that Kilty himself had doubts about the condition of his ship. Yet he still chose to embark on the trip to Milwaukee.

Further remarks about Kilty in an enquiry by the Marine Review were extremely unflattering to the captain. The report stated: “We think that his efforts were directed more towards saving the ship, than to the saving of the lives aboard his boat.” In other words, Kilty should have abandoned ship earlier. But the man himself was of course no longer around, meaning he never had the chance to counter such criticisms.

What’s next for the Pere Marquette’s wreck, then? Eliason and Merryman have pointed out that even experienced divers would have great difficulty reaching the ship’s remains at a depth of 450 feet. So though it’d be fascinating to explore the trail of jettisoned rail cars that lie on the lake bed, there are no current plans to go back to the wreck.