Cold Gray Relics That Sparked A War For US

The remains of the RMS Lusitania lie on the sea floor off the coast of Ireland. The wreck is festooned with fishing nets and live mines which prevent fuller exploration:

SM U-20, the German sub that sank Lusitania, was stranded off the coast of Denmark in 1916. She was partially destroyed and abandoned by her crew. The wreck rusted there until 1925 when she was destroyed by the Danish government:

What You May Have Missed

My modest blog just passed the quarter million views mark which is an inflated way of saying 250,063 pageviews. Thank you dear readers!

Here are the "top ten" posts according to my Blogger statistics, as well as a short recap:

1  The Parable Of The Doorkeeper*  19,420 views

This post is just my favorite Kafka parable and compares the German and English texts. It must be others' favorite too as it was Instalaunched (thank you, Professor Reynolds!)

2   Hail Britannic!  16,311 views

This one concerned the RMS Titanic's younger sister ship, HMHS Britannic and her sad story. Also, I drew a link between Jacques Cousteau's TV coverage of the shipwreck and the plot of James Cameron's Titanic. But I think many people were just looking for the interesting photo. 

3  Titanic Centennial: at the real Café Parisien  9,698 views

I think it odd that this post is number 3. It's just a famous old photograph of a very hip cafe on board the Titanic. Maybe that's all people were looking for. I did a series of posts on Titanic.

4  Forgotten Americans: Jack Thayer, Titanic Survivor  3,918 views

This post tells the story of young Jack Thayer and his heroic account of surviving the sinking. He was the first to publicly assert that Titanic broke in two. His views were contradicted in the official investigations and reports at the time, but he was vindicated when the wreck was actually found. Sadly, he committed suicide. 

5  The SS Great Eastern  3,452 views

Another famous ship and shipwreck story here. The photo is a haunting one and is worth a look. 

6  It's No Lye That Soap Is Made From Pot Ash  2,087 views

This post concerns the element potassium and was one of a series of posts I did covering the chemical elements. I got as far as rhodium with that series and plan to pick it up again with palladium.

7  Newlands' Law of Octaves 1,676 views

This post retells the interesting saga of John Newlands, the man who first drew attention to the chemical periodicity of the elements, a very favorite topic of mine. 

8  Last Letters From Stalingrad: #23  1,572 views

This post is one of a series of letters I transcribed from Last Letters From Stalingrad, an out-of-print, but very haunting book. See the links at the bottom of that post for more on that series. 

9  Last Letters From Stalingrad: #9  1,271 views


10  The Essence of Distillation 972 views

This is actually my personal favorite of the 10. If I could write more of these, I'd do it all day long. 

Fabled Sable Island

Wrecks of Sable Island. Click to enlarge.

I recalled Sable Island while reading of the Titanic saga. Sable Island is a crescent-shaped sandbar located way off the coast of Nova Scotia. The island got there as a terminal moraine from ancient glaciation and took its name from the French word for sand.

Long considered a navigational hazard to North Atlantic trade, Sable Island is littered with the buried remains of hundreds of shipwrecks. Already by 1912, Sable Island had two lighthouses and a Marconi wireless station. The first wireless distress calls from the Titanic were heard and relayed by the Sable Island station. I'd love to visit there.

Buried At Sea

I took my son to Pearl Harbor last summer. My family was on vacation, staying on the Big Island, but I insisted on flying over to Honolulu for a day trip and he wanted to go too. It was an expensive side trip, but I just couldn't get that close without paying my respects.

We got there early in the morning after all the morning tickets for the USS Arizona Memorial were already gone (I think they give the early ones to package tours--not to walk on visitors like us). Anyways, we got tickets for later the same day which gave us plenty of time to visit the nearby USS Missouri.

The guns of the USS Missouri point out over the sunken remains of the USS Arizona

Japan surrendered onboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, less than four years after Pearl Harbor. I already wrote a bit about that ship back here. The Mighty Mo (BB 63) keeps vigil over the sunken remains of the USS Arizona (BB 39); the two ships are poised, bow-to-bow, symbolizing the beginning and the end of the Pacific War. The Missouri is worth a self-guided tour, much like the USS Midway in San Diego is.

Back at the Arizona, the US Park Service shows a great short documentary film narrated by Stockard Channing. I found a snippet of it here (wish I could find the whole thing):

The movie is well-made and teaches the whole inevitability of Pearl Harbor. It's emotionally moving too and softened me up before the boat ride over to the memorial perched over the wreckage. That's really all that's left on the surface--a memorial. A turret base still protrudes, amazingly, given that all iron needs to rust is water, salt, and oxygen. I credit the turret's longevity to the chromium and nickel mixed into the steel--Kruppstahl--but that's just me.

Underwater, the Arizona is remarkably intact.^link Of course you can't dive her, but the Park Service does regular underwater inspections--but I found this cool model of the wreck back onshore:

After paying our respects, we returned to the museum exhibits and various grounds and memorials.

This plaque touched me:

What a comfort to know where one's final remains belong!  That sentiment, along with the shipwreck aspect, reminded me of the last scene in James Cameron's Titanic where the fictional Rose Dawson rejoins her erstwhile lover in death:

Link

The SS Great Eastern

I forgot to mention back here about my fascination with the ship which laid most of the first transatlantic cable. Launched in 1858, the SS Great Eastern was the biggest vessel of her day until the White Star Line's RMS Oceanic came along a generation later. Christened the SS Leviathan, she was quickly renamed the Great Eastern and crossed the seas as a passenger vessel, mainly ferrying immigrants to the U.S.

What I find cool about this ship is that she resembles a transition state in the sense that she embodied the past, present, and future of ship propulsion: sails, paddle wheels, and a screw propeller. Of course she was steam driven—Diesel hadn't yet invented his eponymous engine.

The Great Eastern was sold and refitted with several spools of wire-thousands of miles of it. She set about laying wire on the ocean floor between Ireland and Newfoundland and elsewhere around the world. Here's a sketch of what the giant reels of copper wire looked like inside her:

Inside the SS Great Eastern, spooling out copper wire to lay across the ocean floor.

The Great Eastern met a rather ignominious end.  Like the RMS Olympic (older sister of the RMS Titanic), she was scrapped.

Stripped carcass of the SS Great Eastern awaiting the scrapper's torch in 1889.

Have You Heard Of The Ship Called The Good Reuben James?

I particularly like this old Woody Guthrie song sung by The Kingston Trio entitled The Sinking Of The Reuben James. The maker of this YouTube video put the names of each lost sailor into scrolling graphics.

I love how each man's name seems to rise from the blackened depths--names that might otherwise be forgotten:

Looking over some of the music posts I've put up in the past it's sad to see so many of the YouTube video links get disabled. Rumor has it that some of this creative YouTubing may all be coming to an end.

Surely there can be some kind of mutual recognition between the owners of the song's copyright and the artists wanting to make use of them. The short answer to this is licensing. But what artist is going to find (let alone contact) the owners of the copyright? I see an opportunity for Google here. Perhaps they could broker reasonable fee-for-usage licensing--something akin to iTunes.

"If the ships couldn’t be raised to the surface then the surface could be lowered to the ships!"

Emperor Caligula's Pleasure Craft?
[note how small the men are in the photo]

I'd been to Lago di Nemi in Italy and I even knew the tragic story of how the salvaged ancient Roman ships found on the lake bottom were lost to fire during the invasion of Italy in the Second World War. What I didn't know was that Mussolini drained the lake to get at the ships. The whole incredible story is here.

Another fascinating website with lots of information and links to photos and maps is here. Given what we know of Emperor Caligula's depravities, it's hard to fathom what actually happened on board this ship:

Original

St. Patrick's Sons Don The Green In Wisconsin

The ethnic richness of immigrant Wisconsin about which Fred L. Holmes wrote was already fading quickly in 1944 and may have all but vanished by now.  Places like Erin Prairie (population 658 according to the 2000 census) is still 98% white, but I wonder just how Irish it is today.

Holmes, himself of Irish heritage, visited Erin Prairie in the 1940s, interviewed people, and wrote:

'Every monument except one in this cemetery bears an Irish name' said the youthful caretaker, pausing a moment in the mowing, 'and that one is a Norwegian who had married an Irish girl.'

Headstones lettered with birthplaces from every county in Ireland bear names such as Donahue, Kennedy, Padden, Ross, Gherty, Garrity, Maloney, Wells, Stephens, Murta, Riley, Moore, Dean, Mead, Meath, Gill, La Vele, and many more. A roll call of the same names at mass any Sunday would show people answering. It is as if the identical pioneers are still around laughing, joking, praying. I looked upon it all with a feeling of sadness. Here was a sting in my heart that told me this was Ireland in essence; the spirit of love, devotion, and hope.

'Erin Prairie has changed mightily since I was a boy,' explained the township assessor, who had paused at the church. 'Then the overwhelming majority of the people were native-born Irish or first generation descent. So many of the younger have gone to St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Irish ways are dying out.'

Holmes went on to describe "Irish politics" in Wisconsin's largest city, Milwaukee, and a tragedy still unsurpassed:

Traditionally the Irish are Democrats in politics. Politics attracted them, like moths to candlelight, from the first. Five native-born Irish took prominent part in the convention that drafted the Wisconsin Constitution of 1848. They were the largest nationalistic group, exceeding all the others in membership combined. Early attachment to the Democratic party came from a feeling that the Jacksonians were more sympathetic to the hardships of the immigrant.

One of the most tragic incidents in the history of the state arose from a display of their lively interest in politics. During the Lincoln-Douglas presidential campaign of 1860, a group of young Irish boys, members of the Union Guard of the Third Ward in Milwaukee, chartered the 'Lady Elgin,' one of the finest boats on Lake Michigan, for a round trip tour to Chicago. They wanted to hear their favorite, Senator Stephen Douglas, speak. They took their sweethearts along for the holiday outing of singing Irish songs and dancing. On the return trip at night their excursion boat was rammed in the dark by a lumber freighter. The 'Lady Elgin' soon foundered and sank quickly off the shore at Winnetka, Illinois, with a loss of nearly half of the six hundred passengers.[1] That tragedy cast a pall of such mourning over the state that the disaster was remembered for generations in both stories and in song. It is still recalled by an annual requiem mass at St. John's Cathedral, Milwaukee, on September 8.  

~Fred L. Holmes, "St. Patrick's Sons Don The Green" Old World Wisconsin (1944)

Sign commemorating the sinking of the "Lady Elgin" in 1860

The Paddle Steamer "Lady Elgin"

________________________
[1] The wreck was located in 1989. Link

Hail Britannic!

It's pretty cool when you realize that the germ of something became something bigger.

I watched Calypso's Search for the Britannic, an episode from The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey. The feature dates from 1977 and tells the story of Cousteau's successful 1975 search for the sunken ship Britannic off the coast of Greece.

HMHS Britannic was built during that brief window of time between the sinking of her older sister Titanic and the First World War. She was launched without fanfare. One disgruntled ship worker said of her: "They just built her and threw her out there."

Britannic was fitted-out with all the features intended to avoid her older sister's fate: double-hulls; water-tight bulkheads which rose to B deck, and of course there were ample lifeboats. Intended to replace Titanic as a luxury trans-Atlantic liner, HMHS Britannic was instead pressed into service as a hospital ship and was sunk by a submerged mine just two years after her launch in 1914.

The remarkable thing about the old TV episode is how it foreshadowed James Cameron's Titanic. Cousteau located one of her few remaining survivors, Sheila Mitchell (then 86 years old), flew her to the Calypso hovered over the wreck, plied her memories of the sinking and then took her down in a submersible to see the wreck -- one last time -- just like fictional character Rose Dawson in Titanic. I seriously wonder whether Cameron watched or was inspired by this 1977 televised episode.

I also couldn't help but marvel at the man Cousteau himself. At age 65, he dons helium-oxygen-filled scuba tanks and freely descends to over 300 feet to explore the wreck--for 9 minutes. The hour long episode (available on Netflix) is as much a lessen on deep-sea scuba diving as it is on the Britannic. Growing up, Cousteau was a hero in our family, no doubt due to my dad's love of scuba diving which I wrote about here.

[added: a cool website on the HMHS Britannic: link]

Where Manhood Perished Not

I recently re-watched the movie Titanic and recalled what a great film it is with a great melange of messages. I wanted my kids to see it too because they hadn't. I still even mist up at the ending.

In earlier times people could make overt reference to chauvinism without scorn and derision. That drawing is taken from my trusty book The Sinking Of The Titanic And Other Great Sea Disasters (1912) by Logan Marshall. I believe the book is past copyright protection. This is the third post I've extracted from that book. The others are here. The centenary of the event is approaching in just over a year and I will be reaching for the book again.

Imagination Sufficed

Click twice to magnify & to read the text about Titanic

That drawing is from Logan Marshall's The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters and has intrigued me since I was kid, especially the little stick figures tumbling off the stern. It affected me the same way the jumpers from the Twin Towers affected some people. But as a kid I didn't need such graphic "reality" footage.  Imagination alone sufficed to horrify.

Silver, Gold, & Lead

This news story about Mel Fisher's stolen gold this morning reminded me of two things:

(1) John Wayne, confronting and shooting a cattle rustler in the movie Chisum (1970):

Bandito: Did you bring any gold? 

John Wayne: Nope! 

Bandito: Did you bring any silver? 

John Wayne: Nope, just lead!

and (2)  My father, who met Mel Fisher:

Forgotten Americans: Jack Thayer, Titanic Survivor

My grandmother had that book and I loved it so much as a kid that she gave it to me. Logan Marshall's The Sinking of the Titanic and Great Sea Disasters was rushed into print in 1912 shortly after the disaster. Inside are several accounts of survivors, some of whom later became immortalized in the movie Titanic (which I won't link to out of spite for James Cameron).

Jack Thayer was 17 and travelling with his parents. His wiki bio is here.  He was first to insist that the Titanic split in two when she went down. Here are the drawings that Thayer made while on board the rescue ship Carpathia and his description of the Titanic's final moments as published in 1912:

...I jumped out, feet first.  I was clear of the ship; went down, and as I came up I was pushed away from the ship by some force. I came up facing the ship, and one of the funnels seemed to be lifted off and fell towards me about 15 yards away, with a mass of sparks and steam coming out of it. I saw the ship in a sort of a red glare, and it seemed to me that she broke in two just in front of the third funnel.

This time I was sucked down, and as I came up I was pushed out again and twisted around by a large wave, coming up in the midst of a great deal of small wreckage. As I pushed my hand from my head it touched the cork fender of an overturned life-boat. I looked up and saw some men on the top and asked them to give me a hand. One of them, who was a stoker, helped me up. In a short time the bottom was covered with about twenty-five or thirty men. When I got on this I was facing the ship.

The stern then seemed to rise in the air and stopped at about an angle of 60 degrees.  It seemed to hold there for a time and then with a hissing sound it shot right down out of sight with people jumping from the stern.  The stern either pivoted around towards our boat, or we were sucked toward it, and as we only had one oar we could not keep away.  There did not seem to be much suction and most of us managed to stay on the bottom of our boat.

Thayer's theory was dismissed for 70 years until Robert Ballard used his account to help locate the wreck--which he found in two pieces--just as Thayer had said.

For those who have kids: some little models used to be commercially available that reproduce the exact way that the ship sank: link. I own one.  Fun for the kids and grown-up kids alike.

Wrecks of the Amboy and the George Spencer

We didn't stay in the town of Silver Bay but travelled further up Highway 61 to a place near Tofte, MN.  There are two wrecks there, one named the George Spencer and the other called the Amboy.  The two vessels were wrecked together during the Mataafa storm, which sank around 30 vessels the night of November 28, 1905.

The Amboy and the George Spencer were wooden ships and both were driven ashore and beached and then abandoned. They both lie (well what's left of them) offshore of private property and are accessible now only by boat. Years ago my dad had permission to camp on the property nearest to the wrecks. You can get a good overview from the photo labelled Figure 266 at this website (I recently ordered that book). The photo shows the beautiful green lawn between the house and the shore where the owner used to let us drive right down to shore and set up camp.

The site of the George Spencer wreck is indicated in Fig 266 with an arrow. Figure 267 in the link above shows a general map of the wreck in the harbor (including some washed up on shore) and Fig 268 shows a detailed sketch of the remaining underwater portion of the wreck. The wreck is decaying fast. I took this photo of what remains of the Amboy's backbone washed up on the shore:

That photo is from around 1975. The wreckage has decayed further since then. I can see further decomposition in this 1992 photo found online:

The underwater portion of the wreck in Figure 268 above belongs to the George Spencer.  I found a YouTube video of a family canoeing right over the Spencer: the video gives you a sense of how shallow the wreck is and how clear and still the water can be.



The Spencer was quite photogenic and my dad loved that wreck best for that reason. Here's a shot he took of another diver and his photography equipment circa 1977:

Note how clear the water is which is amazing for freshwater.
Here's a B/W shot that my dad took of me on the George Spencer circa 1977.

Here's another shot of me from that day. This photo won him first place in an underwater photography competition sponsored by Sport Diver magazine the following year:

Silver Bay And The Hesper

Our next stop after diving the Madeira was Silver Bay, just up Highway 61 from Beaver Bay.  My dad's friend, Don Franklin, worked for Reserve Mining Company which is pretty much all there is in Silver Bay.  Don refilled our scuba tanks at the local fire station and chatted with us for a bit about exactly where to go, though he declined to go with us. The year before he had taken my father and my brother to Isle Royale and had shown them the wreck of the passenger steamer, the S.S. America.

The harbor at Silver Bay has a wreck named Hesper which went down in 1905, the same year as the Madeira:

 The Hesper lies in three big pieces in about 35 to 40 feet of water.  Part of her is partially buried under the western breakwater wall.  The jetty makes for an easy way to get up close to the wreck site, although you have to pick your way across the rocks [added: the jetty is visible in a photo at the website that I linked to below. The wreck is about 3/4 of the way out on the left (harbor) side]. You can visualize the wreck with the help of this sketch (click to enlarge):

According to my dad, Don and his friends discovered the wreck and were the first to dive on her. Some recovered artifacts can now be seen in a museum in Duluth.  Because the wreck lies inside the breakwater and the harbor is busy, the water is pretty turbid.  Consequently, the underwater visibility is not as good as found at the Madeira.  Nonetheless, the wreck is impressive.

Here is a photo of the wreck my dad took, looking pretty much as I remember it:

The Minnesota State Historical Society maintains a website with additional photographs of the Hesper here.

The Wreck Of The Madeira

We arrived at the first wreck site by car on August 4, 1975 and got suited up and in the water by around 10 AM. The air temperature was 78^o, and the water temperature was 42^oF.  No, I don't have that good of a memory -- I'm reading from a logbook that I kept at the time. My actual memories are visual and not at all numerically factual like that. 

Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate the negatives or even prints from a roll of film that I shot on that first trip. I know I didn't throw them out -- I just can't find them right now. I'll have to rely on my memory, the Internet, and some shots my dad took at different times.

Madeira was the name of a vessel that went down in a huge storm of 1905. There's a harrowing story about her last hour that you can read about here. She broke in two against Gold Rock, less than a mile "up-lake" from the present day Split Rock Lighthouse.  Of course the lighthouse wasn't there then--it was built a few years later after the owners of ships that went down that night banded together and persuaded Congress to build one (I have a separate story about the lighthouse that I'm saving, but I should say that the lighthouse is the most iconic image of the North Shore, having been painted and photographed to death).

In those days one had to park alongside Highway 61 and carry the gear through a beautiful birch forest (one of the photos I'm missing) down to a small rocky beach. Here's an aerial view of the lay of the land: Link. 
The rocky beach was as close as one could get to the wreck site on land.  Here's an older photo of my dad (standing) heading out to the Madeira wreck site. The photo was taken sometime in the early 1960's:

photographer unknown circa 1960s

That's Gold Rock in the background, the rock that battered the Madeira to death that November when the skies turned gloomy.  On a clear sunny day when the water is still, it is possible to look down into the water from the edge of that cliff and see a bit of the wreck.

Madeira was my dad's favorite wreck. It wasn't the most photogenic, being too deep for natural light. But it was the most challenging and is still typical when one thinks of a shipwreck. The wreck lies in two big pieces. I'll never forget how her bow points straight up towards the surface and the steel of her hull where she broke looked peeled back like a banana skin. You can more easily imagine what I'm talking about with the help of this sketch:

click to enlarge

The bow section is in the upper left.  [added: here is a photo of her bow taken by my father sometime in the '60's]:

Obviously tremendous forces clashed that night back in 1905. Her stern lies in deeper water and the pilothouse lies even deeper, completely detached from the rest (in the very foreground in the sketch). My dad's friend salvaged the ship's wheel and other artifacts which can now be seen in a museum in Duluth. The other parts of the wreck are unrecognizable as a ship- just twisted bulkheads. The vessel had long since lost its coating of paint, but incredibly, the iron hull is remarkably well preserved--a combination of freshwater, cold, and depth.

The Madeira wreck is cold and deep.  I recall experiencing a little bit of nitrogen narcosis that first time when we plunged to the wheelhouse. I remember signaling my dad that we needed to go up a little. I still remember slowly crawling back up that pile of rocks towards the cliff.  In those days (1975) before the widespread advent of buoyancy compensators (BC's), I had an orange inflatable vest that required me to wrap my lips around the inflation tube and blow (nowadays, those things are hooked-up directly to one's air supply and one can adjust buoyancy with a push button). Although we were covered head-to-toe in 3/8 wet suits, there was this little gap between my face mask and the opening in the hood which exposed my face and lips. Now those body parts are pretty resilient to cold, but after mouthing a regulator for about 45 minutes in 42 degree water, my lips and mouth were frozen and I still recall the difficulty of getting my mouth around that smaller tube in order to re-inflate my vest--the sheer will to live overcame and triumphed.

There is a major treasure trove of Madeira photos here: Link

Revisiting Highway 61

That photo was taken along Minnesota's Highway 61 by my late father sometime in the 70's. The concrete wall is kind of unsightly (imagine it's not there) and is a safety eyesore only then recently added. [Added: that stretch of Highway 61 no longer exists and has been replaced by a tunnel].

State Highway MN 61 follows the Lake Superior coastline from Duluth all the way to Canada. Prior to 1991, MN 61 was part of US 61, or as Dylan referred to it, Highway 61 (yes, that Highway 61).  Highway 61 was also called the "Blues Highway" and it stretched from Canada all the way to New Orleans. Before the interstate system, US 61 was a main route north-south, much like US 66 was a main route east-west. In my humble opinion, that particular stretch of MN 61 is one of the most beautiful and scenic drives in the continental US (and I'm including both coastal California and New England!).

Minnesota's Lake Superior coastline is shipwreck rich. Map The reason there are so many wrecks is simply because there were so many ships and also because the lake was a cruel and harsh place to navigate before modern navigational equipment. Duluth was once a leading shipping port city (at one time it had more millionaires per capita than any other America city). The ships came first to carry away furs and pelts from the interior; then they came for timber and grain; then for copper, and then finally, for the iron.

The Iron Range is (or was) a massive geological deposit of iron ore-so much that it fed the entire steel industry "downstream" at the other Great Lakes [added: about a quarter of it came from just one pit]. Great old industrial cities like Detroit, Cleveland and farther inland, Pittsburgh were built from it. Arguably, the only physical reason those cities were ever great (laying aside the great people for a moment) was simply the melding together of Appalachian coal and Minnesota iron to make American steel. The boom years lasted for well over a half century.

My dad started scuba diving up there in the early 1960's. He had an acquaintance who lived up there and who had discovered one or two shipwrecks. Back in those days scuba diving was still relatively uncommon, not at all like it is today. There were no dive shops (in Madison at least). Scuba tanks could only be filled at welding shops or fire stations. Some gas stations had air-compressors that went to high enough pressures but they usually didn't filter and the compressed air tended to be contaminated with pump oil. Diving gear had to be bought by mail order from companies that advertised in the back of magazines like Skin Diver or the likes. Most equipment was still manufactured either in California or Italy (it's probably all made in China now like everything else).

When I was 15 my dad took me on a scuba trip to Lake Superior along Minnesota's North Shore. My brother and I had been around diving since we were little kids, but he waited until we were older and had passed a certification course before taking us up there. He took us separately (there's a 3 year age difference there), mostly for reasons of space and equipment limitations: we always drove up from Madison and had to pack a week's worth of gear, camping equipment, and food.  I recently got around to digitizing some slides he took and so have decided to start yet another blog post series to remember all these things before I get old and forgetful. I'm still looking for some photos I took. At least there'll be pictures this time so don't go away.