UNH team played key role in shipwreck discovery

Mar. 2—T he spectacular discovery was revealed last week: the wreckage of a 19th-century sailing ship, resting upright and intact on the bottom of Lake Huron.

Hidden for 125 years — and kept secret for four more — the Ironton shipwreck offers a ghostly glimpse into an era when America's Great Lakes and the communities surrounding them bustled with commerce and promise.

And researchers from the University of New Hampshire were part of the team that found it.

In 2019, Val Schmidt, principal research project manager for UNH's Center for Coastal & Ocean Mapping, was leading a UNH team helping to map the floor of Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary at Lake Huron. They deployed their robotic boat — fondly referred to as BEN (bathymetric explorer and navigator) — which uses multi-beam sonar technology to do underwater mapping from the surface.

The group included researchers with the Ocean Exploration Trust, founded by explorer Robert Ballard, who famously located the wreck of the Titanic in 1985.

Schmidt said the different teams on the mapping expedition would gather at the end of each day to share their findings and go over the sonar and navigational data. One night, he could tell by the looks on the faces of other team members that they had found something important.

Then the image appeared: the ghost of a schooner, its three masts rising from the deck. After years of searching, Ironton had been found.

"Everybody was kind of giddy," Schmidt said.

Amid the excitement, however, came the somber recognition that those amazing images marked the final resting place for five sailors who perished when Ironton sank on Sept. 26, 1894, after a collision with a larger ship.

"There was this moment of silence, and everybody was sort of coming to terms with what we had seen," Schmidt said. "There's a kind of reverence, I think, that you have for places like that."

The Ironton is the 100th shipwreck discovered within the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, according to Stephanie Gandulla, the sanctuary's resource protection coordinator.

Encompassing 4,300 square miles, Thunder Bay is co-managed by the state of Michigan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Office of National Marine Sanctuaries. The agency oversees a system of 15 national marine sanctuaries and two marine national monuments, from American Samoa and the Hawaiian islands to the Florida Keys and the waters off Cape Cod.

"We're kind of like national parks but under water," said Gandulla, a marine archaeologist.

The combined Great Lakes represent an astonishing 20% of the world's surface freshwater, Gandulla said. At Thunder Bay, she said, "Our job is to protect the Great Lakes and its rich history for this and future generations."

Part of that mission involves mapping the bottom of Lake Huron, for a variety of scientific purposes, including navigation, habitat, fisheries and geology.

"And then sometimes you find shipwrecks," she said.

Reliving a disaster

Ironton was part of a fleet of wooden schooner barges, towed by steamers, that plied the waters of the Great Lakes — the "workhorses of the region's wheat, coal, corn, lumber and iron ore trades," according to a narrative posted on NOAA's website.

The night of the disaster, Ironton and another schooner barge were being towed by the steamer Charles J. Kershaw. Shortly after midnight, the Kershaw's engine failed, and the wind was pushing the barges toward the disabled ship. So the tow line was cut and the Ironton was cast adrift on the dark, windblown waters of the lake.

Even as her crew struggled to raise the sails, Ironton collided with the wooden freighter Ohio, loaded with 1,000 tons of grain.

Ohio sank; her crew managed to escape on lifeboats and was rescued by nearby ships. But Ironton drifted away, and her seven sailors got into their own lifeboat.

When Ironton sank, she dragged the still-tethered lifeboat down with her.

The captain and four crew members perished; two men survived by clinging to floating wreckage until they were rescued.

One survivor, William Wooley of Cleveland, described the collision in the next day's Duluth News Tribune: "At this time we sighted a steamer on our starboard bow. She came up across our bow and we struck her on the quarter about aft of the boiler house. A light was lowered over our bow and we saw a hole in our port bow and our stem splintered."

His fellow survivor, William W. Parry of Michigan, told the newspaper: "I sank underwater, and when I came up grabbed a sailor's bag. Wooley was a short distance from me on a box. I swam to where he was."

A team from Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary found the wreckage of Ohio in 2017, but it took two more years to find Ironton.

The discovery was a thrill, Gandulla said. "You're sitting there day after day and you're doing your job and you're mapping and you're mapping ....A lot of hours go into finding this one shipwreck like this, so it's very exciting," she said.

Still, the lost crew members were uppermost in her mind, she said.

"It is very somber and sad when you know that five sailors who were simply trying to make a living perished in what must have been a terrifying manner," she said.

The wreckage is a gravesite, she said. "And we respect that."

Rescuing history

After Ironton was found, a remote submarine was used to explore and document the wreck. No human remains were found, Gandulla said.

It's the human stories that render us so fascinated with shipwrecks, she believes.

Those who worked on these ships were "regular people ... who are not necessarily represented in the history books," she said. "But here we have a window in time as to a little bit of what life was like during what we call the 'shipwreck century.'"

That era began in the year 1825, with the completion of the Erie Canal, she said. "That opened up all the industry and all the immigration ... on the East Coast."

The area of Lake Huron known as "Shipwreck Alley" contains the wrecks of all types of ships that once worked on the Great Lakes, Gandulla said. "We have schooners, steamers, paddlewheelers."

The intact condition of the Ironton wreckage, Gandulla said, is "a real testament to the preservation possible in the Great Lakes with the cold, fresh water."

Thunder Bay's mission is based on accessibility, Gandulla said. "So even though we're called a sanctuary, that's a little bit of a misleading term," she said. "We don't close off these resources so people can't visit them."

The sanctuary maintains more than 50 buoys that mark the location of shipwrecks so divers can visit them without risking damage from anchors. "People from all over the world travel here to ... dive on these shipwreck sites," she said.

For her, it's about what famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau said: "People care about what they love."

"You can't love something if you don't understand it, if you don't connect with it," Gandulla said.

So a key part of her own work involves educating the public about the history of those who lived and worked on these waters, she said. A nonprofit group, Friends of the Sanctuary, operates a glass-bottomed boat for the public to view the wrecks.

Thunder Bay also invites scientists to bring cutting-edge technology to help explore the sanctuary. "People like to come and test out their stuff here," she said. "We've got shipwrecks to look for."

They were thrilled to work with the New Hampshire researchers and their autonomous surface vehicle, BEN, she said. "It is pretty special to have that caliber of an ocean exploration group like UNH come here to Thunder Bay," she said.

"We joked with them when they were here: Yeah, it's automated but there's five people running it from the mobile lab on shore."

Keeping a secret

The UNH researchers returned to Thunder Bay in 2021 to continue the mapping expedition.

For all that time, the scientists kept the secret of Ironton — until last week.

Schmidt said he understands the need to protect the sites when such historical vessels are found. In the past, divers have been known to loot shipwrecks for treasures, he said.

"The sanctuary asked us to be really careful about not saying anything to anyone," he said.

"When they find a new wreck, they try to be very quiet about that until they've had a chance to explore it and understand the circumstances in which the boat went down, and study it and preserve it to the extent that they can before other folks learn about it." he said. "They've actually had people follow their boats around and try to figure out where they were going."

Didn't he even tell his family?

"I didn't tell my kids because they can't keep a secret to save their lives," Schmidt said with a laugh. "I did tell my wife we did find something really cool and someday it would be made public."

He told his colleagues at UNH the same.

So, does that mean there may be other discoveries that will be announced someday from the mapping work the UNH scientists did?

Schmidt politely declined to answer.

Gandulla laughed. "I can honestly say there are not," she said. "However, we will be mapping again this summer."

Saving a life

Just 20% of the sanctuary floor has been mapped so far, she said. So in the future, she predicted, "I think you might be hearing more about discoveries here in the sanctuary waters in Lake Huron."

Schmidt said he's eager to return to Thunder Bay for future expeditions.

"Our hosts and our colleagues there are absolutely fantastic, the mission is both fun and fascinating, and we've learned a lot every time we've gone," he said.

Asked why he does this work, Schmidt offered a tale about a colleague named Shepard Smith, the first graduate student at the UNH Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, who went on to become an admiral at NOAA.

Years ago, Smith was captaining a NOAA ship when he heard about a small Cessna plane that was missing in the Gulf of Mexico. The pilot had radioed his location just before his plane went down, and the Coast Guard was searching, but "it was unlikely this guy's plane was going to be found," Schmidt recalled.

Smith asked permission to join the search and rescue mission. Then his team used radar and the data they had been collecting about currents to calculate the possible crash site, and they sped in that direction.

When they got to the location, they turned on all the ship's lights and Smith called for silence on the bridge. And at once, "They could hear him yelling for help on the ocean," Schmidt said.

Years later, Smith reunited with the pilot he had rescued and met his wife and children, and they exchanged their memories of that harrowing night.

And that's what Schmidt finds most satisfying about his job, he said: being able to apply science and math, oceanography and physics, to real-world situations.

"They're not always as dramatic as Admiral Smith's was," he said, "but sometimes they save a life.

"Or they find a sunken ship that's been gone for a long time."

swickham@unionleader.com