A local team of documentarians has found a shipwreck in Lake Huron.
Yvonne Drebert and Zach Melnick came across what they believe is the wreck of the 128-year-old ‘Africa’ while working on a documentary about invasive quagga mussels in the Great Lakes.
“It’s around 150 feet long, so it started looming up out of the gloom and we realized, oh boy, this is something big here,” says Drebert.
She says they discovered it when they were asked by US scientists doing a fish survey to investigate a section of lake bed this past summer.
“We got connected with the boats from the USGS (United States Geological Survey) who do fish surveys in the Great Lakes and they found a weird bump on one of their SONAR readings, that got back to us and we went to check it out,” says Drebert.
“We headed out into the water on a Saturday afternoon in June, thinking, ‘oh, it’s probably going to be a pile of rocks,” says Drebert, explaining how they sent their remotely operated vehicle (ROV), one of only a few of its kind in the world into the water.
“It went down, down, down, and we saw a whole bunch of invasive mussels which were, you know, surprise, surprise, that’s what you see on the lake bed these days— but then we kept going and ‘oh my gosh’ a shipwreck just loomed out of the distance.”
She believes they’ve found the Africa, which was a ship built in 1873. It went down in 1895 during an early season snow storm. Drebert says it came from Ashtabula, Ohio and was laden with coal. It was also pulling a barge called the Severn which was loaded with coal.
“As happens on the lakes, the weather came up and they ended up cutting the line that was towing the barge. The barge, that also had a crew ran aground here on the west side of the peninsula,” says Drebert, noting the crew of the barge were all rescued.
The 11 person crew of the Africa died.
Drebert and Melnick aren’t saying exactly where they’ve located the ship because it’s now considered a protected grave site, but she does say it’s off the west coast of the Bruce Peninsula in about 280 feet of water or 85 metres down.
“Not far from where we know that the barge ran aground on the western side of the peninsula,” says Drebert.
She and Melnick live on the Bruce Peninsula in an area called Larsen Cove, which was actually named for the captain of the Africa, Hans P. Larsen.
She says after getting their archaeological license from the province, they went back and measured the ship at 148 feet long, 26 feet wide, and 12.5 feet high and noted the pieces of coal strewn around the shipwreck site, “We know the size of the ship is right, the look of the ship is right and the cargo is right,” says Drebert. They’ve also been working with local maritime historian, Patrick Folkes, and marine archaeologist, Scarlett Janusas, to help identify the ship.
As for what’s next, Drebert says they’ve been looking for descendants of those who were on the Africa. “This story would be in family lore. This would be someone’s great grandfather or great grandmother who went down with this ship. So we have put the call out there to see if any surviving relations are connected to this story so we can try to figure out how we can honour these folks.” Drebert says they have heard from some of those family members already.
She says, mussels have encrusted the entire shipwreck, noting quagga mussels are a cousin of the zebra mussel. They came over from the Black Sea in the ballast of ships in the 1980s. “The quagga mussel has actually out-competed the zebra mussel. They like to live a little bit deeper and that’s why we don’t see them as much when we’re playing on the beach. The quagga mussel now carpets the bottom of the Great Lakes in the quadrillions of animals,” says Drebert.
Those mussels eat the plankton other aquatic life needs to survive, and by doing so, alter the food chain.
She says there are so many quagga mussels that on average, once a week, all the water in Lake Michigan gets filtered through a mussel.
Their presence not only has a significant effect on the lake, but also on shipwrecks as the mussels can pile up and become heavy enough to damage the wood and degrade the metal.
“Mussels literally encrust the whole shipwreck, so there’s so many of them that are starting to lose identifying information from ships,” says Drebert.
Drebert says the mussels become so attached to the ships that if you try to scrape them away, parts of the wood will come off. “So they’re really kind of changing our cultural heritage too. They’re kind of putting it at risk.”
The documentary they’re working on is called All Too Clear: Beneath the Surface of the Great Lakes.
It’s coming to TVO next year.