Steel ship ripped in two by deadly 1892 squall is found in Lake Superior

It was a late summer evening when conditions on Lake Superior turned from bad to treacherous. The year was 1892, and the ship – a 300-foot steamer christened the Western Reserve, hailed as one of the speediest and most advanced cargo vessels of its era – found itself in a squall.

About 9 p.m., the unthinkable happened: Its modern steel hull, lashed by waves, tore in half.

The ship had 27 people aboard, including the boat’s millionaire owner, who was taking his family on a leisure cruise bound for Two Harbors, Minnesota.

The passengers and crew had little time to find space in two lifeboats. The ship sank in 10 minutes, and one of the lifeboats then capsized. For 10 hours through the night, some 19 survivors huddled in the last wooden lifeboat, which itself was gradually filling with water. After sunrise, with the coastal rescue station in view, it sank.

“The cries of the children, screams of the women and moaning of the men were terrible for a few moments. Then all became silent,” the Watertown Republican newspaper reported at the time, citing the recollections of the wreck’s sole survivor, wheelman Harry Stewart, who managed to swim for two hours through exhaustion to shore.

Nearly 133 years later, explorers at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society this week said they have finally located the underwater wreck of the Western Reserve using sonar technology, some 60 miles northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan. Their exploration of the 600-foot-deep wreck using a remotely operated vehicle confirmed the sole survivor’s account: The ship was in two pieces.

“It was broken almost straight in half. The way it sank, the bow fell right on top of the stern, which is kind of abnormal for shipwrecks,” Corey Adkins, the society’s spokesman, said Wednesday. “Each half measured just about 150 feet.”

Video of the underwater wreckage recorded by the group’s remote vehicle revealed a bell, running light, deck rack and broken mast. “After 132 years, those are neat things to see. Nobody’s laid eyes on it for over a century,” Adkins added.

He said that as the ship cracked in half that night, the owner’s family – staying mostly in the bow – found themselves suddenly separated from the crew members, who were on the other half of the ship with the lifeboats. “As the crew was launching the lifeboats in the stern of the vessel, the family had to jump over the crack as the ship was tearing itself apart. Imagine jumping over that crack to get to the lifeboat. It must have been terrifying.”

Newspaper reports from the time listed the ship’s owner, respected Cleveland shipping magnate Peter G. Minch, among the passengers. His wife; 10-year-old son, Charlie; and 6-year-old daughter, Florence, also were on the ship.

According to the historical society, there have been 500 to 600 shipwrecks in Lake Superior since the 1850s, including the well-known Edmund Fitzgerald – which in 1975 hit the bottom with such force that it ripped in half after sinking in one of the most powerful storms ever recorded on the lake.

According to the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society, the Western Reserve was the largest bulk carrier on the Great Lakes when it was launched in Cleveland in 1890. The society said it was also the first to be constructed of steel in the classic Great Lakes design – in which the ship’s superstructures are at its bow and stern.

The steel was manufactured using the Bessemer process, an efficient method for producing large quantities of cheap steel, although its subsequent brittleness at lower temperatures was not yet well understood.

One theory floated by the Wisconsin Marine Historical Society is that the ship sank because of “hogging.” This is when a ship finds itself supported by a large wave in the middle, with its heavy bow and stern lifted into the air, causing it to snap. The steel’s brittleness could have made it vulnerable to snapping when subjected to twisting and bending pressure, acquisitions director James Heinz wrote on the group’s website.

“There are some theories that they didn’t carry enough ballast, and that it wasn’t balanced correctly,” noted Adkins, while cautioning that there was not yet enough evidence to ascertain the precise cause of the shipwreck. “Who knows?”

After the ice clears on Lake Superior this spring, explorers from the society intend to return to the wreckage to learn more, Adkins said.