The long-sought wreck of a schooner that sank in Lake Michigan in 1886 has been discovered by a team led by Brendon Baillod of the prolific Wisconsin Underwater Archaeology Association (WUAA).
“A few of us had to pinch each other,” said Baillod following the discovery of what had come to be regarded as a “ghost ship”. “After all the previous searches, we couldn’t believe we had actually found it, and so quickly.”
Twenty citizen-scientists and community historians had been invited to join Baillod and the WUAA team on the charter vessel Shoreline to learn more about sidescan sonar and ROVs and participate in the search.
Missing for 139 years, the FJ King had been the object of numerous search efforts since the 1970s, with Neptune’s Dive Club of Green Bay offering a $1,000 reward for its discovery. Fishers claimed to have netted pieces of the wreck, but divers in the area had long drawn a blank.
Between the lakes
The 43m three-masted wooden schooner had been built in Toledo, Ohio in 1867 for the grain and iron-ore trades, designed to run between the Great Lakes via the Welland Canal, which it did successfully for 19 years.
Carrying iron ore from Escanaba, Michigan to Chicago, the FJ King was off the Door peninsula when it ran into a south-eastly gale with a 3m swell that split its seams. After several hours manning the pumps, Captain William Griffin ordered the crew into the yawl boat.
At 2am on 15 September the FJ King sank bow-first, the crew watching as its stern deckhouse blew off. They were rescued and taken to the nearest town, Baileys Harbor, by a passing schooner.
Captain Griffin stated that he thought the vessel had sunk around 8km out from shore at a depth of around 45m, though the following week a lighthouse-keeper in the area had reported seeing a schooner’s masts breaking the surface closer to shore.
Long shot
Baillod had studied hundreds of original documents about the ship and corresponded with previous wreck-hunters who insisted that the entire area had already been thoroughly searched. He had considered finding the wreck on the citizen-science expedition something of “a long shot”, though he still held out hope.
“We reasoned that the captain may not have known where he was in the 2am darkness, but the lighthouse-keeper’s course and distance to the masts were probably accurate,” he said, and had been searching a 5sq km grid based on the latter sighting.
Two hours into the search, on the boat’s second pass, the WUAA’s new DeepVision sidescan sonar revealed a large object so clearly that its hatches were visible, and Baillod was able to establish that its length matched that of the FJ King.
The wreck lay some 800m from where the lighthouse-keeper had reported his sighting.
The citizen-scientists were then able to help guide ROVs onto the wreck. “The hull is remarkably intact,” said Baillod. “We expected her to be in pieces due to the weight of the iron-ore cargo, but her hull looks to be in one piece.”
Model created
Divers from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Maritime Archaeology Programme have since dived the wreck to document it and create a 3D photogrammetry model. It will be nominated for inclusion in the State and National Registers of Historic Places, after which its location will be disclosed.
“Finding an historic shipwreck brings with it a great responsibility,” says Baillod. “People may not think twice about taking an artefact from an anonymous old shipwreck, but once the vessel has a name, a story and links to the community, it becomes a part of the community’s history and even a source of tourism.”
The WUAA and Baillod have located five significant wrecks in Wisconsin waters in the past three years, most of them reported on Divernet. This spring they located the steamer LW Crane in the Fox River at Oshkosh and last year the tug John Evenson and schooner Margaret A Muir off Algoma.
In 2023, Baillod located the intact remains of the schooner Trinidad at 81m, also off Algoma, and this wreck and the Margaret A Muir are now on the National Register of Historic Places.
