Hazardous waters of the Great Lakes is an inland Bermuda Triangle where thousands of ships have come to grief
FORGET the Bermuda Triangle — an inland waterway system in America has also claimed thousands of vessels.
IT is the site of hundreds of wrecks of ships and dozens of aircraft, but it is not the Bermuda Triangle. So it may surprise many people that one of the worst areas for non-war-related air and shipping disasters is not a treacherous ocean but a series of inland lakes.
The Great Lakes in the US have seen the demise of no less than 6000 ships and tens of thousands of lives. One of the worst periods was from the mid 19th century to the 20th century when shipping traffic was at its peak.
The Great Lakes are a system of five large inland bodies of water that border northeast US and southeastern Canada. Formed thousands of years ago by glaciers, which gouged out the basins that are now filled with water, the lakes, named Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario are interconnected by rivers.
Before Europeans arrived, the native Americans navigated the lakes and rivers to trade with other tribes.
European colonisers also found the system of waterways vital for getting around, exploring, founding towns and setting up a trading network. But they soon found out how hazardous the waters can be. The first known sailing ship to ply the waters of the Great Lakes was Le Griffon, built in America in 1679. It was commissioned by French explorer Rene-Robert Cavelier to take part in an expedition, but it vanished on Lake Michigan. It has never been found.
More ships would vanish, never to be seen again, but some older wrecks have recently come to light. In 2008 searchers using sonar scanners in Lake Ontario discovered the wreck of British warship HMS Ontario, which had sunk in 1780 during the Revolutionary War. In July this year an expedition found the remains of the Washington, the first commercial sailing sloop to ply the waters of Lake Erie, which sank in 1803.
As more ships took to the waters the toll continued to rise. An influx of immigrants from the 1830s saw the lakes system being used to transport great numbers of migrants across the lakes to port cities such as Chicago, Cleveland or Toronto, where they would join the workforce or head further inland.
The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 connected Albany in New York to Buffalo, from where ships travelled to ports in Michigan. The Erie Railroad was also built to connect New York City with Lake Erie. In the 1830s shipping companies on the lakes were quick to seize on the new technology in the form of paddle steamers. But some of the worst disasters would involve these picturesque vessels, mostly due to mechanical failures or human error.
On August 9, 1841 the Erie was travelling on Lake Erie, on its way from Buffalo to Chicago, when a fire caused by sparks landing in turpentine left by painters broke out. While some people were killed by the fire, others died after plunging into the waters to escape or douse the flames. About 240 are believed to have died, most were German immigrants. Charred bodies washed ashore for days after. The ship sank as it was being towed to shore.
In 1850 steamer P.G. Griffith was on its way from Buffalo to Toledo when one of its boilers exploded causing a fire that consumed the rear half of the ship, forcing passengers and crew forward to escape the flames. Because the engines had been abandoned, the ship coasted to a stop and drifted onto a sandbar. Some swam to safety, many drowned, others were burned alive. About 290 people died. There were few survivors.
In 1852 paddle steamer Atlantic was rammed by the Ogdensburg in Lake Erie. The Ogdensburg sailed away without assisting the stricken Atlantic and 200 people died. The Northern Indiana, which caught fire on Lake Erie while steaming from Buffalo to Monroe in Michigan in 1856, left 60 dead.
Even into the 20th century ships were still coming to grief on the lakes but were also joined by aircraft. One of the most mysterious was Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 2501, a DC-4 flying from New York to Seattle in 1950 that vanished without a trace over Lake Michigan with the loss of 58 people.
The most recent ship lost was the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald which sank in Lake Superior during a storm in 1975, taking all 29 crew. It was the largest ship to have sunk in the Great Lakes.
Originally published as Hazardous waters of the Great Lakes is an inland Bermuda Triangle where thousands of ships have come to grief
