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On May 4, 1891, as strong winds and waves raged on Lake Superior, the crew of a sailing barge named Atlanta abandoned the ship as it sank. Six men and a woman, a cook, clung to the lifeboat for nine hours and fought on their oars to get it to the Michigan shore.

As they approached land, the lifeboat capsized within sight of a distant rescue patrol, mistaking it for a tree trunk rolling in turbulent water, according to archival reports. Six of the crew members managed to get back to the boat, but the boat turned upside down again. Only two men survived.

This month, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society said the Atlanta wreck was found after sitting undetected in the cold oblivion of the lake’s depths for more than a century. The announcement rekindled the story of how Atlanta crew members fought for their lives in the world’s largest freshwater lake.

“Suddenly, our cameras were on us,” Bruce Lynn, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Mich., said in an interview. “We were the first human eyes to look at it since that dramatic moment. I almost jumped out of my chair.”

Lake Superior, which is also bordered by Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Ontario, Canada, has historically been crossed by shipping lanes. High traffic volumes meant collisions, meaning hundreds of ships were sunk and the deepest terrain of the lake turned into a naval graveyard ready to be explored.

Mr. Lynn said that in 2021, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, the nonprofit that operates the museum, had its best season. side-scan sonarsending and receiving acoustic pulses that help map the seafloor and detect underwater objects . Darryl Ertel, the society’s director of naval operations, said after towing 2,500 miles of sonar, he discovered nine shipwrecks each season, the most including Atlanta.

Hundreds of debris are estimated to be in the approximately 32,000-square-mile lake, most of which is in the Whitefish Point area of ​​Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which Atlanta’s crew members are desperately trying to reach in lifeboats.

Last July, the community’s researchers dragged sonar in a grid pattern across the lake. They took a 650-foot-deep feature that they couldn’t immediately identify and marked it for future exploration.

Atlanta was slowly making itself known.

Mr. Lynn returned with the crew in August. The weather was calm. They launched a remote-controlled device into the water. As his camera zoomed out, a glimmering scrolling ship appeared in the clear water. (Lake Superior does not have the invasive zebra mussels lining the debris in other Great Lakes.)

The letters in the ship’s name read “Atlanta”.

“It was a target we found before, but we weren’t sure exactly what it was,” Lynn said. “You never know for sure until you see a smoking gun. That was the nameplate. It proclaimed in vague terms, ‘This is who I am’.”

Lake Superior’s shipwrecks are steeped in history. In 1918, as the First World War ended, two minesweepers Built for France in Canada, it sank, dozens of sailors died. In 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the largest freighters on the Great Lakes, sank while it was snowing. with 29 men on board become a cultural legend without sending a distress signal haunting ballad Gordon Lightfoot’s photo.

The voyage of Atlanta was typical of the Industrial Revolution, where sailing barges transported iron ore and coal across Lake Superior, Fred Stonehouse said. local historian.

About 550 shipwrecks are found in the lake, while about 40 ships are missing. Their journeys were recorded by officials at the locks, the gateways connecting the lakes, and in newspaper reports about ship traffic. “’Sailing a crack in the lake’ was a phrase you often saw a hundred years ago,” said Mr. Stonehouse.

Sometimes corpses or pieces of debris appeared, he said.

“It’s really about solving historical mysteries,” said Mr. Stonehouse.

The discovery of Atlanta, about 35 miles offshore, aroused the interest of researchers because of first-hand accounts of survivors. In early May 1891, the weekly newspaper Soo Democrat published a series of stories about the ill-fated voyage and rescue.

He had set out from Buffalo, NY for the coal-laden 172-foot Atlanta, Duluth, Minn. On May 3, 1891, he encountered a light breeze. At night, “one of the worst storms that swept the largest of all lakes was fierce,” Soo Democrat said. The storm fell on Atlanta, which was being towed by another ship, Wilhelm.

The towline snapped and Atlanta began picking up water that her crew was trying to block with a pump.

At 9 am on the morning of May 4, the ship with 10 feet of water in its hull was abandoned. The crew remained in the lifeboat for nine hours as the storm “intensified at its worst”. About 200 meters from Whitefish Point, the lifeboat capsized in sight of a rescuer. US Life Saving ServiceCoast Guard pioneer who mistook it for a tree trunk rolling in the waves.

All but one of Atlanta’s crew returned to the lifeboat. It capsized again 100 meters later.

“This was where the struggle for life was most intense,” the newspaper said.

The newspaper said the remaining crew members were seen bobbing in the water before sinking under the waves. The two, described as John Pickel and “Nellie” Wait, were pulled out of the surf as “more dead than alive” and “what remains to tell the tale of a struggle that eclipses fiction in its horrific details.”

Atlanta will not be disturbed. A Michigan law makes it illegal But Mr. Lynn said it would also be like raiding a funeral.

“They’re like cemeteries,” he said. Finding Atlanta was “lucky. There were survivors who could tell us what happened.”