Heather Wright/The Independent

Canadians have relearned the “legend” of the Edmund Fitzgerald this month on the 50th anniversary of the shipwreck on Lake Superior which claimed 29 lives.

But few know the stories of the 5,000 ships laying at the bottom of Lake Huron which either sank in rough weather or were discarded to the deeps when they were no longer needed.

Two Lambton County men, Greg Hillyard of Alvinston and Tim Moran of Mooretown, actively search for what they call mystery ships and recently not only rediscovered a giant wooden hull off near Kettle and Stony Point but uncovered its history.

Hillyard, a long-time diver who owns his own marine business, heard “through the grapevine” and social media about a charter operator out of the Wheatley area, John Little, who had been snagging his fishing lines on something on the bottom. Hillyard wanted to see what it was, so he reached out and got the GPS coordinates. “That got us diving it.”

Hillyard says other teams had been there before, but it had not been clearly documented. “It became a bit of an obsession.”

But he said the ship was deep, in about 100 feet of water, and was difficult to dive. So, he brought in Moran to help.

The Mooretown man discovered diving in his teens. His office is filled with artifacts claimed from the bottom, everything from dishes dropped from cruise ships to portholes.

“Tim spent a winter just grinding it out all the details,” said Hillyard.

Moran dove deep into every detail of the ship. He found every ship with similar dimensions to the wooden hulk on the bottom of Lake Huron and began ruling out them out. One similar ship sunk in Lake Superior, another was scrapped at Oswego. “It came down to a very short list,” says Hillyard.

Moran found the ship was first located by Kenneth Gascoigne in 2008. He gave the information to a marine historian, hoping he would be able to identify it. Little found the ship in 2015 and provided the coordinates to Hillyard. 

Together the pair found the wooden ship was about 290 feet long and between 40 and 42 feet wide. It had been powered by two large Scotch Boilers. It’s 12-foot propeller had two of the four blades broken off. 

The ship’s rudder – 20’ long by eight feet wide – lays off the stern of the boat. Moran believes the ship hit the bottom first and then was dragged before the bow fell to the lake bed. He says that would explain the debris found around the ship.

Moran concluded the ship had been burned and stripped of most of its machinery, including the engines and the winches, and likely “scuttled.”

Hillyard says “sometime in the 20s, there was a cleanup project to get all these derelict old boats off the banks of the river and back in the 20s, you could just make it go away –  just take it out in the lake and not come back with it.”

Moran eventually concluded the ship was a steamer built by the American Shipbuilding Company in 1890 named Tampa. It had been docked in Marine City for decades.

Ship hulks from the St. Clair River that were scuttled in Lake Huron have been referred to as the Ghost Fleet of the St. Clair River, according to Moran. The Tampa is one of six ghost ships known in the area, including the steamers City of Genoa, Yakima, Sachem, Aztec and an unnamed steamer off the coast of Bright’s Grove. The dredge ship, Province is also a member of the ghost fleet. 

And Moran says, research suggests there are likely many more to be discovered which ended up on the bottom of Lake Huron.

“Vessels that have outlived their usefulness, abandoned by its owners for being obsolete or succumbed by collision, fire, flounder or other mishap where allowed to languish along the St. Clair River banks and docks or within its tributaries,” Moran said. Such was the case of the Tampa, which showed evidence of fire on the ship.

“Some were brought to Sarnia by local salvers and stripped of anything useful and then abandoned in the backwater areas of Sarnia Bay. Ultimately these hulks were either dynamited in place, burned, demolished in place, or raised and taken out to Lake Huron and scuttled.  

“Sometimes vessels were set afire until they ultimately sank.”

It took Hillyard and Moran years to get enough details from the wreck to say with any confidence that the ship lying off Kettle and Stony Point is the Tampa. Hillyard regrets he didn’t take his camera out during one of the last night dives of the wreck. “You notice a lot more detail that way.” Hillyard recalls the sharp, almost ocean-going style stem, which looks very much like the line drawings available of the Tampa. 

With a good photo, he says, he could confirm it is a “perfect match.”

Hillyard adds diving the wreck and confirming its origins uncovers another piece of Lambton’s history. 

“When we get to visit these wrecks, we get to retell their story,” he says.

“When we get to share photos and we get to share our experiences diving them or documenting them, it brings back the story of those people and how they lived.”