How Underwater Detectives Found the Henry B. Smith: An Excerpt from “The Last Laker”

by

This edited excerpt is from author and maritime historian Fred Stonehouse’s The Last Laker, Finding a Wreck Lost in the Great Lakes’ Deadliest Storm, just released by the publishers of this magazine. The book examines the 1913 hurricane-force storm that wrecked 12 ships with all hands on the five lakes. Among those that disappeared that night was the 525-foot Henry B. Smith. This excerpt follows the men who found that wreck nearly 100 years after it went missing.

The Henry B. Smith was found on May 24, 2013, by a small team of dedicated shipwreck hunters. It made national, even international, news. She had been missing almost a century, but through decades of effort, the shipwreck hunters put it all together and solved one of the biggest mysteries of the Inland Seas.

Most Great Lakes shipwreck divers are content to explore known wrecks, photograph them and probe for hidden secrets. In their heart of hearts, though, all dream of finding a “virgin wreck,” one never before found. Rarely do their dreams come true. Searching for such wrecks is hard work, time-consuming and requires expensive technology. Success is not guaranteed. But there are divers who raise their game and accomplish the near impossible task of finding virgin wrecks. The group that found the Henry B. Smith is extraordinary in that not only did they find her, but many other wrecks, too, individually or with a team. In part, the Smith is their story.

Lake Superior was calm that morning as the small outboard slowly churned through the water. Aboard were three of the most successful shipwreck hunters on the Great Lakes: Jerry Eliason, Ken Merryman and Kraig Smith. The friends have sought undiscovered shipwrecks for many years, one media outlet calling the trio the “Great Lakes legendary shipwreck hunters.” Eliason works as a regional supervisor at the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, Smith as a CFO (chief financial officer) to a company manufacturing weighing equipment. Merryman is a computer design engineer, but in his spare time charters out his boat Heyboy.

As they chugged along, suddenly things became very exciting, very fast.

“For me,” Eliason related, “those couple minutes we were seeing the Henry B. Smith flying bridge live was an ‘all the hours of shipwreck hunting, research and money spent was worth it’ realization. When I saw that flying bridge video live, I was making sounds that convinced Ken that I somehow had hidden a woman on the boat!”

All of the team on the boat that day had a single overwhelming common denominator – the powerful desire to solve the mysteries of ships missing on the Great Lakes, and they were very experienced wreck divers.

Eliason started diving in 1966 at the age of 13, first hitting Lake Superior two years later. By 1976, he was wreck diving regularly; typically about 50 wreck dives a year. He and Smith met on Isle Royale in 1979 while both were diving with different groups. Merryman joined the pair in 1992.

The team’s shipwreck-finding activities started in 1999 when Eliason’s son, Jarrod, working with his father, built their first effective side-scan sonar system. Things really came together later in the year when Smith purchased his C-Dory, a trailerable fiberglass cuddy cabin skiff. It was a perfect search platform for sensitive electronics like side-scan sonar and video cameras.

Other than the consuming desire to find undiscovered shipwrecks, these team members bring critical skills and experience to the table.

Besides being a computer engineer by trade, Merryman had been running dive charters to Isle Royale, the Apostle Islands and the Minnesota North Shore since the early 1970s. In 1977, he led the group that discovered the Kamloops, lost off Isle Royale in a December 1927 storm, and in 1991 discovered the tug T.H. Camp in the Apostles. Perhaps his greatest accomplishment came in helping to found the Great Lakes Shipwreck Preservation Society in 1995. GLSPS is the leader in the diving community, and has answered the question: “OK, you found it. Now what do you do?” Part of GLSPS’s answer is to place wrecks on the National Register of Historic Places.

For his part, Smith admits that he participates “simply for the adventure … the excitement of solving a mystery. It’s not TV, but a great experience. What we are going to find next, what is just out of sight, realizing most likely no one else has ever seen this before. Friendship is No. 1, then pursuit, leaning forward with a shared objective to apply thought, conversation and energy toward (it).”

The objective of all the work was always in clear focus. Eliason said it’s like “winning the Stanley Cup. We have our private celebration first, and then right away we start thinking about going to find the next one.”

Smith relates, “It takes a lot of perseverance, that’s for sure,” noting the team went through a 14-year dry spell without finding one of several shipwrecks they were seeking. “We were really grinding for quite a while.”

The group is well-respected. “There are only about 50 serious shipwreck hunters on the whole Great Lakes,” said Brendon Baillod, a noted maritime historian, “and those guys on western Lake Superior are in the top five.”

With all due respect, I rate them clearly as No. 1 on the Big Lake.

Oddly, the team never specifically went after the Henry B. Smith. Rather, they went to Big Bay in late May 2013 to evaluate several geologic anomalies discovered by sifting through a huge amount of geologic data. This is a tale in itself.

One of the group’s long-term projects was to find a German submarine off Cape Race, Newfoundland. To this end, Eliason wrote to a plethora of federal agencies using the Freedom of Information Act to request information on how they cataloged static anomalies off the East Coast. “So when we were out hunting for German submarines,” as Eliason said, “we wouldn’t get all excited that we had a German sub when in reality all we had was a geologic anomaly in the same place all the time (presumably a shipwreck).”

In response to his FOIA requests, he received a series of replies in effect saying, “We don’t have what you want but check with this other agency.” Some replies came from rather obscure agencies, including the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.

“Ultimately last November (2012), I received a letter providing me with access and instructions on what they had, with the notation that the data they were providing access to wouldn’t do me any good in finding shipwrecks, but here it is,” related Eliason. “I was amazed and surprised to find that not only was there a treasure trove of geologic data for the East Coast, but also the Great Lakes. In raw form, the data was just millions and millions of numbers, which is where my wife came in. She is a wiz at processing and graphing data. The raw data didn’t say, ‘Here’s a possible wreck,’ but between my wife, son and me, we developed some data processing formulas.” (Author’s note: His wife, Karen, is a remarkably talented software engineer.)

Since Eliason knew where most of the known wrecks in Lake Superior are located, the group used the process on available data to focus on several known wrecks. The first wreck to jump off the bottom after processing and graphing the data was the Superior City. Proving the fragility of the data, other wrecks like the Cowle and Edmund Fitzgerald did not stand out. But since the Superior City proved the analysis methodology, they applied the process in other sections of the lake. One of the data analysis anomalies would turn out to be the Henry B. Smith. Another was the Cyprus. Proving the variability of the data, three other targets turned out to be geologic features. Oddly, another target wasn’t a shipwreck … or at least yet. Apparently it was a surface ship swept up when the original data was collected. This is, of course, a very cursory explanation of the process used. The team still has a number of potential targets to evaluate and widely distributing the exact methods would be counterproductive for their work.

The finding of the Henry B. Smith happened thusly, according to Eliason: “When we headed out, the weather was good, but not great or perfect. I wasn’t sure we weren’t just going for a long boat ride. I was driving the boat, and as we slowed down, just before hitting the waypoint selected by placing the cursor on my wife’s graph of the area, I saw what looked like fish about 120 feet above the bottom.

“I now know the fish-finder was picking up the bow mast, but I couldn’t imagine it could be that easy, so we launched the side-scan and started a pass from a point half a mile north and east of the waypoint. When we got to the west end of the selected one-mile pass, we dropped south 0.1 nautical mile and saw the huge anomaly partly caused by the wreck and partly caused by the rain of iron ore. There were strong geometric acoustic shadows that suggested we had something more than geology. We then launched the camera (drop camera) and started seeing disturbed bottom like we commonly see around wrecks. She teased us for a while, but while moving the camera we winded up seeing a steel pole (forward mast) that said this was a manmade anomaly, not a natural one. Ken, Kraig and I have been fortunate to have been through this several times before, but when we got the camera on the pilot house and flying bridge, I knew it was the best find of my career. The Benjamin Noble had a lot of allure, but turned out to be not a very good wreck. The Judge Hart was and is a superbly intact wreck, but lacking on the history and other intangibles. The Henry B. Smith has it all – history, mystery and a beautiful wreck.”

Between them, these three Great Lakes divers have discovered 13 wrecks, not counting “rediscovery” of three others once lost to history.

By any standard this is a most impressive list of successes, like finding a needle in a haystack again and again. In a way their achievement borders on the mystic, but in reality it is the result of huge amounts of hard work, brilliant engineering and experience.

For me it is time for a toast to their triumphs past and for those yet to come!