1890 Diver

[flyboy65]

Here's an article I typed from a newsletter I received from Elmer Engman, which had been copied from microfilm, from the Duluth newspaper, dated 1890.  It's a long read, I know, but SPOOKILY worth it!  Hope you enjoy!

Part I

Duluth Weekly Herald    Aug 1, 1890

Toledo letter in the New York Sun:  “Foundering vessels on the lakes, especially sailing vessels, frequently sink so squarely,” said a Toledo man who belongs to the precarious and perilous profession of lake diving, “that we find them resting on the bottom as trim and neat as if their keels were still plowing the surface.  This is particularly the case in Lake Huron, whose waters are unlike those of any other lakes in the great chain, although all its water comes from Lake Superior.  What the scientific explanation of the fact is I don’t know, but a diver can work on the bottom of Lake Huron at a depth of at least twenty feet greater than he can in Lake Superior, and much deeper than he can in any of the other lakes.  In Superior a diver can’t see further than ten feet into the water surrounding him, but in Huron he can distinctly distinguish objects fifty feet away.  At a depth of 100 feet in Lake Superior a diver can only work an hour at a time, the feeling of oppression becoming unbearably painful, but I have worked five hours at a stretch in Lake Huron 115 feet below the surface without suffering to any great extent from the pressure of the water.  A man drowned in Lake Superior never appears on the surface, while the dead float on the waters of Lake Huron.

“It is a weird and startling sight to come suddenly upon a full-rigged vessel far down in the solemn depth of the lake, standing erect on her keel as if she were dashing away before the breeze on the gleaming surface.  It is uncanny and ghostlike.  There are no waves down there, but a mysterious swelling and swaying of the waters that give a see-sawing, tossing motion to the specter craft, which is all the more spectral because there is no creak of timber, no sound of straining ropes or grinding keel.  You may climb the rigging, walk the deck, go down into the sunken cabin as readily and easily as if you were a sailor and the vessel were sailing along with only the sky above it, but you can’t help thinking constantly of death and the tomb.  There is no sound down here but the intermitting wail and moan, wail and moan of the swaying waters all around and above you, and yet seeming far away.  I would much rather find a sunken wreck a wreck indeed.  You naturally expect to find a broken ruin on the bottom of the lake, not the ghost of a perfect ship.  I can work and search with better cheer among splintered beams and shattered spars and broken keel where I have to pry and chop and batter down to uncover the object of my quest, whether it is merchandise, treasure or human corpses, than I can on a sunken craft that gives me free and easy access to her sunken stores and watery sepulchers.
“I have gone down to the lake bottoms many and many a time to release the bodies of men, women and children who were known to have perished in sinking vessels, and I long ago grew insensible to any feeling of horror or even uneasiness in searching among sunken wrecks for corpses.  But if I have gone to the bottom to recover goods or valuables simply, no one having been carried down with the vessel and lost, I am continually haunted by a dread that some dead man will rise suddenly from some part of the wreck and confront me, or that corpses are floating in the water above and around me.  I never go down a hatchway or into the cabin of a sunken vessel at such times without involuntarily shuddering over the though that perhaps some poor victim of the wreck is imprisoned, there, and that he will suddenly be released by the lurchings of the hulk and appear to me in all his swollen, wild-eyed frightfulness.  I know, of course, that a dead person is as harmless, tossed fantastically about amid the solemn soundings of many fathoms deep, as he would by lying calmly in his coffin at home, but I can’t help a cold shudder and an inclination to signal to be pulled to the surface if I come unexpectedly in contact with one at the bottom of the lake.  That feeling is by no means common among lake divers, and with me it is the result of an indelible first impression, and incident of my first experience on a sunken wreck.