Ship is rumored to have been carrying $100K in gold coins for payroll
By Garret Ellison
MLive.com
SOUTH MANITOU ISLAND, Mich. (AP) — After 18 hours spent battling a blizzard on Lake Michigan, the fate of the Westmoreland was sealed less than three miles from safety.
At 10 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1854, rising water in the bilge finally extinguished the fire in the boiler, leaving the cargo-laden steamer powerless and thrown to the mercy of heavy, icy seas off a then-remote stretch of Lake Michigan coastline.
Half the souls on board the Westmoreland would soon perish in the deep, frigid waters of Platte Bay. The other half would spread the legend of a ship reputed to be carrying $100,000 in gold coins in her safe, and 280 barrels of whiskey in her hold, sparking more than a century of treasure hunters that would search in vain for the wreck.
Search in vain, that is, until 155 years after the sinking, when a diver and shipwreck sleuth from Grand Rapids would find what others could not; the wreck of the Westmoreland sitting upright on the lake bed, 200 feet under the surface of a bay where summer vacationers frolic in the shadow of the Sleeping Bear Dunes Lakeshore.
“It is probably one of the most well-preserved shipwrecks from the 1850s on the planet,” said Ross Richardson, who found the wreck on July 7, 2010.
“It’s in amazing condition.”
Richardson, a former 17-year Steelcase employee, lived in Grand Rapids for 40 years before relocating to Lake Ann in 2008. A board member with the Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates nonprofit during his stint in Grand Rapids, he took up the mantle of the Westmoreland after his move to northern Michigan, where proximity to the wreck gave him better access to primary sources and other historical research materials.
The diver had been enamored with the Westmoreland since reading about her and beginning some preliminary research into her location in 2004.
His first stab at finding the wreck was in 2006 with another searcher. The expedition gave Richardson some better understanding of the Manitou Passage’s underwater topography and some insight into why previous expeditions had failed.
Richardson began zeroing in on the wreck using accounts published in various newspapers around the country by survivors of the Westmoreland. Much of Richardson’s research has been reproduced in his book “The Search for the Westmoreland,” published by Arbutus Press of Traverse City.
Shipwreck research is an exhaustive process akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. A search grid and depth estimate has to be pieced together using clues culled from reference books, old newspapers on microfilm, oral histories and other sources.
“A lot of times you have to go through every page of a newspaper for three months to find that one or two graphs that can be useful,” he said.
Then, in late 2009, while working some volunteer hours at the Almira Township Library, Richardson found an 1889 letter in a book about South Manitou Island written to the U.S. Life Saving Service (now Coast Guard) that gave valuable clues indicating the Westmoreland was located off Otter Creek, near a promising “dark spot” he’d identified analyzing Google Earth mapping of the waters off Esch Road Beach.
It was the final puzzle piece for Richardson, who had already sold a beloved vintage muscle car in order to finance the purchase of a boat and sonar equipment.
According to Richardson’s book, the first mention of gold aboard the Westmoreland appears to be in a book by Traverse City historian Martin Melkild, “Log Cabin Tales of Leelanau.”
It was the last run of the year, and Richardson said the speculation over the years was that the Westmoreland was on a payroll run for the Army garrison there. The gold, in the form of $20 double eagle pieces, and the whiskey, was supposedly loaded in Chicago.
Stories tell of a small, drunken party of German lumberjacks who locked themselves in their cabin playing cards when the storm hit and soused themselves on the cargo of whiskey; eventually being left behind when the crew abandoned ship.
The ship was heavily laden with cargo and burdened with a thick ice coating from the waves. It sprung a leak mid-lake. Captain Thomas Clark tried to make safe harbor at South Manitou, but the boilers were doused within sight of the protective harbor. Powerless, the steamer, sinking at the stern, began to drift south through the treacherous Manitou Passage.
“The sounds of the storm were deafening. People were yelling and screaming and the whines and howls of William Saltonstall’s sled dogs could be heard as the Westmoreland slipped beneath the waves. Several of the men who were tossed from the large lifeboat were last seen clinging to the arches as the Westmoreland foundered. The icy seas bubbled with white foam and wreckage from the cabins and anything else buoyant enough to rip itself off the ship. The 15 passengers and crew who were left behind either drowned or quickly froze to death in the frigid water.”
The two surviving lifeboats landed on shore a quarter mile east of the Platte River mouth, then a remote dune river winding through a stretch of giant virgin pine trees. The 17 survivors split into groups making for Manistee and Traverse City by hugging the shoreline.
In 1872, The Westmoreland’s first mate, Paul Pelkey, would be the first of more than a dozen salvage-seeking expeditions drawn to Platte Bay by the legend of treasure within the sunken ship’s hold.
Shipwrecks, said Richardson, are like underwater haunted houses.
“It is scary,” he said, likening the isolation of the cold, dark water to being on the surface of the moon. “The only thing you hear is bubbles. It’s very still-life down there.”
