Lake Superior shipwreck Adella Shores, missing since 1909, finally found

The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.

But historians, sometimes can find where her shipwrecks ended up.

The Adella Shores — a wooden steamship loaded down with salt that vanished in 1909 as it rounded Whitefish Point during a fierce, Lake Superior gale — has been located, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society said Wednesday, as part of its efforts to find thousands of missing vessels.

By tradition and state law, the ships must remain in the deep water, but when found, their tales can be told.

The Shores was one of the many ships classified as missing in the Great Lakes, and shipwreck hunters now know it went to the "bottom of Lake Superior" on May 1, 1909. There were no survivors. When the ship vanished, the society said, "some debris was found, but no bodies."

In a twist, the ship it was following, a larger, steel steamship, the Daniel J. Morrell, also sank — decades later.

The find is significant, not just for history, but because it allows distant relatives of the ship's 14 crew members to finally, and definitively, know their loved one’s final resting place: 40 miles northwest of Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula, under 650 feet of icy water.

The only names that are known of the crew is the captain: Holmes. The crew records, historical society officials said, were aboard the ship and appear to be lost, but the find might spur relatives who, through family lore, could contact the shipwreck museum.

One estimate puts the number of Great Lakes shipwrecks at more than 6,000, some dating to the 17th century.

More: An 1881 Lake Michigan shipwreck story of a leaky ship, a lost dog and a brave crew

Fred Stonehouse, a maritime historian and author of "Went Missing," said that the Shores reveals a “very poignant and fascinating story,” and the "folks that are out there actively hunting for shipwrecks, like the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, are helping to" tell it.

They keep looking, Stonehouse added, for the ones that are not yet found.

One of the most famous modern Great Lakes shipwrecks is the Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that also sank in Lake Superior in 1975 during a terrible gale. Its crew of 29 men perished, but the memory of them was immortalized by folk singer Gordon Lightfoot, who described the storm-tossed ship as "bone to be chewed."

The Shores — which was headed to Duluth, Minnesota — left the dock and was never seen again until 2021, when the wreck hunters — Darryl Ertel, the society’s director of marine operations, and his brother, Dan, spotted it using a side-scan sonar system.

"I pretty much knew that had to be the Adella Shores when I measured the length of it because there were no other ships out there missing in that size range," Darryl Ertel said, adding that as soon as he maneuvered the remote-operated vehicle toward it he "could see the design of the ship" and it matched the Shores.

The society, however, said it spent several years corroborating its findings with other historical records before announcing the ship had been found.

The 195-foot, 735-ton ship was built in Gibraltar, owned by the Shores Lumber Co., and named after the owner’s daughter, Adella.

Adella’s sister, Bessie, christened the ship with a bottle of water instead of champagne because the family that owned the ship was strict about alcohol consumption, and some sailors might have considered the change to the tradition a "bad luck omen."

The Shores had sunk twice before in shallow waters but was refloated each time.

On April 29, 1909, the ship was following the Morrell, through a thick ice floe. The Morrell was plowing a path through the ice, but near Whitefish Point, both ships were caught in a storm. The Shores fell behind, lost sight of the Morrell.

And then it vanished.

The captain of the Morrell, the historians said, theorized that the smaller ship may struck the ice.

As it turns out, the 603-foot long Morrell, which was built in 1906, and new when the Shores sank, broke up in 1966 during a ferocious storm on Lake Huron. The tragedy took the lives of 28 of the 29 crew aboard. The lone survivor, Dennis Hale, died in Ohio in 2015 at 75.

A watchman inside the pilot house, Hale was 26 when the Morrell sank off the coast of Port Hope.

Hale and three of his crewmates managed to climb into a small life raft, but they froze to death before they could be rescued. Hale wrote a book about his experience, "Shipwrecked: Reflections of the Sole Survivor," and said telling his story was a kind of therapy for him.

"I think somehow I give people a little hope in life, that life is a struggle," Hale reportedly said years later of his November ordeal on the lake. "But if you have faith and determination you can go through life and come out ahead."

It is unclear how much the wreckage of the Shores can reveal about the ship's — and crew's — last moments on the lake, but the more than a century-old mystery about where the ship went down finally has been solved.

Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 or fwitsil@freepress.com.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Lake Superior shipwreck Adella Shores, lost since 1909, finally found