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Stonehouse to address lakes shipwreck mystery

Ships from yesteryear are pictured. (Photo courtesy of the Marquette Maritime Museum)

MARQUETTE — Maritime History on Tap presents Fred Stonehouse’s “Gone: The Greatest Shipwreck Mystery on the Great Lakes” at 7 p.m. Dec. 6 at the Ore Dock Brewing Co.. in Marquette.

The suggested donation at the door is $5. Arrive early for the Christmas ornament sale at the Marquette Maritime Museum gift shop table.

A number of ships have “gone missing” on Lake Superior but the most inexplicable loss was that of the French Navy minesweepers Inkermann and Cerisoles, each with 38 French sailors and a Great Lakes pilot aboard.

To this day their fate remains one of the biggest mysteries of the Great Lakes. They were part of a dozen of the tough little vessels built by Canadian Car and Foundry in Fort William, Ontario (today’s Thunder Bay).

The pair, plus the minesweeper Sebastopol, left Port Arthur on Nov. 23, 1918 bound for Montreal, before final delivery to France. Somewhere in Lake Superior Inkermann and Cerisoles disappeared.

Desperate searches failed to find the missing warships. No confirmed human remains were ever recovered and what little flotsam was found gave mute testimony to the disaster.

Accusations of poor construction, shoddy seamanship and collision followed but real evidence was illusionary. French Navy investigations were equally empty of solutions. The mystery remains unsolved.

Maritime History on Tap is sponsored in part by the Michigan Arts and Culture Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Upper Michigan Energy Resources in partnership with We Energies Foundation.

This program will begin with a brief annual meeting of the Marquette Maritime Museum. Call 906-226-2006 for more information.

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