It is called the “Holy Grail” of shipwrecks, a riddle that has puzzled historians and adventurers for centuries while offering up gold coins and skeletons as compelling clues.
Local maritime historians Cris Kohl and his wife Joan Forsberg will be featured on Unknown Expedition Wednesday as the Discovery Channel show investigates the mythic search for the Griffon.
To this day, nobody has been able to account for that wreckage
Often cited as the first ship to sail the Great Lakes, the Griffon moved through local waters before heading north and disappearing, sparking a 340-year mystery that the Discovery Channel hopes to finally solve.
“The general search for the Griffon is trying to lay this greatest mystery of the Great Lakes to rest,” said Kohl, 70, who has spent half his life searching for proof of the ship’s final resting place. “There have been more than two dozen claims of discovery made in the last 150 years. Pretty much all of them have been discounted or discredited or outrightly disproven.”
The Griffon was built near Niagara Falls in 1679. Commanded by René-Robert Cavalier, a French explorer and fur trader also known as LaSalle, it sailed through local waters in August 1679 on its maiden voyage.
A month later, LaSalle sent the ship and a skeleton crew towards Montreal. The boat was last seen by LaSalle and most of his men in Green Bay, near Washington Island in Lake Michigan.
“LaSalle was heavily in debt,” said Kohl, who counts The Wreck of the Griffon among his 16 books. “He had to get furs as quickly as possible sent back on the Griffon to Montreal to appease his creditors. Well, it was his worst bad luck that the ship that was meant to save his financial rear end ended up disappearing.”
The centuries since the ship’s disappearance have brought dozens of theories about its fate. One of the most enduring claims, and the one Kohl and Forsberg have always believed is the strongest, has the ship and its men meeting their demise on Manitoulin Island.
“A lot of people think the ship must have gone down in northern Lake Michigan,” said Kohl, who spent three days on the island during filming. “We think it made it through the Straits of Mackinac and was blown onto the rocks at Manitoulin Island.”
People have been telling stories about a shipwreck on the island for hundreds of years.
“There was what the First Nations people on Manitoulin Island called the ‘white man’s boat,’” said Kohl. “They knew this wreckage to have been there since at least the late 1700s.”
Many years later, a British naval officer doing a survey of Georgian Bay between 1818 and 1821 noted some old wreckage on the shoreline.
“To this day, nobody has been able to account for that wreckage,” said Kohl.
It was unusual because it had lead lining between the wooden seams, he said.
“There’s been no record of any other ship in the Great Lakes that had lead caulking,” said Kohl.
That wreckage was last seen on the western side of Manitoulin Island before it was washed away in 1940, though some pieces were collected and now sit in a museum on the island.
In the 1890s, also on the island’s western edge, a lighthouse keeper found skeletal remains in a cave along with French coins and a silver watch.
“Trouble is, all that stuff disappeared,” said Kohl. “The lighthouse keeper took it with him when he retired and nobody knows where it is now.”
Part of the Discovery Channel search involved exploring that cave with metal detectors.
Kohl is forbidden from revealing what they found in that cave, or if they finally solved the mystery of the Griffon, before the show airs.
“Anybody who tunes in to that show is going to learn a lot about the Griffon, the first ship on the upper Great Lakes, and how it disappeared on the return leg of its maiden voyage, how it’s become the greatest mystery of the Great Lakes and how we might be getting — ah, I can’t tell you any more.”
Expedition Unknown airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on the Discovery Channel.
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019
