Le Griffon, the lost ship

The first and most-hunted Great Lakes shipwreck, still lost since 1679

In the winter of 1678 the French explorer René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, sent men up the Niagara River to build a ship above the falls, and on 26 January 1679 he drove the first bolt into her keel at or near Cayuga Island. He needed her to carry furs: a monopoly on the western fur trade was to pay his debts and finance his search for a passage to China. The Senecas, whose country this was, had to be won over to "the big canoe" with gifts and embassies on snowshoes, and the builders launched earlier than planned for fear of sabotage. She was Le Griffon, the Griffin, perhaps a 45-ton barque of 30 to 40 feet with seven cannon, a griffin on her jib-boom and an eagle above, larger than anything yet seen on the lakes.

On 7 August 1679 La Salle and Father Louis Hennepin sailed her with a crew of 32 across Lake Erie, up the shallow St. Clair River, through a near-fatal storm on Lake Huron and on into Lake Michigan, waters only canoes had crossed before. At an island at the mouth of Green Bay his advance men were waiting with furs from the tribes gathered there. On 18 September he sent her back toward Niagara, loaded with pelts and six crewmen, and stayed behind to explore. She never arrived. Local tribes reported seeing her sail into a violent storm and, the next spring, finding a hatch cover and spoiled pelts. La Salle came to suspect worse. By a letter of 1683 he had heard of captive Frenchmen carrying pelts and explosives, one perhaps matching the pilot, Luc the Dane, and until his death in 1687 he believed his crew had betrayed him.

The Griffon carried no treasure that would survive three centuries in the water, yet she is the Holy Grail of Great Lakes wrecks, because the cold fresh water preserves ships so well she could lie almost intact somewhere on the bottom. Shipwreck hunters joke that she is the most searched-for and most found ship on the lakes. Michigan's maritime archaeologist Wayne Lusardi investigated at least 17 Griffon claims after 2002, and only two of them were ships at all; others were telephone poles, pieces of barns and piles of rock. Steve Libert spent more than three decades on the search and in 2001 bumped into an old timber with three hand-hewn pegs that he believed was her bowsprit; it remains unproven. Michigan's official position is that no evidence of the Griffon has been found.