Canadian journalist John MacLean, positive he and Orrie Vail have found the wreck of explorer LaSalle's ship, the Griffon, brought in two experts to examine remains of the wreckage.
In August of 1955, MacLean traveled to Vail's home at Tobermory, Ontario, on Georgian Bay. The experts were Rowley W. Murphy, a marine architect and artist, and C.H.J. Snider, a world-recognized authority on early shipping and a member of Britain's exclusive Society for Nautical Research.
MacLean and Vail took them in an outboard to the isolated cove off Russell Island in Georgian Bay, where the wreck lay underwater for centuries. Then they returned to Vail's workshed, where the salvaged parts of the wreckage were stored.
They wrote a lengthy report that concluded, "We have decided that the Tobermory wreck found in Russell Island fills all the information we have as to the size and shape of the Griffon. We can accept the Tobermory recovery as the Griffon."
MacLean and Vail were overjoyed. But MacLean had a lingering mystery. He wrote, "It's just that I'm concerned about the location. If the Griffon was headed for Niagara Falls after leaving LaSalle in Green Bay, how could she end up here?"
For the answer, he turned to Father Louis Hennepin's writings about the ship's maiden voyage through the Great Lakes to Mackinac, where LaSalle learned some in his advance party had deserted to Sault St. Marie. He sent his second in command, Iron Hand Tonti, 30 miles north to apprehend the deserters. The ship moved on to Green Bay to pick up furs.
LaSalle was waiting for Tonti's return. Tonti was to command the ship back to Niagara while LaSalle moved down the Illinois River, continuing his explorations. However, Tonti was delayed, and bad winter weather was approaching, so LaSalle sent a small crew under command of his pilot, a Dane named Lucas.
Hennepin wrote, "LaSalle, without asking anybody's advice, resolved to send back his ship to Niagara laden with furs and skins to discharge his debts. Our pilot and five men with him were therefore sent back." They left on Sept. 18, 1680.
That was the last LaSalle saw or heard of his boat or the pilot and crew. He later received word that a pack of moldy beaver skins had been cast up on Mackinac Island.
After much research, MacLean wrote about his personal belief that the Griffon "didn't drift into her grave. It wasn't happenstance that robbed the explorer of his ship." To get to the wreckage location, the Griffon "was carefully steered into the narrow channel entrance to the first cove."
Then, according to MacLean, "She was turned to a bearing of 240 degrees. Then she was angled four degrees to the starboard and probably towed through the next and narrower channel by men on shore."
At that stage in history, he said, the only people who would know of such a secluded cove were Native Americans. But, he said, they would not have had the expertise to maneuver such a ship into that location.
He believes the pilot and the crew wanted to steal the furs, so they picked up some Indians, who directed them into Georgian Bay and the isolated cove. Then the ship was scuttled and the crew made off with the furs. Or perhaps the Indians turned the tables, killed the crew, sank the ship and stole the furs.
A French historian, La Poutherie, who published a book in 1753, wrote that Lucas, at a stop on the return trip, met some Indians "and received them with entire good will, but the opportunity seemed to them at the moment too advantageous to miss their stroke."
He said they "slew all the Frenchmen, carried away all the goods that suited them and burned the barque." LaSalle, he wrote, after showing the Indians "tokens of esteem and friendship ... had never suspected such perfidy and believed his ship had been wrecked."
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 10 2003 |