More than a century after two French warships were lost in the Great Lakes, the mystery surrounding their disappearance has resurfaced in a tantalizing way, with new bits of history and clues being offered by well-known maritime historian and author Fred Stonehouse.

“Gone: The Greatest Shipwreck Mystery on the Great Lakes” is a new book by the longtime wreck diver and history buff that uses records from France, Canada and the United States to delve into the fate of the Inkerman and Cerisoles. The twin minesweepers were built in Fort William, Ontario for the French military during World War I and disappeared in a storm on Nov. 24, 1918 on their way to Europe via the Soo Locks. None of the 76 French sailors aboard or their two Great Lakes captains were ever found, making the wrecks the largest loss of life on Lake Superior, Stonehouse said.

It’s also the only time steel naval vessels have been lost on the Great Lakes.

“I’ve been chasing them for a long time, more than 40 years,” said Stonehouse. In all his years of recreational diving, the fate of the two minesweepers has been in the back of his head. He’s seen a blip or two while doing sonar work for other targets that made him think of those missing ships. And he’s worked topside on some search expeditions aimed specifically at finding them, but to no avail.

Amassing the research that led to this book was the next logical step for him. “The curiosity was there to see what you could find out about it.”

With more than 30 books to his name – most about maritime history and lore – it was no surprise to learn that Stonehouse grew up along the New Jersey shore – a world of storms, stories of shipwrecks and pirates and lifesaving adventures on the big water. “For a kid growing up, that was wonderful food for thought.” He made an early career out of the Army Corps of Engineers. Marriage to a Negaunee native pulled him to the Upper Peninsula. He’s taught classes for years at Northern Michigan University.

“It’s given me the opportunity to do what I want to do,” Stonehouse said of his life in the U.P. “To be able to teach and write, to dive and explore.” While he gave up wreck diving about a decade ago, he still heads out on boats to lend a topwater hand when it comes to looking for lost ships. And if curious explorers can piece together the clues he laid out in his new book, we won’t be surprised if Stonehouse gets a call to head out to help solve that mystery.

But when it comes down to it, it’s the not the missing minesweepers that spurred him to get the book published. It was honoring the memory of the 78 lives lost to Superior way back in 1918.

“The real stories are these French sailors. They literally died in the course of their duty,” Stonehouse said. “I think honoring them would be to find them and finally lay the mystery out.”

Bete Grise, on the lee side of the Keweenaw Peninsula, offered shelter from the storm of 1918. Photo by Google Maps.

French Death Certificates, Years of Research

While digging up new information for his book, Stonehouse found he was not just writing a timeline of the doomed trawler-style ships built in the waning days of World War I – an era when French shipbuilding projects were being farmed out to other countries who could meet the demand. Instead, he was poring over translated death certificates of the French sailors to learn what their experience levels and capabilities had been. He was amassing details about how the Inkerman and Cerisoles were built – and along the way dispelling myths that shoddy workmanship of the ships or ill-trailed French sailors at the helm had sunk the brand new vessels. Along the way, his research had assistance from a French naval attaché in Washington, D.C. and a Canadian museum curator. Google Translate became his friend.

The twin ships were actually part of a group of 12 copycat minesweepers the French Navy had ordered from the Canadian Car and Foundry Company, located in what is now Thunder Bay, Ontario. The CCF in that era was like the General Motors of Canada, Stonehouse said, with foundries and steel mills under its corporate umbrella. The plan for these CCF-built French ships was they would leave in small groups as they were finished, traveling down the Great Lakes and east to Montreal. Once the dozen were all assembled, they would travel to France as a group. But the Inkerman and Cerisoles – named after major battles in the Italian and Crimean wars – never made it to the Soo Locks. And it was days before the crew of the third sister ship that had been traveling with them, the Sebastopol, realized they were gone.

The rush to see this last trio of sweepers off to France in the fall of 1918 had to do with the calendar. It was November and winter weather would soon be shutting down the locks and vessel traffic on the lakes. “When they left Fort William, they had to get off the lakes as soon as they could,” Stonehouse said. “They needed to get to Montreal.”

The weather was good when the three ships entered Lake Superior. But a gale blew up mid-lake, forcing them to seek shelter. “They made it, all three of them, into the lee of the Keweenaw Peninsula,” Stonehouse said of the U.P.’s northernmost mainland tip. “But somewhere in the vicinity of the lee of the Keweenaw, they were lost to visibility.”

The last time the third ship’s crew saw the Inkerman and the Cerisoles was by Manitou Island, near the peninsula.

The Sebastopol waited out the weather near Bete Gris for more than a day. Its crew had some repairs to do, including fixing the device that raised and lowered the anchor. When the Sebastopol’s crew forged ahead alone, they assumed the other two ships had gone ahead of them – a common arrangement for the day even if the ships’ radios were not working properly.

The Sebastopol’s captain didn’t realize there was cause for alarm until several days later when his ship arrived at the port of Kingston in Lake Ontario and he learned the other two ships were not there.

“Nobody was reading that they had sunk then and there,” Stonehouse said. “It was not because of secrecy. It was that nobody could believe it.”

The U.S. Navy was alerted to kick off the search for the missing warships. It involved the Coast Guard, tugboats and other vessels. But there was no trace of them.

“How the two French warships ended up sailing into a crack in Lake Superior remains, for now at least, an inexplicable mystery of the Great Lakes,” Stonehouse wrote in a 2018 article about the disappearance.

Searching in the Wrong Spot?

In recent years, searches for the Inkerman and the Cerisoles have largely targeted the waters off the Keweenaw, but Stonehouse’s research has turned up enough intriguing details that future explorations may well pick a different spot. There’s an island group in Lake Superior that became the focus of his attention. Why? An account of a body found in a French sailor’s uniform in 1919. Years later, rumors of two more bodies that washed up nearby. Stories of lumberjacks along a shoreline who heard a ship’s distress whistle in a storm in the fall of 1918, then hung their lanterns in the trees as wayfinding help.

Rumors, legends, descriptions … does it all add up? “You can kind of put all those things together and you can suggest,” Stonehouse said. “There’s not going to be a mast sticking out of the water. You have to build on things. This is a building block,” he said of his research.

He’s hoping an independent group will take on the search for the wrecks. He also knows it’s the maritime version of two needles in a haystack. “We are looking at very small targets – 140-foot targets. It’s not a big thing to see in a very cluttered bottom. And if you find one, nobody is saying that you’re going to find two of these things sitting together.”

“It truly is kind of a riddle inside of an enigma. You peel this back and there is another question.”

Stonehouse’s book will be available on Amazon soon. To get an autographed copy, you can also contact the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.

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