WINDSOR—Chris Kohl doesn’t want to talk much about his upcoming book on North America’s Holy Grail of wrecks, LaSalle’s Le Griffon, the first decked ship on the Great Lakes and, sadly, the first wrecked decked ship—having been lost to a deadly storm as it traversed the region largely unexplored by Europeans.
The fate of Le Griffon is a 17th century mystery that still eludes a solution. Diver Steve Libert remains certain that the wreck he and his team have discovered lying deep in Michigan waters will solve that mystery. Mr. Kohl remains very skeptical about Mr. Libert’s claim.
“If we talk about the details of the book now, at this early stage, it might jinx it,” said Mr. Kohl in an email exchange with The Expositor, “but I can give you some general information.”
“My wife (Joan Forsberg) and I are writing it together, as we have done with our last three books,” he said. “I am a Canadian from Windsor, Ontario and she is an American from Chicago. This situation suits us fine, as we are both university-degreed Great Lakes Maritime historians and the Great Lakes are co-owned by Canada and the United States.”
“This new book about the Griffon will be an expansion of the 68-page flagship chapter of my 2004 book, ‘Shipwreck Tales of the Great Lakes,’ which was about the Griffon,” he noted. “Just last month, my wife and I spent two weeks doing some follow-up research in the Ontario Archives in Toronto and the National Archives in Ottawa—with very satisfying results.”
“I spent two weeks in 1994 on Manitoulin Island researching local shipwrecks and in particular the story of the Mississagi wreck which could very well have been the Griffon,” he said. “My wife and I spent another week on Manitoulin Island in the summer of 2011 researching the same topic.”
“If you read that opening chapter of ‘Shipwreck Tales of the Great Lakes’ there are some pages at the end of the Griffon chapter about Steve Libert’s Lake Michigan claim, which he first made public in 2004,” he said, “giving me just enough time to include it in my book. But his claim has dragged on since 2004, with no end in sight.” Unfortunately, ‘Shipwreck Tales of the Great Lakes’ is currently sold out, but Manitoulin Publishing’s bookstore does have copies of Mr. Kohl’s other books on local shipwrecks.
“I had serious doubts about his claim and the excavation that was finally done in 2013, with disappointing results for him, but gave my doubts a foundation,” continued Mr. Kohl. “Yet he somehow has managed to keep the story of his ‘discovery’ in the media spotlight, much to many people’s surprise. I myself am surprised by the media’s repeated publication of what is basically the same claim with extremely little or weak or no new evidence—over and over and over again. It reminds me of the movie ‘Groundhog Day.’
“Another thing that has surprised me is the fact that the Ontario government has not acted upon my stated belief that one of the two areas I think is “hot” for searching (sidescan and any other way possible) is just to the west and southwest of Manitoulin Island, but still in Ontario waters—which I suggested in my 2004 book as being a very likely location of the missing Griffon remains, possibly including the cannons or perhaps another smoking gun identifier,” he said. “But it doesn’t seem to be of pressing interest to the Ontario government.”
Unlike the ships of the ill-fated Franklin expedition in the high Canadian arctic, where the Canadian government is involved in a high stakes boundary game with Russia and Denmark, Le Griffon lies in waters that have largely been settled.
Mr. Kohl said that it was “truly unfortunate that all those items found in a cave in the late 1890s near the remains of the Mississagi wreck have been lost.”
As for Mr. Libert, he is currently diving a debris field found near the site of the inconclusive spar under which he had hoped to find proof of a 17th century vessel.
