Schooner in the Sand Home Page

A Shape in the Sand

An Earlier Discovery

Excavation: Digging into the Wreck

What Did the Ship Look Like?

Learning from Artifacts and Documents

The Artifacts

Ports of Call

World Market

Time Line

Unanswered Questions

All the work—excavation, research and analysis—has not answered all of the questions. How did the wreck occur? Did the people on board survive? And, most elusive, what was the name of the ship? Some possible conclusions have been drawn from the investigation.

There are a number of ways in which the Millecoquins schooner might have run aground:

• Perhaps it was damaged in a storm and the crew could no longer sail it.
• Or, perhaps most of the crew members (remember, there were only a few people on board) were washed overboard, and those remaining couldn't control the ship.
• Or, perhaps a storm arose too suddenly for the schooner to reach shelter and it was blown ashore.

Unless the crew had all been washed overboard, they probably survived the wreck and had to decide what to do.

• They could stay aboard or camp on shore and watch for passing ships. In addition to fishing boats, there was regular, though not frequent, steamer traffic on Lake Michigan by 1840.
• The crew members probably knew where they were and how far away settlements were. Taking essential gear with them, they could set off on foot.
• If there were several survivors, they could split up. One or two could stay near the ship, while others set off on foot to find help.

What Is Missing? Where Does the Evidence Point?

Although many questions remain, the current consensus is that the Millecoquins schooner was part of the Great Lakes commercial fishing trade, probably supplying fishing stations around northern Lake Michigan. Its crew appears to have done its own fishing as well. Its home port may have been either Mackinac Island or a Canadian port.

The ship most likely ran aground in a storm in about 1839 or 1840, and was abandoned in place by her crew. Someone—Native Americans, local settlers or other fishermen—later burned off the deck and gathered the schooner's iron spikes and fasteners, for use in other building projects. They left the hull, and the windblown sand continued its work of covering and preservation.

The artifacts recovered from the Millecoquins site and the remaining hull make it the most important shipwreck on the Great Lakes for understanding how people lived, traded and built small sailing craft in the early nineteenth century.

Dr. Bradley Rogers and Frank Cantelas,
East Carolina University

David Head's discovery began a chain of discoveries that continues today. Nature and coincidence have played their part in first preserving, then revealing the wreck and involving people in its investigation. Those people—some with practical knowledge, others with academic skills; some doing their jobs, others pursuing hobbies—brought much of the schooner's treasure to light. By preserving the wreck where it was found, they hope that future historians and archaeologists will be able to discover even more about it.