The Heroic Age of Diving: America’s Underwater Pioneers and the Great Wrecks of Lake Erie by Jerry Kuntz (review)

In The Heroic Age of Diving, author Jerry Kuntz combines elements of technological, business, and environmental histories to produce a fascinating work that details the origins of American maritime engineering and salvage during the transition away from free-diving in the nineteenth century. As the subtitle states, a plurality of the book’s focus is on Lake Erie and the maritime salvage operations occurring on three grisly shipwrecks: the Erie (burned off Dunkirk in 1841 with about 140 lives lost), the G. P. Griffith (burned near Cleveland in 1850 with about 285 lives lost); and the Atlantic (struck by a steamer off Long Point, Canada, in 1852 with about two hundred lives lost). All three were passenger steamers, overloaded with passengers and those passengers’ savings for a new life out west on the frontier. However, the book goes beyond Lake Erie to discuss American maritime salvage during the mid-nineteenth century.

Kuntz begins his story in the Caribbean with early attempts by American William Taylor to develop new methods for pearl diving. Finding the return on investment negligible, Taylor instead used his diving suit for maritime salvage, which at that time was undertaken by free-diving (holding one’s breath). After work on several wrecks in and around New York City, in the wake of the highly publicized sinking of the Erie on Lake Erie in 1841, Taylor attempted a salvage effort of the supposed treasure ship, which failed. Another effort by a different team succeeded only in salvaging parts of the engine, with little return on investment.

After a pause of six years, maritime salvage diving on the Great Lakes returned in 1852 when engineer Albert Bishop started a new wrecking company in Buffalo using specially designed salvage derricks. Around the same time, Daniel Stebbins, the builder and chief engineer on the G. P. Griffith, mounted a successful salvage operation to that wreck. During that operation, the crew picked up John Green, whose fearlessness would become legendary on the lakes as he set new diving records and managed to successfully recover gold from the wreck of the Erie. Finally, that same summer the Atlantic was run down off Long Point by a cargo steamer. In addition to passengers’ monies, the ship was also carrying a large amount of cash for banker Henry Wells, the founder and president of the American Express Company and Wells, Fargo, & Company. Wells put out a large bounty for the recovery of the safe, which was coupled with the contract for raising the ship. The reward attracted interested from Bishop and Green, as well as New York City maritime engineers who all tried and failed to salvage the Atlantic in 1852.

The next year, 1853, proved much harder for the salvage business. The first diving death on Lake Erie due to “diver’s squeeze” occurred (a type of barotrauma that mutilates the diver’s head), and Albert Bishop’s business was destroyed when two of his derricks sank in a gale during a salvage attempt on the Erie. Late in the season, an attempt made to salvage the same wreck using a prototype submarine also failed. Although it began with the loss of a second diver to diver’s squeeze, the 1854 season finally saw the successful raising of the Erie by John Green, which was then towed to Buffalo for scrapping. This galvanized attempts to raise the Atlantic, a year later. Unfortunately, the greater depth of the Atlantic complicated recovery, and Green became possibly the first Great Lakes diver to be severely afflicted by decompression sickness (“the bends”). After Green was bedridden, diver Elliot P. Harrington instead made the successful dive down to the Atlantic, which recovered her safe. According to Kuntz, this “marked the last time that a dive to any wreck in Lake Erie attracted national attention...