07.23.08
Posted in Creativity, For educators (and history buffs) at 11:29 pm by markgmitchell
- Awesome Austin Writers Workshop in session (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith)
A mega-critique of 26 children’s and YA published and soon-to-be-published authors, the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop ended Sunday, June 29, and everyone drove home in shock. Shock because it was over and had gone so well and we realized that we weren’t coming back to hang out with each other again the next day.
The workshop took place in the 1920s-vintage Austin, Texas home of authors Greg and Cynthia Leitich Smith.
Cynthia, who teaches in the children’s and young adult writing MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts thought up and organized the event with help from her author-attorney husband, Greg and other friends from the Austin chapter of SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.)
For three days she led the critiques in a tour de force of quick wit, good fun, practical erudition, zinging (as opposed to stinging) professional insight and Kansas Pioneer Woman stamina.
Months before we’d been asked to submit up to ten pages of our works in progress. These were the beginnings of picture books, parts of YA novels and sci-fantasy chapter books, poems and nonfiction stories. Each writer got 40-45 minutes of vociferous attention from the group, moderated by Cynthia.
- Liz Scanlon, Alison Dellenbaugh, Erin Edwards and Phillip Yates get their papers in order. April Lurie is in the background. (Photo courtesy of Cynthia Leitich Smith.)
It’s an odd sensation to be on the receiving end of so much focus – 26 bright minds reacting to your prose or verse, while you’re not allowed to talk back. It feels like a surgical procedure is being done – a double cataract removal.
Like the other dazed & AAWW’ed patients after their operations, I got my copies back scribbled with thoughts, kudos, suggestions for fixes, often accompanied by typed notes. We clutched our precious stacks like they were our medical charts and we were on our gurneys in the recovery room.
Since I was one of two illustrators present, I was invited to pass around a couple of sketches to accompany my picture book offering – for additional AAWW-some scrutiny.
There was a lot of sharing, bonding, helping and a lot of eating going on. Our graceful “pages” (fellow SCBWI’ers) Donna Bratton and Carmen Oliver kept us supplied with coffee, scrambled egg kolaches, chocolates, juice and jokes (bad pun jokes — relentless pantomiming on the theme ”turning pages”, ”flipping pages.” At one point they donned tunics with labels: ”Page #1″ and “Page #2.”)
The founder and first regional adviser of our Austin SCBWI chapter, Meredith Davis was there, along with our current RA Tim Crow and former RA Julie Lake and our 90 year old member Betty X. Davis, who frequently outpaces us. Participant Gene Brenek wrote later, ”These relationships have been years in the making.” It was true and probably contributed to all the magic we felt around us. Still, not everyone present was an Awesome Austin writer. You see, Awesome writer Varsha Bajaj joined us from the Houston SCBWI chapter. She became one of us quickly, though.
- Taking time out from their paginations, Donna Bratton(left) and Carmen Oliver (right) visit with author Lindsey Lane at the Saturday night party at author Helen Hemphill’s home. (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith.)
We enjoyed a relaxing Saturday night party in the lovely loft residence of YA author Helen Hemphill and her husband Neil. Children’s writers settled right in to flowing wine, a spectacular catered supper and twinkling night views of the downtown.
Sunday around lunchtime everyone drove home in shock, as I’ve explained above. Many, after recovering somewhat, went straight to blogging about their experience, which is why the Awesome Austin Writers Workshop is all over the Internet today, as it should be.
I’ll borrow the list of attendees from Cynthia’s blog Cynsations.
Brian Anderson, Varsha Bajaj, Chris Barton, Gene Brenek, Shana Burg, Anne Bustard, Tim Crow, Betty X. Davis, Meredith Davis, Alison Dellenbaugh, Erin Edwards, Debbie Gonzales, Helen Hemphill, P.J. Hoover, Varian Johnson, Julie Lake, Lindsey Lane, April Lurie, Mark Mitchell, Jane Peddicord, Liz Garton Scanlon, Greg Leitich Smith, Jo Whittemore, Phil Yates, and Jennifer Ziegler. (Brian Yansky and Frances Hill submitted manuscripts and donated chairs but had to bow out due to a last-minute conflict).
Here are some of the blogposts::
Cynsations, Greg Leitich Smith, Liz Garton Scanlon, P. J. Hoover, Jo Whittemore, Alison Dellenbaugh, Alison’s part two (AKA Coming Back to Earth), April Lurie, Shana Burg, Carmen Oliver, Chris Barton, Jennifer Ziegler, and Jennifer’s part two (AKA Additional AAWW-tobiography), Lindsey Lane’s This and That,
- Jo Whittemore, Julie Lake, Liz Scanlon and Betty Davis prepare for the next critique round. (Photo by Cynthia Leitich Smith)
This post first appeared on Mark Mitchell’s children’s book illustration blog.
Mark teachers a children’s book illustration class at the Austin Museum of Art Art School at 3809 West 35th Street, Austin, Texas 78703. He’ll teach a special weekend watercolor workshop , “Watercolor of Children’s Book illustration” August 9 -10.
For more information on this or any of the AMOA summer art classes (for adults or children) call the Art School at (512) 323-6380 or visit the AMOA website.
To obtain some free lessons in an online course on children’s book illustration Mark teaches, answer the question you see on the ask survey page.
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05.29.08
Posted in For educators (and history buffs), The "Belle" at 7:36 pm by markgmitchell
The “Belle” shipwreck soaks in a pool of polyethylene glycol at Texas A&M
University’s Institute of Nautical Archeology in College Station, Texas.
Conservators expect the chemical preservation process to take at least
another six years.
She was not very big — about one third of the size of a regular French ship of the line. That would have been a naval ship 180 feet long with at least 70 guns. The Belle was a mini-version of one of those — 57 feet long — with the same three masts and maybe six large cannons stationed at gunports along her deck. Her deck would have been about twice as wide as a city bus.
Small, yes. But like those larger warships, she would have been “state of the art” transportation technology for her day. These were the rocket ships — the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, if you will — of the 17th century.
Fleet, sleek and beautiful as her name quite simply said, the Belle was a personal gift from King Louis XIV of France to Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the great explorer of North America. A king’s present. And not just any king, but the “Sun King” of France – Europe’s most powerful monarch.
Did I already say she was “small?”
“Back up here on the quarterdeck, you’ve got La Salle you’ve got the captain and the pilot steering the ship and then you got two or three other biggies,” says Jim Jobling, marine archeologist and dive safety officer of Texas A&M University’s world-renown Institute of Nautical Archeology (INA). Jobling also manages the INA’s Conservation Research Laboratory where the Belle and artifacts are being treated .
Acquiescing to a “state of the ship” interview with The Admiral’s Blog, Jobling gestures at a photo of wooden model of the Belle (made by fellow INA staffer Glenn Grieco.) ”La Salle and these officers control the back of the ship and the cabins below the quarterdeck,” he says. ”Now what is a cabin? The cabin’s about five feet long and 2.5 feet wide.” In other words, about the size of a small coat closet turned on its side.
“You’ve got your sea trunk. You put your blanket on top of your sea trunk and you sleep on top of that. Now if you want to open your sea trunk, you open the door and step outside. You lift open your sea trunk and take the stuff out. You close the trunk. You climb into bed and close the door,” he says.
Jim Jobling, manager of the nautical archeology conservation research lab at
Texas A&M University, discusses the “Belle” from a photo of Glenn Grieco’s wooden model of the 17th century ship.
”So this section is a quarter of the length of the ship and has La Salle and maybe five officers. Then you’ve got 38 people for the rest of the ship.
”You’ve got 3 watches, with about 13 people per watch. So any one time, you’ve 13 people down in the hold to sleep. There’s no where else to go and the hold is probably filled to within 18 inches of the deck beams. So you basically crawl in there and try to sleep on top of the cargo. There’s not much space,” Jobling continues.
“Because you started off with 44 people [when the Belle sailed from La Rochelle, France in July of 1684.] Then half way across the Atlantic a woman gave birth.
”This section of the deck here had a pen for pigs and chickens. This forward part here had a big grating, where you could look down the hold. So it was sealed off. Behind that you probably had a couple of boats here. And don’t forget you had cannons on the deck, three guns on either side. You don’t have a lot of space.
“If it rained, you got wet. You could try and get down below.
“And where did you cook? You had an open fire — probably a little grating up here with a couple of bricks.”
The Conservation Research Laboratory has been conserving the artifacts and the 328 year old-hull for the Texas Historical Commission (THC) since THC archeologists pulled up the ship from the bottom of Matagorda Bay in 1997. Everyone was thrilled to find the lower third of the ship intact. Wood that should have rotted away years or centuries ago was preserved. Other organic materials such as rope, leather, cloth (and bone) remained as they had been in La Salle’s time. Sand, gravel and clay mud had sealed up the ship, creating an anaerobic environment where bacteria could not live.
Archeologists worked inside a cofferdam, the first ever built in the U.S. to excavate a sunken wreck. The waterlogged vessel was too fragile to be carried in one piece to the mainland, so she was taken apart in the cofferdam and brought to shore in pieces.
After an initial cleaning and treatment, 381 wooden components (about 14 tons of wood) were reassembled underwater in a pool (built just for the Belle at Texas A&M’s out-of-the-way Riverside campus.) A lubricant/thickening agent used widely in industry called Polyethylene Glycol (affectionately called PEG by chemists) was gradually introduced into the pool water. (You’ll find PEG in medicines –it’s even a cancer-fighting ingredient — and all kinds of consumer products, including anti-freeze, toothpastes and some skin creams. )
The Belle’s conservators are waiting for the waxy liquid polymer to saturate the dense oak timbers. If all goes according to plan, the PEG will replace the water in the wood, Jobling says. Eventually the PEG will ”stand in for” the wood cellulose that was destroyed by the sea’s salt water long ago.
As more PEG continues to be added in solutions of increasing molecular weight, the hull will solidify and grow sturdy enough to bring out of the pool.
It won’t shrink, warp or crumble to dust. (Don’t laugh, it’s happened to many an untreated artifact!)
It could take another six or seven years — or longer, Jobling says, before the Belle is fit to stay in the open air and the hull is cleaned and thoroughly dried. Then planks, frames and keel will all be taken apart again — and reassembled at the Texas State History Museum in Austin between the state capitol and the University of Texas campus.
And the public will get to see this ”rocket ship” that carried La Salle to Texas.
And Austin will be home to a crowning symbol of the discovery and expansion of the American West.
Jim Jobling and the covered pool where the “Belle” waits for her
moment in the sun. In the meantime, sun and dust only pose a threat
to the 328 year old wooden ship — which explains the black tent.
Some of the “Belle’s” hand-hewn oak timbers are thought to be 150-200 years
older than the ship. Elegant as she was, she may have been built, at least partly,
from old shipyard scrap.
Mark Mitchell is the author-illustrator of an award winning book for young people “Raising La Belle“. He makes presentations to schools about the shipwreck and La Salle. Visit his website at www.markgmitchell.com. Download his book “Raising La Belle” for free by going here.
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04.12.08
Posted in Creativity at 12:12 am by markgmitchell
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent
Well, as you can see this post has nothing to do with shipwrecks and archeology or my own exploits as an Admiral of the Texas Navy…
It’s about another book — one that a reviewer apparently called the “most under-appreciated children’s book of 2007.” And since next week is the Texas Library Association Conference in Dallas, with its presentations of the Bluebonnet and other literary awards and so much book talk and promotion, it seemed fitting to include it here today in a context of unsung praises.
The below post also appears in my new WordPress illustration blog, How to be a children’s book illustrator, which you can find here.
Last year my friends at the Susan Salzman Rabb & Associates Literary Publicists sent me a children’s book by Candian author Hugh Brewster.
A former editor for Scholastic, Inc., Brewster has written on many subjects for young readers — including the Tsar Nicholas’s daughter Anastasia, the Titanic, World War Two and dinosaurs.
Here he tells a story of the great painter John Singer Sargent and a work that he completed over nearly two months in the small English village of Broadway in 1885. The painting is one of the most beloved of the late 19th century and launched Sargent’s career.
But Brewster focuses on the drama of a little girl, Kate, who almost got to pose in the painting, but at the last minute didn’t, for various casting reasons (related mostly to her age. She was only four and rather wiggly.)
I reviewed the book in the February, 2008 issue of American Artist magazine. You can read it below, as well the inteview that Brewster recently gave to this blog.
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose: The Story of Painting, with paintings by John Singer Sargent, by Hugh Brewster
Reading level: All Ages
Format: 8? x 9 1/4? (203.2 x 234.9 mm) 48 pages
Published: September 2007 by Kids Can Press, Toronto www.kidscanpress.com
Review by Mark G. Mitchell
When his once-promising career as a portrait painter blew up in his face with the unveiling of his picture of Madame Pierre Gautreau – a work soon to be called “Madame X” – the young John Singer Sargent actually considered hanging up his palette and brushes. The painting shocked audiences and critics at the 1884 Paris Salon because the woman wore a black satin gown and had one shoulder strap down, (before Sargent relented and painted it back up. The picture now hangs at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.)
Mme. Gautreau and Sargent were suddenly finished in French polite society, the market in which Sargent had expected to make his living.
The shaken artist beat a retreat across the English Channel and found a safe haven at the home of an American family, the Millets, in the village Broadway in Worcestershire, England. In this tiny resort town in south central England — which evokes the landscapes of The Wind and the Willows and Beatrix Potter illustrations — Sargent nursed his wounds, mulled over his next career move and met an array of writers and artists who would greatly influence his life, from the era’s top painters Edwin Austin Abbey and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to novelists Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.
His hosts, Frank and Elizabeth Millet were the magnets who drew these cultural luminaries (Francis was a history painter, muralist, journalist and a war correspondent who died on the Titanic disaster years later), and it was in their backyard garden that Sargent painted one of his greatest works – a large canvas that delivers, maybe better than any “big picture” in the history of art, the innocence and almost supernatural enchantment of childhood.
Sargent called the painting Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose (after a popular song of the day and as a nod to Elizabeth “Lily” Millet), and how he painted this masterpiece of two children lighting paper lanterns in a flower garden is one of the most charming and instructive of art-making stories.
Now we have a children’s book that tells the story behind the painting, titled Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by Hugh Brewster with paintings by John Singer Sargent (Kids Can Press Ltd., Toronto 2007) and one of its many delights is it is told by a child. Or more accurately, Brewster narrates from the viewpoint of a little girl, Kate Millet, the Millet’s youngest daughter who auditioned to be a subject for the painting, but was rejected by Sargent in favor of the daughters of the illustrator Frederick Barnhard, her parents’ friend. The Barnhard girls, Dolly and Polly, were older and fair-haired (which Sargent decided he wanted for the design) and perhaps more important, they held still better than the wiggly four year old Kate. [Interesting note: Forty years after they were painted by Sargent, the sisters Polly and Dolly joined the artist at a special dinner in his honor in Boston — on the night Sargent died in his sleep.]
Along with many others (an audience of her family and friends) Kate witnessed the plein-air painting sessions, which occurred in her backyard and continued for many weeks. The two older girls held their poses Sargent had given them, lighting their paper lanterns in the garden, for only 20-30 minutes of twilight each evening from August through September of 1885, while Sargent struggled to capture the colors and magic he saw.
The story ends with Kate seeing the painting with her parents at the huge exhibit in London, where “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” stole the show to become the most talked about painting in London that season.
The painting was later bought by Royal Academy, in London, a great honor for an artist who was not a native Englishman. It hangs today at the Tate Gallery in London.This is an exquisite book, gently written and beautifully produced. It’s filled with Sargent’s paintings, sketches and even his cartoons and doodles in letters. There are also some photos of the painter at work and of this charming time and place. The book makes compelling, essential reading for anyone of any age who is interested in painting and loves art.
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Hugh Brewster
When we visited electronically a few weeks ago, Hugh Brewster and I found that we shared many of the same interests – reading and writing history among them.
He took on all of my questions that day. It was better than shoveling the snow off his front walk in Ontario, he said.
You’ve written and are writing books for young people on World War Two battles. But in Carnation Lily, Lily Rose you write about a young artist not yet successful or famous, who painted two children lighting paper lanterns in a garden. This is a gentler subject than military history. What brought you to it?
Brewster: I’ve long been a fan of John Singer Sargent’s paintings. I think at first, like many people, I was simply drawn by the sensuous loveliness of them and by the lost, leisured world of the Gilded Age he so often depicts. But my appreciation grew with more exposure, At first, for example, I thought ‘Carnation,Lily,Lily,Rose’ was a charming, sentimental painting but it was by no means my favorite. Then in 1999 I saw the original in the large touring Sargent exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I was struck by two things –- first, that the painting was so much larger than I expected, and secondly, by how it actually glowed as if lit from within. This is something no reproduction can capture, alas.
What else was it about this painting?
Brewster: After being struck by the extraordinary glow of the lamps, I noticed the colors of the lilies and the roses and thought how difficult it must be to capture that time of the evening (the French call it ‘l’heure bleu’) when pinks and blues stand out in the twilight. But the painting is more than just a technical ‘tour de force.’
An art historian friend pointed out to me how the painting seems to be painted from both an adult’s and a child’s point of view. That is to say, the perspective is the artist’s, looking down on the two girls holding the lamps. and yet it also depicts a child’s world with the lilies towering overhead. I wondered who the two little girls in the painting were and what became of them, so I decided to do a little research.
John Singer Sargent’s self portrait made about the time he was living with the Millets in Broadway, England and did “Carnation Lily, Lily Rose.”
You tell the story from the perspective of a five year old girl, Kate Millet, who wasn’t included in the final painting of the girls (although the setting was in her parents’ backyard garden) because she is too young and too wiggly — and her hair is too dark for it to work in the scene. Why did you decide to tell this story from her point of view? I think I can see a strong, lively personality in the photos of the older Kate that you show toward the end of the book. But what was it about her that drew you?
Brewster: When I discovered that the painting had been done in the English garden of the American painter, Frank Millet, the coincidence of this was quite striking to me. I already knew a little about Frank Millet because he died on the Titanic. As an editor and publisher I had worked with Robert Ballard on several books after he discovered and explored the wreck of the Titanic in 1985 and 1986. I had also worked on several subsequent books about the Titanic as well as writing two children’s books about it, so was well immersed in the story.
Several art historians referred to the letters of Lucia Millet, Kate’s aunt, who came to England to stay with her brother and his family in 1885-86 and described the goings-on in Broadway, Worcestershire to her parents back in Massachusetts. So, I thought there might be research material there that would allow me to tell a real story about a child’s encounter with a famous artist rather than the more fanciful ones featured in many children’s books.
I also rather liked the fact that Kate was “dumped” by Sargent and that she was reportedly angry about this. Childhood is full of disappointments! I also thought this would make her a good observer of the events.
And the portrait Sargent did of Kate in 1886 shows such a self-possessed little person! When I met Kate’s son and grandson in Winchcombe in 2004, they showed me the photographs you mention, and told me stories that confirmed that she was indeed a remarkable character throughout her life.
In your “Author’s Note” you refer to letters written by Lucia Millet (Kate’s aunt), and recollections of others in the charmed circle of artists and writers around the Millet family during this time (1885-86) in Broadway in Worcestershire, England.
How were you able to research this material so that you were able to tell the story in a close-up, intimate (albeit semi-fictional) way — as if seeing it from the eyes of a child?
Brewster: Lucia Millet’s letters are in the Millet Family Archive at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington D.C. Letters and recollections from Edmund Gosse and other members of the Broadway circle were also available so that I did not have to invent the actual events of the story – except for occasional embellishments.(For example, we don’t know for certain that Ye Shepherds Tell Me (the song from which Sargent took the title for his painting) was actually sung at Lily Millet’s birthday party but we do know that it was a favorite of the Broadway gang that summer. For how Kate reacted to events, I drew on my own childhood memories.
How difficult was it to keep yourself from getting bogged down in all the family and “art historian details”?
Brewster: That’s a very good question! My early drafts were just a little too art history-ish. When publishers were not responding to the book, I showed it to an editor friend who said, “Kate gets lost. You introduce her and then tell the story of the painting. We need to know how Kate feels all the way through.” This was excellent advice and with that I was able to rewrite the book and sell it to Kids Can Press. Karen Li, my editor there, would also frequently write in the margins, “What does Kate think of this?” to remind me to keep to my young narrator’s perspective.
Sargent’s painting of the Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, another frequenter of the Millet home in Broadway.
What else you would like to say about your work on this project, or the paintings, sketches and photos in the book?
Brewster: It was a huge amount of work to assemble all the paintings, sketches and photos and to get permissions to use them but I’m very grateful to the Adelson Gallery in New York and all the collectors and to Kate’s family for their help with this. It was also a treat to make several trips to Broadway and environs – one of the loveliest areas in England—and see where it all took place. Broadway is little changed in over a century.
What do you think this story of Kate and Sargent and this canvas says to our time and place? And what might it say say to the young people who come across your book?
Brewster: My main hope is that they find it to be an engaging story. Yes, they may learn a little about people like Sargent and Monet and Henry James and about how artists work. And I hope that it evokes a world before TV and the Internet when people entertained each other with songs and games. I suppose there may also be a life lesson about disappointment in it. But the biggest thrill of all for me would be to hear someone years from now say that they first developed a love for Sargent from reading this book as a child.
Read about Hugh Brewster and his other books at www.hughbrewster.com.
Mark G. Mitchell (www.markgmitchell.com) is the author-illustrator of “Raising La Belle” and other books for children, and the Texas Navy Admiral behind the “Admiral’s Blog.”
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03.09.08
Posted in La Salle's other ship? at 8:09 am by markgmitchell
U.S. Court of Appeals judges will hear arguments Wednesday regarding what may be a historic wooden ship on the floor of Lake Michigan. The State of Michigan, a private shipwreck salvage company and the Republic of France all have an interest in the wreck.
At least one party in the case believes it could be Le Griffon, a trade ship that belonged to the French explorer, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle. The Griffon disappeared on the lake on a stormy September day in 1679.
Steve Libert, a Washington D.C. intelligence analyst by day and a historic shipwreck hunter and researcher by weekend, said he bumped into it, literally, during a dive in 2001, after a search for the Griffon that has taken up much of his adult life. (See the story in the October 2007 post on The Admiral’s Blog.
Libert made infrared underwater videos of his discovery. But the State of Michigan won’t issue him the permit to conduct a preliminary excavation.
That’s because Libert has held back the precise details about the site’s geography. He’s afraid that the government and other parties could wrest the investigation away from him.
“I want the ship to be identified on my watch,” he told the Admiral’s Blog in an interview last summer.
Restrained from visiting the ship, Libert in 2004 filed a federal lawsuit: Great Lakes Exploration Group LLC v. The Unidentified, Wrecked and (For Salvage Right Purposes) Abandoned Sailing Vessel her tackle, apparel, appurtenances, cargo, etc.,
The suit asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan to appoint Libert’s company, Great Lakes Exploration, LLC, ”custodian” of the wreck – before relic hunters stole artifacts or damaged the ship.
But Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox argued that the shipwreck belonged to the people of Michigan — under the U.S. Abandoned Shipwreck Act http://www.nps.gov/archeology/submerged/intro.htm
and since Libert’s wreck was state property, any excavation had to proceed under the state’s control.
When Judge Robert Holmes Bell dismissed Libert’s suit in November 2006, Libert appealed. He’s represented by maritime legal expert Rick Robol, whose clients include famously successful sunken treasure hunters and the Cousteau Society.
Nudged by Libert’s side in the case, the French national government has also expressed something like a proprietary interest — if the wreck turns out to be La Salle’s Le Griffon.
Oral arguments in the case begin at 9 a.m. this Wednesday (March 12, 2008) in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth District in Cincinatti.
Photo above: Libert in dive gear on Northern Lake Michigan.
Abandoned lighthouse on Poverty Island in Green Bay, Lake Michigan
Great Lakes Exploration LLC website (www. La Salle Griffon.org)
“X” Marks the Spot
The irony is that the state still doesn’t know where the shipwreck is.
Libert’s lawsuit described a location of sorts: a seven mile diameter-circle lying west of Poverty Island and Summer Island in Green Bay in northern Lake Michigan.
“If you have a computer you can see these islands on Google Earth,” Libert told The Admiral’s Blog. “The Michigan authorities want me to give them exact GPS coordinates. They want to be spoon-fed.”
Libert’s suit offers up the latitude and longitude of the centerpoint of the circle, but doesn’t give away the actual position of the ship, 180 feet under the waves.
Libert has said he will share those coordinates with the state’s marine archeologist — once state officials sign his agreement that they will not disclose the shipwreck’s location. Then his salvage company and the state “can work in cooperation to identify the ship,” Libert says.
“Great Lakes Exploration is making every effort to forge a unique public-private endeavor that would preserve the historical and archeological value of the find while also making it available for further study,” Libert says on his website. (www. La Salle Griffon.org)
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02.08.08
Posted in Creativity at 1:17 am by markgmitchell
Student drawing of La Salle’s ship, La Belle - How do you talk to your child about her art?
When does praise ‘miss the boat?’
When a child runs up to show you her latest drawing and asks, ”Do you like my picture?” it’s an opportunity to relate authentically to the work and, more importantly, its creator. But how you respond can open up the moment between the two of you — or shut it down.
An upcoming one-night evening workshop in Austin, Nurturing Your Child’s Creativity, scheduled for February 28 and again on March 7 , will focus on how to encourage and connect with a child at just these moments.
“Your best intentions can do a disservice to a child,” says Katherine Torrini, an artist, educator of children and parents, and life coach.
Praise given at the wrong times and in the wrong ways can sometimes create a “praise junkie” — conditioning the child to be dependent on your approval.
It can “shift the focus and reward from an internal one (joy of learning, discovery and satisfaction) to an external one (’What will they think of this?’ ’Will it be good enough?’)” Torrini says.
“When I work with parents and small children, I hear a lot of ‘Good job!’
In and of itself, it’s not the worse thing you can say or do to a child. I don’t want to lay guilt on the parent, but I would like to maybe introduce them to a new paradigm.
“Your judgment or evaluation may not be necessary, even though the child has asked you for one,” Torrini says.
”What do they really want when they come up to you holding up their artwork and saying, ‘Look, Mommy’ ? They really just want to share their ‘ah-ha!’ moment with you.”
“This is your chance to close your mouth. Say nothing. Open your eyes and look. Give your child’s artwork your full attention. Kids know how important it is to have the full attention of an adult, even if you can only give it for a few minutes,” Torrini says.
“If you can resist speaking, then they will fill in, and this is a great time to shift your attention from the child’s artwork to the child.”
“Resist taking over the conversation. They’ll show it to you, tell you a little bit about it and run off. They adjust really quickly to being really seen and heard,” she says.
The two hour workshop also will offer role-playing andpractice on how to coach children through frustration ( “I don’t know how to draw a pirate!”) in ways that strengthen problem-solving skills and artistic confidence.
Nurture Your Child’s Creativity will be taught twice this Spring;
Thursday, February 28 from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Austin Museum of Art downtown location at 823 Congress Avenue, and
Wednesday, May 7, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the AMOA Laguna Gloria Art School campus at 3809 West 35th Street.
The workshop is $15. Call the Art School for more details at (512) 458-8191, or register on line at www.amoa.org/artschool
Katherine Torrini is an artist, designer and illustrator who works in watercolors, pastels, textiles, inks and photography. Her work has been exhibited in Italy and Texas. She is an educator of children and parents, a certified life coach and a faculty member of the Art School at the Austin Museum or Art.
You can e-mail her at ktorrini@earthlink.net.
Mark Mitchell of the The Admiral’s Blog teaches children’s book illustration at the Art School of the Austin Museum of Art, where he knows Kathy.
When he’s not ‘admiraling’ around Central Texas, he’s a children’s book author and illustrator. You can download his award winning-book for upper elementary and middle grades, “Raising La Belle” for free at http://shipwreck-book.weebly.com
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01.18.08
Posted in For educators (and history buffs) at 11:28 pm by markgmitchell
“La Belle” by Kenny of Austin, Texas
Pam Wheat-Stranahan didn’t know what lay ahead of her when she walked into the Texas Historical Commission offices in Austin in the summer of 1996.
Intending to present a plan with workshops and lesson plans for teachers to “take archeology around the state,” as she describes it, she became the “Education Coordinator” of what has been called America’s ”most significant shipwreck discovery.”
THC Antiquities Division Director Dr. James Bruseth was familiar with her children’s book on archeology Clues from the Past published by Hendrick-Long (Houston) as well as her work as an educator, some of it through the THC.
Bruseth explained that the commission had just embarked on a major undertaking. A cofferdam was under construction in Matagorda Bay – the infrastructure to excavate La Salle’s lost ship, La Belle. The THC needed an education component of this venture — someone to write lessons, do a website and teacher workshops. Could Pam prepare a budget — and start Monday, he wanted to know?
“I was living in Colorado at the time and had just come into Texas for a wedding. I had no clothes to stay for a week,” she recalls.
She was given a desk in the Austin office, but spent most of her time in the early months travelling around the state with a THC exhibit that included the 800 lb. decorated bronze cannon form the Belle that the archeologists had pulled up with a crane.
The exhbit roamed about the different museums along the Texas coast. Pam would help set it up, train docents and lead field trips and teacher workshops.
“I kept doing that, every month in a different community, and we focused on the coast,” she says.
“We consciously went to hit all the communties around Matagorda Bay, Corpus Christi, Rockport, Edna… Archeologists get a bad rap for taking all the goodies out of an area.”
But with this, the biggest shipwreck find in the U.S. in modern times, the THC was determined to share the excitement and knowledge of their discoveries with local residents. (Pam’s visits eventually extended to Midland, the Panhandle and in fact all around the state.)
She also spent a few days each month out in the bay. Some days she worked as just another crewmember on the dig, snapping photos and sifting sand through screenboxes, looking for small artifacts. But her main job was talking to the public in this most public of archeological excavations. Visitors, if they could get out to the cofferdam in boats, could watch the excavation from a public sightseeing area on top of the dam. There Pam led public tours and talked to reporters.
She stayed with the crew when it brought artifacts back to the marina lab in Palacios at the end of each long day. Like a good reporter, she hung out with archeologists in the lab in the evenings. That was how she kept up with all the current finds for the ’breaking news’ press releases she was continually writing.
Building the cofferdam alone cost the state $5 million. That sum didn’t include the $100,000 per month to keep the excavation running. Pam was pulled into the early fund-raising efforts. She wrote some of the early grants and presented them to foundations. “As a result of these efforts, we formed the Friends of the Texas Historic Commnission, a private citizens’ group that could do more fund-raising outside the state agency,” she says.
By the time the THC had discovered and begun to dig up Fort Saint Louis (La Salle’s settlement three miles upstream from the bay) the “Friends” were up and running in a serious professional way.
Money would no longer be the worry that it had been with the “Belle” project. “By then [The Friends of the THC] were so highly visible that it made the Texas Historical Commission a viable player in historic and prehistoric conservation in the eyes of the nation,” Pam says.
* * * * *
Pam Wheat-Stranahan, the author of La Salle in Texas: A Teacher’s Guide for the Age of Discovery and Exploration will conduct a one day workshop at the Museum of the Coastal Bend in Victoria on Thursday, January 24.
Participants in the workshop, “The French and Spanish Legacy in Texas: La Salle and the Early Spanish Settlers” will examine exhibits at the museum related to La Salle’s Texas settlement — along with Wheat’s lesson plans that illustrate the influence of the Spanish as well as the French in Texas.
They will also receive a copy of her 136 page-teacher’s guide, which includes a DVD of Alan Govenar’s films, The Shipwreck of ‘La Belle’ and Dreams of Conquest.
Anyone — not just teachers — can attend. Registration is $50 — or $30 for Texas Education Regional Service Center 3 cooperative members.
Call the Region 3 center at (361) 573-0731 to register, or just show up at the museum’s door Thursday morning. The workshop will last from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Museum of the Coastal Bend is located at Victoria College at the corner of Red River and Ben Jordan streets in historic Victoria, Texas. The address is 2200 E. Red River, Victoria, 77901. The museum phone number is (361) 582-2511.
This will be the first of a series of workshops Pam is offering the the Educational Regional Service Centers around Texas.
* * * * *
Pam Wheat-Stranahan’s teachers guide La Salle in Texas: A Teacher’s Guide for the Age of Discovery and Exploration (Texas A&M University Press) , with the two dvds included, is available here.
Raising La Belle, an award winning children’s book written and illustrated by Mark G. Mitchell (the admiral of The Admiral’s Blog) is available in softcover here and as a free download here.
* * * * *
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11.07.07
Posted in The "Belle" at 9:31 pm by markgmitchell
La Salle in Texas: A Teacher’s Guide for the Age of Discovery and Exploration
by Pam Wheat-Stranahan
Cover illustration by Charles Shaw.
Now teachers have a superb resource for bringing their students to a science that many of us may not understand as well as we think we do.
The science is archeology (or archaeology or archæology, from the Greek: archaios, combining form in Latin archae-, “ancient”; and logos, “knowledge.”)
Wikipedia defines it as ”the science that studies human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data…”
Or you could think of it as sleuthing the human stories that lie buried beneath us.
The resource is La Salle in Texas: A Teacher’s Guide for the Age of Discovery and Exploration by Pam Wheat-Stranahan (Texas A&M University Press, 2007.) It uses as the vehicle for its lessons the spectacular cofferdam excavation of the 17th century shipwreck, La Belle.
La Belle was built in 1684, in the era of the real pirates of the Caribbean. Her design was just a few generations removed from the caravels of Christopher Columbus and Magellan. This small, three masted ship belonged to one of the most dynamic explorers of North America ever: Robert Cavelier, the Sieur de La Salle — a French fur trader.
Archeologists found the hull just a couple of feet under the mud at the bottom of Matagorda Bay. They found her packed tight with cargo — items that La Salle thought he might need to build a new village in a New World wilderness. Archeologists called her a ”colony kit.”
Objects in this massive “kit” included three extraordinary cast bronze cannons, barrels, navigational instruments, weapons, rope, clothes, wire coils, shoes, a cobbler’s last, kitchen, cooking and eating utensils, an array of weaponry and munitions, and chests of trade goods intended for the Indians. The Texas Historical Commission, which brought up the ship, has set the number of artifacts at nearly one million. They were counting every trade bead, button and bone.
Also recovered was an adult human skeleton, hypothesized to be that of a sailor from Brittainy.
Simultaneous to the very public ship excavation was the accidental discovery — not 30 miles away on the Texas mainland — of a cache of eight cast-iron cannons belonging to La Salle’s settlement site, ”Fort Saint Louis.” This coincidental but stunning find by a ranchhand clearing juniper brush with a backhoe resulted in the THC’s second major dig.
On top of the ruins of Fort Saint Louis the Spanish had built their own presidio (fort) and mission, La Bahia. And so 18th century Spanish artifacts were unearthed along with the 17th century French remnants that included musketballs, fragments of jars, dishes, glass and stoneware and the scattered bones of three French colonists killed by Karankawa Indians in 1686.
Wheat-Stranahan was part of — actually she was right in the middle of — the milestone shipwreck excavation. A teacher and amateur archeologist who has championed archeoological science to schools and the public throughout her career, Pam served as education programs coordinator for the THC for the duration of its ”La Salle Shipwreck Project.”
When she wasn’t working out at the cofferdam, or the marina in Palacios where artifacts were brought in to be cleaned up and examined, she was back at THC headquarters in Austin writing THC newsletters and website pages, dealing with the media and sponsors and ’riding the circuit’ of the state’s museums, educational regional service centers and K-12 schools.
She was instrumental in putting together the Friends of the Texas Historical Commision, the fund-raising arm (still active) that helped to propel the state’s heritage preservation and conservation efforts onto the world stage.
La Salle in Texas is the fruit of her work with the THC and as a teacher of a subject she loves.
Instead of one more written history of the Belle excavation – La Salle in Texas is an illustrated curriculum of lessons for teachers to bring to their students. A truly thoughtful and original work, it provides a hands-on approach to teaching Texas and American history.
The guide walks teachers and students through a series of interactive exercises. They’re like lab sessions with a ”let’s pretend” component that demonstrate — better than any prose could – how archeology can be a practical, ingenious system for learning about those who came before us.
In this case, they were the French pioneers on the shores of what would someday be Texas. And the cultures they brushed against when worlds collided here in the 1600s — the tribes of the Karankawa, Jumano and Caddo Indians and the Spanish.
Archeologists must make their conclusions from the physical evidence — the junk they find in the dirt. Most of it is pretty humble stuff. But these dedicated scientists treat it like the clues at a crime scene – meticulously recording, protecting and preserving every piece, knowing it will eventually be used to build a case.
In Pam Wheat-Stranahan’s lively lesson plans, students play detectives of history as they handle, sort and organize, and ponder simulated ‘artifacts’ from the shipwreck and the fort. They also assume roles as navigators, explorers and crewmembers of La Salle’s final expedition.
It’s this juggling of ‘relics’ and make believe that starts them to really think about the lives of these early settlers, Pam believes.
“More than by reading and hearing, kids really learn and connect by handling objects. It’s actually in manipulating the objects where the lessons start to take hold,” she says.
I had the fun of participating in teacher workshops conducted by Pam in Austin and Corpus Christi. They were afternoons of real discovery, even though modern buttons stood in for precious historic ones, and turkey wish-bones represented prehistoric remnants at a Karankawa hunting camp. Using many of the same exercises that are in this guide, we experienced the logical methodologies of the archeologist in the field. We saw how conclusions arise, almost as natural by-products of the scientific process. It’s an exhilarating thing to experience!
The 135 page- La Salle in Texas features a compilation of resources and is accompanied by a DVD with two 45 minute documentary films, The Shipwreck of La Belle and Dreams of Conquest. These films were created by Alan Grovenar, who also made the PBS Nova episode on the Belle, Voyage of Doom.
La Salle in Texas is a companion book to From a Watery Grave: The Discovery and Excavation of La Salle’s shipwreck, “La Belle” (Texas A&M University Press, 2005) by James E. Bruseth and his wife Toni S. Turner, a professional writer. The director of the THC’s division of archeology, Bruseth led the excavations of the ship and Fort Saint Louis.
Pam Wheat-Stranahan is now the executive director of the Texas Archeology Society. How she found her way to the cofferdam excavation of La Salle’s ship is a fun odyssey in its own right. We’ll learn more about in the interview with her on the next post.
* * * * *
Mark Mitchell is the Texas Navy admiral behind The Admiral’s Blog.
You can download his award-winning children’s book about the La Salle shipwreck, Raising La Belle (Eakin Press) for free by going to http://shipwreck-book.weebly.com
Pam Wheat-Stranahan served as this book’s consulting editor.
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10.09.07
Posted in La Salle's other ship? at 6:45 am by markgmitchell
A replica of La Salle’s ship of the Great Lakes Le Griffon, built in 1905 in Ontario, Canada.
Amateur marine archeologist and treasure hunter Steve Libert was feeling frantic. For two weeks he and his team had scoured the murky, near feezing floor of Lake Michigan. They’d come up with nothing — and it was the last day of their dive season.
The year before they had seen something remarkable – a very old-looking bow section of a wooden ship nestled amid the shellfish.
But the coordinates they had taken for it seemed wrong. And a series of storms “had messed up the bottom and destroyed the visibility terribly,” Libert says.
An experienced hunter of old wrecks, Libert knew to be patient.
He likes to say that looking for a sunken ship in the Great Lakes is not like trying to find a needle in a haystack. It’s more like trying to find a needle in a hayfield.
So they were still diving and looking – though the topography resembled nothing they remembered from the previous year.
By now they had moved out, perhaps a half mile from their original dive spot. Libert was alone under the water and getting low on air. He was on his fifth and last dive for the day. (The compressor on the boat had seized up and there would be no more tank filling that afternoon.) He had no idea where he was or how deep he was. In fact he thought he could feel the nitrogen starting to build up in his body. He was looking down to check his pressure — the water was so turbid he could hardly make out what the gauge said — and that’s when his face mask banged into it.
“It was like hitting a telephone pole,” Libert says, “which is a strange feeling when you’re swimming and not expecting anything to be in front of you.
“If you can imagine being in your dark house at night and your kid says, ‘Hey Dad, I think I hear something.’ And so you get up to look and …I cannot explain the feeling, the shock of running into something that is not supposed to be there… I grabbed this thing.”
That thing was a lone timber angled in the water. When Libert got over his shock he blindly reached out and felt around for a possible snagged fishing net that could entangle him. The beam seemed to be free of netting.
Libert pulled a Pelican float from the vest pocket in his buoyancy compensator and attached its yellow tether line to the mystery pole.
He released the float, then he followed its slow ascent.
The float stopped before it got to the lake surface, having used up all of its 100 foot-line. Libert swam past it to the top and called out to the men in the waiting boat, “Turn on your GPS and get position points.”
He was so cold he had to be helped out of the water.
Steve Libert and dive-team member Jim Kucharsky
A year passed before they returned.
As Libert told an interviewer in an Associated Press story, “That was the hardest thing, waiting all that time, wondering ‘Is it the mast of a ship? Is it anything like that?’ ”
On the next expedition Libert brought an underwater infrared video camera. You can see what he recorded on a page of his website, http://greatlakesexploration.org/video1.htm
(That’s another diver raking mussel shells off the timber.)
Critics have called it everything from a barn beam to a tree sticking out of the lake bottom. Libert doesn’t think so. He thinks it’s the bowsprit of the French sailship Le Griffon. And not the 1905 replica shown above, but the real one built by Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle on the wooded banks above Niagara Falls in 1679.
Remember La Salle from eighth grade history? The voyageur with long hair and a mustache who maybe looked like Peter Pan’s Captain Hook?
The guy who — three years after he built the Griffon – claimed the Mississippi River and a vast chunk of the American West for France?
Hard not to rememer a guy like that.
Libert’s website also shows a video clip of the fast approach of a violent storm, like the one that might have sunk the Griffon. The squall blew in while Libert and his men were returning to camp after diving.
“Before that it was a beautiful day,” he says. “It started with one cloud in the sky.”
Click on the box with the angry-looking clouds at http://greatlakesexploration.org/video1.htm
* * * * *
If you’re in the vicinty of Traverse City Michigan next Saturday night, October 20, you may want to catch Steve’s talk at the Traverse City Heritage Center. He’ll be speaking at 7 p.m. with Greg MacMaster and Kenneth Vrana of the Center for Maritime & Underwater Resource Management (CMURM) on the subject, “In Search of the Griffon, First Schooner on the Great Lakes: Has It Been Found?”
It’s the first part of a two part series at the Heritage Center, ”Mysteries of the Lake.” For more information about the program and an address and contact info, go to http://mystery-of-the-lake-events.weebly.com
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09.17.07
Posted in La Salle's other ship? at 10:54 pm by markgmitchell
The picture is from infrared video taken by shipwreck hunter Steve Libert, president of the Great Lakes Exploration Group, LLC. Libert believes that he has discovered La Salle’s other shipwreck, Le Griffon in the cold deep waters of Lake Michigan.
It’s not quite an official claim yet. Libert believes that he has found the Griffon, the fabled Great Lakes vessel of explorer Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.
And not exactly the ship, but what he thinks is the bowsprit — the long stabilizing spar at the front of the ship — projecting up out of the mud and zebra mussels that carpet the floor of the lake, where the water seldom gets above 38 degrees. The Griffon or another colonial era ship is presumed to lie buried underneath.
Libert’s coterie of historians and archeologists say that the ship — if it is a ship — lies along the plausible path the Griffon would have been following when she sank. http://www.LaSalle-Griffon.org
Nothing metal attaches to the bowsprit, Libert says. The trennels (treenails) are wood. It’s all wood — and the carbon dating of a sliver has not ruled out a 17th century time window. The markings of a shipwright’s tool, an adze on the timber suggests that the vessel was hand-hewn, which was certainly the case with the Griffon.
Magnetometer readings indicate a buried cannon. The Griffon reportedly carried five of them. And Libert saw a boot that could be enclosing a human skeletal foot.
The discovery in 2001 came after 28 years of research, diving and team-building by Libert. His professional career is that of an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense. But finding La Salle’s Le Griffon has been a preoccupation of his adult life.
Nothing’s happened at the site since Libert took his infrared videos ( in 2001. See the video at http://greatlakesexploration.org/video1.htm )
The state of Michigan, which claims all known shipwrecks in the state’s waterways and bottomlands, won’t issue him a permit to excavate and make an identification — until Libert furnishes the state marine archeologist with the exact GPS coordinates.
Libert has provided a general location, but won’t pinpoint the site for authorities — until they sign an agreement promising not to disclose it. Libert doesn’t want the information in the hands of another shipwreck hunter.
The state won’t oblige, and the case has bounced around in the courts for seven years. In the meantime, nothing has been touched, moved, dug or messed with near the bowsprit — if it is a bowsprit. And so the Griffon remains as elusive as ever.
“Le Griffon” from an old book engraving
So why this lifelong quest to find a 326 year old relic that may not, in truth, even exist any more? Steve Libert knows the day the seed was sown.
He was in junior high school in Dayton, Ohio. “One of my history teachers was taling about the early exploratoins of what is the present day U.S. when he mentioned La Salle and the Griffon and began talking about them.
“It caught my attention,” he says. “Then something really caught my attention. I remember I was looking out the window and he walked by and said, ‘And maybe one day someone in this room will find that ship.’ ”
Libert will share with us the astonishing story of his find — and the legal status of what he calls Team ID1679 – in the next post.
©2007 by Mark G. Mitchell, www.markgmitchell.com
* * * * *
Mark G. Mitchell, children’s author, illustrator and the Texas Navy Admiral behind The Admiral’s Blog, makes presentations to schools about a different “La Salle shipwreck” — the Belle, which was recovered from a bay on the Texas Gulf Coast in 1997 along with hundreds of thousands of 17th century artifacts.
Download his illustrated book for middle grades Raising La Belle for free at http://shipwreck-book.weebly.com
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08.06.07
Posted in La Salle's other ship? at 7:24 am by markgmitchell
Could this be La Salle’s other ship, the Griffon at the bottom of Lake Michigan?
The Mighty Mouse of early American explorers, Robert Cavelier, the Sieur de La Salle stormed into North America like it was his own backyard woods to play in.
His first little house and settlement outside Montreal was dubbed Lachine (China) and probably not by him. His neighbors poked a little fun at his ambitions. For he kept it no secret that he was out to find the “Northwest Passage” — that fabled water shortcut across the continent to the markets of Asia.
A discovery like that would bring untold glory to France — and make La Salle ‘Trade Czar” of the New World!
Hence the somewhat ridiculous moniker Lachine for his farm in lonely French Canada.
Was La Salle so crazy? Crazy like a fox maybe.
The Seneca Iroquois Indians had told him of a great river, the Mississippi that they said fed a warm sea at the end of the land. Could the ’sea’ be the Gulf of California in northwest Mexico, La Salle reasoned. Then it would be just a hop across the Pacific to China!
His quest to explore and dominate the Mississippi River occupied his whole adult life and eventually cost him his life. It led him to the upper reaches of the Great Lakes and what would someday be the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.
It also brought him to King Louis XIV’s den at the Palace of Versailles, pirate wharfs in French Haiti and the prickly brush country and pine thickets of Texas. But that’s another story and another shipwreck.
One of the first stops of the Odyssey was the majestic Niagara Falls, where Lake Erie basically spills into Lake Ontario.
The French party probably were the first Europeans to see the sight. They scaled the cliff of the falls and near the present day City of Niagara, New York proceeded to cut down the trees around them. They were going to build a ship from scratch. She would be a first on the lakes — a Eurpoean merchant barque with square sails. They would call her the Griffon (French spelling of griffin), after the half lion-half eagle beast of mythology. (La Salle chose the name for reasons other than whimsy. A griffon was the family coat of arms of his benefactor and business partner — Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac, Governor of New France.)
In La Salle’s mind, the Griffon would be the first of a regular fleet of sailships bringing in to Niagara heaps of beaver pelts from the forts, posts and trade-routes that he planned to establish all around the lakes. All part of a giant fur-trading enterprise to finance his explorations.
La Salle also counted on the Griffon to carry him and his coeur de bois brothers-in-arms — including Indians — down the Mississippi River to its mouth.
She was “a peculiar ship….full rigged and equipped, having many of the appointments of a man-of-war,” wrote Father Louis Hennepin, the Franciscan missionary who served as the expedition’s diarist.
Seneca Iroquois Indians stood around the wilderness shipyard in amazement — dumbfounded at how the French could build such a “big canoe” from logs. The Iroquois were also worried — enough to complain about the vessel under construction. They suspected that La Salle would use it to interfere with their own lucrative fur trade with the British. Some braves threatened to burn down the half- completed boat and murder the blacksmith. This only hastened the launch day for the Griffon.
She sailed on Lake Erie, Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, dazzling Indians wherever she appeared. She must have been a dream vision, plowing through waves with her high warship walls, tall mast, billowing sails and colorful flapping flags.
In September 1679, La Salle sent her out into the cold, choppy waters of Lake Michigan, while he stayed back on shore (of present day Wisconsin) with the bulk of his force. The Griffon carried 6,000 lbs. of beaver pelts for La Salle’s Montreal creditors. He wanted to make a payment on his debt before the last leg of his Missisippi River expedition.
The ship disappeared in the lake mists.
Two years later La Salle was still waiting for her. Now he and his men were making preparations at their new bivouac near the present day city of Peoria, Illinois. They were ready (finally, actually) to make their run down the river. But La Salle gave up hope of seeing his flagship again. He supposed that the six men on board had scuttled her and made off with the furs. (It is more reasonable to assume that a fierce storm sent the ship, men and cargo straight to the bottom of Lake Michigan.)
Deprived of the Griffon, La Salle and his band shoved off in birch bark canoes for their history-making voyage down the Mississippi.
While the Griffon, “Ghost Ship of the Great Lakes” sailed on into legend.
But now maybe she’s back…
In the next post, hear from a group that believes it has found the Griffon in Lake Michigan. The photo at the top shows what divers say could be the Griffon’s bowsprit.
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