The ships lost on the Great Lakes number in the thousands and include vessels from the SS Edmund Fitzgerald to paddle steamers, tugboats, schooners and more.
The lost ships also include the SS Marquette & Bessemer No. 2, a 100-metre-long ferry that plied the lakes in the early 1900s, carrying railway cars loaded with coal. On the night of Dec. 7, 1909, the ferry sank in a fierce storm on Lake Erie, leaving no survivors and no trace of a wreck.
In 2025, a team of local historians contacted U of T professors Charly Bank and Katherine Patton, asking if they would be interested in conducting a search for the ferry in Rondeau Provincial Park, on the north shore of Lake Erie. The historians suspected the wreck came to rest east of the boat’s original destination, Port Stanley, and lay buried under metres of beach sand.
Bank is a geophysicist in the Faculty of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Earth Sciences and Patton is an archaeologist in the faculty’s Department of Anthropology. Banks’ expertise in geophysics and remote sensing, and Patton’s long-term interest in geophysics in archaeology made them well-suited to conduct the hunt.
For Bank and Patton, the search also offered an excellent opportunity to enlist students through the faculty’s Research Excursion Program (REP), which enables third-year students to take part in off-campus research projects — whether in Canada’s Algonquin Park or First Nations communities, or abroad in locations like the rainforests of Ecuador and Peru, or schools in Kenya.
I jumped at the opportunity to join the REP!
And so, Bank, Patton and eight students pitched their tents in Rondeau Provincial Park for ten days in June, probing the shoreline for the missing Marquette & Bessemer.
Spoiler alert: The team did not find the ferry. Nevertheless, the REP provided the students with a memorable and valuable experience.
“I jumped at the opportunity to join the REP,” says Averyn Ngan, a member of Innis College double majoring in environmental science and women and gender studies.
“It offered an immersive research opportunity where I could learn fieldwork skills. Plus, among all the REP projects offered, the search for a buried ferry stood out to me because of my love for maritime history and coastal environments. It turned out to be a unique, exciting and fascinating experience.”
Arthur Monange is a member of Victoria College, pursuing a double major in biology and ecology and evolutionary biology, with a minor in environmental science.
“Honestly, it was great,” says Monange about the experience. “I’d only taken three geology courses — because my main focus is environmental sciences and ecology — but I learned so much geology during this project. And, I really enjoyed learning how to use the remote sensing equipment.”
And according to Lauren Murray, a Victoria College member, “It was incredibly rewarding to have a chance to work with both geophysical equipment and historical documents for the same research question. That intersection of geoscience and history, my two programs, has always been an academic goal of mine, and the REP has given me skills to develop this further.”
It offered an immersive research opportunity where I could learn fieldwork skills. Plus, among all the REP projects offered, the search for a buried ferry stood out to me because of my love for maritime history and coastal environments. It turned out to be a unique, exciting and fascinating experience.
The team probed beneath the surface of the beach using a variety of tools Bank regularly employs in his research and which archeologists like Patton are using more and more.
They probed the site using ground-penetrating radar capable of detecting large metal objects buried in a few metres of sand. They carried out a magnetic survey, looking for distortions in the natural magnetic field that a large steel object like a 100-metre-long ferry would produce.
And using a technique known as electrical resistivity tomography, they probed the area by sending an electric current into the ground and measuring anomalies in the electrical resistance.
“So, we didn’t find the ferry,” says Monange, “But, we got some good insight into how the beach and shoreline evolved over the years.
“We also gathered some intriguing data,” he says. “We all thought: What's this we’ve found!? We're still not sure what it is but finding something like that gave me a very rewarding feeling. It’s something to remember.”
For the students, it was also valuable seeing how researchers and Indigenous communities should work together.
We reached out to the Caldwell First Nation which claims this area as part of their traditional lands. And someone came out and represented the nation's interests on this project. After all, as one of the contacts at the band office shared with me, ‘All archeology is Indigenous archeology.’
“We reached out to the Caldwell First Nation which claims this area as part of their traditional lands,” says Patton. “And someone came out and represented the nation's interests on this project. After all, as one of the contacts at the band office shared with me, ‘All archeology is Indigenous archeology.’”
“It's so good for the students to see that in this type of research, in order to work ethically you need to involve the Indigenous community,” says Bank.
And while the waters of Lake Erie still hold the secrets of the Marquette & Bessemer, the search was not without its rewards for students.
“This has definitely solidified in my mind that field research is what I want to do in grad school,” says Ngan. “Learning skills like this, I feel it’s equipped me for research. It’s shown me, I can do this.”