Ships in Trouble: The Great Lakes, 1850–1930

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

The role of commercial vessels on the five Great Lakes and adjacent
waters has seldom received the public recognition it deserves. For
hundreds of years ships have gone about their work, seldom making the
headlines unless some disaster has overtaken them. Nowadays mishaps are
much less common, yet over the centuries the bottoms of the Great Lakes
have become littered with the remains of thousands of vessels, large and
small, that have fallen victim to storms, collisions, fires, groundings,
and navigational errors.

Ships in Trouble is a picture album that contains about 235
postcard-sized black-and-white photographs of ships, both Canadian and
American, that have met their fate over an 80-year period. The photos,
some rare and others better known, of the long-vanished ships offer an
insight into the great variety of ships that have plied Great Lakes
waters. Descriptions of the ships, along with accounts of their demise,
or, occasionally, their salvage and survival, are limited to brief four-
or five-line captions. Most photos show the ships in happier days, but a
number of them depict vessels driven ashore or back in port with their
damage evident.

The pictures are the book’s raison d’кtre, but unfortunately,
reproduction of the images has not been totally satisfactory. Many lack
sharpness: the details are not clearly visible. An index of ships’
names would have been useful.