Climate Change

I'm reasonably sure it sank. Seriously...we appreciate the research and I love learning about the Great Lakes. Lots of wrecks to talk about, and they remain in much better condition that salt-water wrecks....if found.

Maybe she’s near Caribou island.

@@Blackfaced I heard it lost everything in the stock market then fled to brazil to evade a loan shark.

Well I think we could pull out all the classic conspiracy theories, from Aliens to insurance job.

Great Lakes historian Wes Olezsewski has shown that the two ships were so different looking from anything else on the Lakes at the time, but so similar to each other, they were frequently confused for each other by ship spotters when the Bannockburn was still floating.

@@Thatguy-of5re for those unfamiliar, @authorwes’ channel is full of terrific GL shipping lore.

@@Thatguy-of5re oooh, that does explain quite a lot actually yeah....

@@549RR it says more about me than it does about this comment that when I read 'GL shipping' on a video about a ship on a great lake my mind went to a completely different subject

@@horngatekeeper - I’m scared to ask what it means to you. 😆

Well, just going off of the information here, it sounded as if the captain viewed the ship as being underway as if all was normal, and not in peril. That's strange. I would almost be willing to wager that if his sighting was recorded with coordinates, that you'd find the wreck in the same spot he thought he saw the ship. Sort of the ship version of a phantom, visible above where it went down and vanishing once he looked away from it.

@@matthewmosier8439 if the hull was fully or even partially obscured by the horizon then it would be quite difficult to tell if she was in trouble or not. You can also have a mirage effect occur with ships on the horizon, but that usually just makes them appear to float. Perhaps some sort of mirage also clouded his judgement. That said, I trust a seasoned captain to see through that if possible.

Very cool. It's sad that so many are not seaworthy. I feel sorry for any ship that sank.

It makes me think about the Fitz, which by some accounts, sank very quickly in November on Lake Superior.

What are the specs to which you subject your designs? Are they modern and updsted? I think what you do would be very interesting.

I am on the Bannockbun now. It is old and smells.

God watches over drunk, children, and fools.

@@Tula-cs1ef If that was true, then why do they, still die???

Lol. Good analogy! "Just one last run it'll be fine" the great lakes "nope"

Honestly comes down to the namesake. Last run of the season. Its always the worst weather hence the season end of operation. It was always and still to an extent is a time where profit pushers push their men to squeeze every penny they can out of the year. You end up with throwing caution to the wind and fighting storms you'd normally run from. Its no wonder you hear so many with the same story.

Definitely, we often hear about better known ships, Lake Superior ships aren't very mentioned. I really love discovering new ships !

Pretty sure that's the lighthouse that some KZfaqrs spent the night at for a video. Pretty interesting to see it up close.

Why shut them down at all? I thought they operated all the time.

At that time, you needed multiple people to keep them running. The lights were run in kerosene (or some other oil), and there were no mechanical means to get the oil to the light to keep it burning. The keeper would have to haul buckets of kerosene up several flights of stairs to the light. Stannard Rock Lighthouse (the specific lighthouse the Bannockburn passed) is in the middle of buttfuck nowhere (its one of the most isolated spots in the Northern hemisphere), and the Lighthouse Service had a hard time getting people to stay out there - they'd go insane from the lack of human contact. Stannard Rock was also prone to icing over in storms, making it physically dangerous. They probably decided to shut the light off because they couldn't carry the heavy buckets of kerosene up the frozen stairs.

If not profit, it would have been "the state". Like those doomed cosmonautes in Communist USSR.

What strikes me as, apparently this was a quite lucrative line already. They didn't need to squeeze every tiny little drop of profit out of the stone. They were making enough.

McDonalds is a lucrative business, still doesn’t stop them from exploiting teenagers for cheap degrading labor. Corporate greed and scumminess is a tale as old as time, unfortunately.

737 MAX is another clear example. Pound a square into a round hole to make something it’s not and disaster follows. That plane had hit its limit but to compete against a new airframe and Airbus company they used new Bigger engines that drastically altered center of gravity / thrust. That made it unstable in certain critical flight regimes. Solution, add an automatic safety system , MCAS, to stop uncontrolled pitch up caused by the center of gravity / engine issues. There were further problems keeping it in the same exact “ type” classification as anything putting it outside of Type would require real life $$$$$ pilot simulator and real flight training. The completion Airbus needed none of that. Solution, offer to train them on their dime or watch a video tape which was optional. The laughable FAA blessed it all with it’s typical of late “ pencil whip” . Engineers knew it had serious issues and the chief test pilot made it known to the CEO who blew him off. The Result three serious incidents with two ending in tragedy. 350+ dead and it’s likely the pilots on those planes never even knew MCAS was on the plane or how to shut it off. Boeing got it’s fine, the FAA ducked out of sight and the Boeing CEO snuck away with his 16 million “ golden Parachute”. Profit at any cost?……

Great Lakes freighters were notorious for not having the safety standards of ocean transportation

Love this comment.. ❤️👌

That's a great line you wrote. The fact that these early steel boats were floating death traps, reminds me of the phrase "In a fleshy tomb, i am buried above ground"

Yes, she was never found. So was the ship depicted earlier, in the video, the 'Marquette and Bessemer No 2'.

Maybe. Depends on how broken up she was. It's also why they haven't found the James Carruthers yet - there was a lot of wreckage, but they've never located a ship structure in the area.

Back then kids were apprenticed from 15. 4 years on the job training and trade school usually once a fortnight for written theory was how many gained qualifications right up to the 90s.. Basically they were fully qualified by 19 in their preferred trade.

@@tkps5079 There was still a dangerous lack of old blood on the Bannockburn that night.

​@@funnelvortex7722 There used to be a disgusting practice of using junior crews on rotten old ships to save on money when it inevitably floundered

Junior crews were also easily bullied onto unsafe ships, unlike the old salts.

I was 13, when I learned about the Bannockburn, from a book titled 'The Great Lakes Triangle', back in '75. I also live by the Atlantic Ocean, in southern NJ.

Fellow lifelong Michigan troll, I've never heard of this ship either until this video. (For anyone not from Michigan, a troll is anyone who lives "under the bridge", aka in the lower peninsula. Yoopers are "above the Mackinac bridge", living in the upper peninsula. Neither term is derogatory.) Everyone knows of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it's a footnote in a history lesson in elementary school here. Unless you had an obsession with ships as a kid (I didn't, my obsession was outer space), I doubt that many of our fellow trolls and Yoopers have heard of these ships and shipwrecks. I have been to Whitefish Point as a kid, (I was a kid in the 90s) toured the museum and found it all very interesting. Now as an adult, these ships are becoming more and more fascinating to me.

It really is wonderful to hear perfect English with correct pronunciation & good grammar. It’s sadly so rare these days. And well researched too.

So the debris field was confirmed to be the vessel? It sounds as if the captain who sighted it from a distance believed that the ship went down as he was nearby, but wouldn't that imply that the storm would spread out the debris field too much to be noticed?

Not just in winter. Even in spring and summer when the waters are on average more calm they can still give a nasty surprise. The storm systems that cause tornadoes, hail, and high winds in the Midwest and Great Plains often move over the lakes bringing *explosive* weather with them. Wake lows, derechos, and microbursts can turn a nice summer day into nightmarish churning hell within minutes. These explosive conditions have wrecked multiple ships. Stan Rogers wrote a song about it.

I'm wondering at the idea that was in fact her hull plate the excavators found. Maybe the inspection team was in a hurry or lazy? Maybe the inspection team genuinely were trying their best but missed something? I don't have much info on what the inspectors actually did, so it's impossible to have confidence in the inspection. soo... the idea that there could be a catastrophic failure is... more than a little plausible. Also, she was last seen with no barge in tow... why? Was she in trouble?

I thought the narrator called him George R Wood.

Ran a background check and you never lived in or around Michigan

The hell are you talking about, Lake Superior was formed by glacial action, same as all the great lakes, and there are sandy beaches, just look at the west coast of the Keweenaw.

You must not be a local, then. There’s plenty of glorious sand beaches on the north shore - my family’s camp among them. Agawa, Pancake, Batchewana… and SAND River.

The Gilded Era? Nah, this is all still a thing, look how they pack warehouses and even your local McDonalds full of overworked and underpaid young kids who don't understand how they are being exploited.

There's a lot of uncertainty over exactly where it sunk, so you'd have to cover a large area. This costs a lot of money, and people would rather spend it elsewhere. Also, a very large part of that potential search area is located over the deepest part of Lake Superior, or a little over 1300 feet deep. The deepest wreck discovered in her waters is somewhere around the 925 mark IIRC, and it wasn't the Bannockburn.

Guess they're just that unlucky, like the Flying Dutchman itself.

They likely have been. Shes up there on the list of wrecks they want to find.

It's not been found. The area where it's believed to have sunk also happens to be the deepest part of the lake.

It’s also possible her cargo shifted and caused her to capsize. A few hard knocks back and forth, piling cargo higher on one side, then the other, then back… and CLANG! 20 tons of loose wheat slams into the inner hull. CLANG! 20 tons into the other side if she survives the first. Shifts like that can break a ship in half.

I'm not so sure. What do we know of the way Bannockburn was put together? did she have internal bulkheads to stem the deluge of the ship interior? Have a bulkhead get strained by being under load long enough and a water tight bulkhead can just fail. If the hull plate falling off opened a gap into a water tight compartment(such as a sealed hold) that no one tried looking inside? The amount of water taken on would be limited until the bulkheads collapsed under strain.

@@marhawkman303 I want to say (and this is a fuzzy memory) she wasn’t fitted with water right bulkheads, but again this is thoughts from long ago. I’ll try to find the books I had when I was a young boat nerd

Keep in mind that throughout history young men have been expected to risk their lives to do the stuff that other people don't want to do, usually with little or no thanks from society. As a younger man myself, I can say that these sailors (I sailed briefly and loved it) were choosing this profession. That's not to defend choices made that were unreasonably dangerous, but if it wasn't shipping, it would have been a draft to go to war, or a hundred other options, many of which the average person tends to discount or take for granted.

@@matthewmosier8439 It's STILL that way. When I was 22 I had a warehouse job where I was expected to come in and work strenuous labor for pennies even when I had a serious acute illness that caused me to have constant diarrhea to the point I needed to bring a full sized Gatorade in to avoid collapsing from lack of electrolytes or hydration. The illness lasted for nearly 2 months, but it was 2020 and I did what I needed to do at the time to support myself and my girlfriend. They wouldn't give me leave, instead they wrote me off as a liability and thanklessly fired me as soon as they found the next kid they could replace me with. Society 100% sees young men as a source of cheap degrading thankless labor that can just be tossed out and replaced. Young men need work, I understand, but the way society commonly goes about it and how they are treated is actually kind of sick and often goes into the realm of exploitation. A lot of the marketing campaigns directed to recruiting young men into certain jobs are also manipulative as hell. Yes, young men need work and are a bit limited in their options, but it doesn't make these exploitive practices right.

@@funnelvortex7722 That's a gender thing. Society believing that young men are more expendable than young women. Do you think ships would sail dangerously if crewed by a majority of young women? I think we both know that things would change if the genders were swapped.

@@matthewmosier8439 It's also an age thing. The truth is in a lot of these trades old blood is routinely forced out, a lot of people >30 regularly get laid off, bullied out, or fired and swapped out for some naive kid despite being good at what they do and having many working years left, they do this because as people get older the cost of their life becomes more expensive and therefore they begin demanding raises, so of course companies find it easier to just be rid of them for some unwitting teenager or young adult who will work minimum wage. The consequence of this is that it causes a massive shortage in experience and skill as no one is there to provide their years or decades of mastered skills or train and give guidance to younger workers. I have no doubt the lack of old experience on board was a factor in the Bannockburn disaster, they were just eager kids who just got tossed out into a November Gale on a shoddy ship and sketchy captain to fend for themselves it seems like.