One day in the early 1980s, diver Tom Farnquist was exploring the shipwrecked SS Comet in Lake Superior. Tom was there with members of his local historical society. They were filming the wreck, when suddenly, they noticed something strange.
Shipwreck artifacts would normally be scattered about, but, today, a bunch of them were piled on the stern of the Comet. And attached to the ship’s anchor was a lift bag – a balloon used to bring heavy objects to the surface.
“And I said, ‘Whoa, somebody's getting ready to loot this wreck,’” said Tom.
In an attempt to stop this kind of looting, Michigan passed a law in the 1980s banning anyone from taking artifacts from a wreck without a permit. But it was hard to enforce. Tom, a founder of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, said he didn't want those artifacts looted; they should be preserved for the public.
So, he did something he’d never done before. He stole the artifacts.
And then he did it again and again on other ships. Until, eventually, he and the museum got caught. State law enforcement had to decide if Tom was some kind of savior preserving history or a looting criminal.
Credits:
Producer: Maxwell Howard
Host: Dan Wanschura
Editor: Morgan Springer
Mixing: Dan Wanschura
Additional Editing: Dan Wanschura, Ellie Katz and Claire Keenan-Kurgan
Transcript:
DAN WANSCHURA, HOST: One day in the early 1980’s, Tom Farnquist is looking at a shipwreck deep underwater. The wreck is just about 100 years old. It’s the SS Comet, this steamship that sank in Lake Superior in 1875. The ship’s hull is half buried in the lake’s sandy bottom – its propeller sticking just out of the sand.
TOM FARNQUIST: There weren't too many people wanting to dive the Comet. It was pretty deep as far as sport divers go. And that’s what we were.
WANSCHURA: Tom had visited the wreck many times before. And on this day, Tom is diving with members of his local historical society. They’re filming the wreck, when they notice something.
FARNQUIST: We noticed a bunch of artifacts…were piled up on the stern, on the fantail.
WANSCHURA: At first, Tom is confused by what he’s seeing. Normally, artifacts from a shipwreck are scattered all over. Not stacked in a pile. But then it clicks.
FARNQUIST: And I said, ‘Whoa, somebody's getting ready to loot this wreck.’
WANSCHURA: At the time, it wasn’t unusual to loot a shipwreck in the Great Lakes. Divers would take artifacts and disappear without a trace. Looking down through the water, Tom sees something else too – a lift bag attached to the anchor. It’s this balloon used to bring heavy objects to the surface.
FARNQUIST: And we knew then for sure that they were planning on stealing these artifacts. I mean, you don't go down [and] put a lift bag on something unless you're gonna recover it.
WANSCHURA: A few days earlier, Tom had spotted another diving crew around the wreck. He suspected they were behind this, but didn’t know for sure. So, Tom surfaces and scans the horizon – no ships in sight. Tom knows he has to do something. These artifacts shouldn’t be looted, they should be preserved for the public. He’ll have to take them first – to save them from the looters. But the problem is, if he takes the artifacts, he’s breaking the law.
In an attempt to stop this kind of looting, Michigan had recently passed a law banning anyone from taking artifacts from a wreck.
FARNQUIST: You have to have a permit to recover that stuff. So, [had] I tried to get a permit from the DNR, it would've taken too long. … I mean, probably weeks.
WANSCHURA: After that, the artifacts would probably be gone.
FARNQUIST: And I said, ‘No, we can't wait that long.’
WANSCHURA: So the next day, Tom returns with his crew and takes what he can from the pile of artifacts.
FARNQUIST: And we cut the lift bags off the anchor and…just made it more difficult for them to come back and raise them.
WANSCHURA: This is Points North, a podcast about the land, water, and inhabitants of the Great Lakes. I’m Dan Wanschura.
That day on the SS Comet – it’s the first time Tom has ever stolen artifacts, but it won't be the last. Eventually, Tom gets caught. And the state has to decide if Tom is saving history or if he’s just another diver breaking the law.
Producer Maxwell Howard has the story right after this.
MAXWELL HOWARD, BYLINE: As a teenager growing up in Michigan, Tom’s hero was Jacques Coustaue – which gives you a pretty good idea of his interests. At 15, he borrowed a dive tank and respirator from a neighbor and was hooked. For the next decade, he dove for shipwrecks all over Whitefish Bay in the Upper Peninsula. He and other local divers had a nickname for one of their boats.
FARNQUIST: We called it the SS Leak because you had to bale half the time when you're going out there you're quite a ways offshore too in the middle of shipping lanes.
HOWARD: And while Tom kept diving, he kept learning as much as he could about local shipwrecks. Some wrecks still hadn’t been found, but through some digging, Tom thought he might know where to find them. And then he got an opportunity. It was the early ’70s and Tom was invited to join an out-of-state dive crew that had equipment to go much deeper than Tom and the locals could. They headed out to Whitefish Point in Lake Superior.
FARNQUIST: Nobody's ever looked for shipwrecks up there. At that time, this is in like 1972.
HOWARD: They started sweeping the lake’s floor with sonar, mapping every inch – when they found a wreck. And then another. And another.
FARNQUIST: And I thought after the fourth one, ‘There's nothing to this, you know…’ This was a good time in my life, pretty exciting. ... N othing, nothing more exciting for a diver than to find a virgin shipwreck.
HOWARD: It was a big moment for Tom. But something didn’t feel right.
FARNQUIST: I didn't take any artifacts, but the guys aboard…they were taking things like the ships wheels, telegraph, ship's bell, I mean stuff, real prized possessions.
HOWARD: These dives were happening before it was against the law to take artifacts. It was more of a "finders keepers" culture. Whoever found a wreck could take whatever they wanted. And a lot of them did. They’d often take that stuff home with them – ending up in garages maybe, or on shelves collecting dust.
FARNQUIST: My concern was the finders were taking a lot of these things and it was leaving the area. And I had this plan or vision, hopefully, to keep the artifacts local.
HOWARD: Tom thought, there should be a place accessible to the public to preserve this history. Without that, people would never have a chance to learn about old shipwrecks and see the incredible artifacts he and some other divers had. So, in 1978 Tom formed the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society. From there, they established the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, just off the bay Tom had spent so much of his youth diving. Tom was the executive director. And the museum did well from the very beginning.
FARNQUIST: And we opened in September and September till October, we had 12,000 people go through. And that convinced the board that I wasn't blowing smoke up their butt. That this is a good opportunity for us to really create something worthwhile.
HOWARD: Finally, Tom had made a home for all these lost objects. They could be preserved and their history shared – instead of collecting dust on some diver’s shelf.
A few years after the museum opened, the state passed new legislation.
The new law said anything along the Great Lakes bottomlands was property of the state. That meant any shipwreck, plane wreck, minerals, you name it – anything at the bottom of the lakes.
WAYNE LUSARDI: Yeah so the 1980s legislation was really a grassroots effort by area divers.
HOWARD: That’s Wayne Lusardi. He’s Michigan’s maritime archaeologist.
LUSARDI: They were seeing these wrecks being looted, they were seeing them falling apart, and they wanted to do something to help preserve them.
HOWARD: Now, if you wanted to pull anything up, you needed a permit. Otherwise, divers could risk fines anywhere from $500 to $15,000. And even jail time – starting at 93 days and going up to 10 years depending on the value of the artifacts.
LUSARDI: This is like walking into a national park or state park and walking out with stuff. Like, you just can't do that. And for some reason it was tolerated in the Great Lakes.
HOWARD: The new law was a big step towards protecting underwater artifacts, but it didn’t entirely stop shipwrecks from getting looted. Case in point, the SS Comet. That wreck where Tom thought diver’s were about to steal artifacts. The first wreck he ever stole from. Back then, Tom actually consulted with the local prosecutor of Chippewa County Patrick Shannon.
FARNQUIST: And, make a long story short, he basically said, ‘Take 'em, and we'll deal with it later.’
HOWARD: Pat Shannon says that sounds about right.
SHANNON: No harm, no foul. You have to show criminal intent. And there has to be what's called a criminal animus. I just didn’t see it. … I didn't see the criminal animus. I saw a group of people who were trying to preserve the history of the Great Lakes.
HOWARD: So Tom kept collecting. More wrecks, more artifacts, sometimes with permits, sometimes without them. And things were fine for a while, years even. But trouble did come, eventually. It was the spring of 1992. Tom was still the executive director of the museum. He was in his office when the receptionist called. There were two men at the front. Tom needed to come quick. There were two officers from Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources. And they’d gotten a tip.
FARNQUIST: He said, ‘Well, we have a search warrant.’ I said, ‘Really? For what?’ ‘You know, we're looking for any artifacts or any kinda evidence that would prove that you guys took artifacts illegally.’
HOWARD: They searched for hours – taking film, photos, slides – anything possibly incriminating.
FARNQUIST: They thought, well, this is a, this is a big bust. … And they hauled a bunch of stuff out of there like you'd see the FBI raiding some, you know, mafia office or something – they were hauling stuff out of there.
HOWARD: At the museum, the officers left the exhibits untouched, but they made a list of things they thought were taken illegally. Around a hundred items were listed. A ship’s wheel from one wreck, another wreck’s large nameplate, silver ore from the SS Comet. Tom was worried. A few years earlier, a diver he knew spent a day in jail for taking just one item from a wreck. And Tom knew the museum had much more than that – taken without a permit.
FARNQUIST: If they catch you in the act of doing something like that, they can take your diving gear, and confiscate your boat, and fine you, and do all kinds of stuff like that.
HOWARD: The museum’s board called a meeting to keep them up to speed.
FARNQUIST: We didn't wanna be branded as thieves. And that the reason we took some of these artifacts is they were being threatened. And we were gonna do nothing but… [preserve] the artifact in the proper way.
HOWARD: After the conservation officers left the museum, they sent what they collected to the Michigan Attorney General’s criminal division. The museum quickly hired lawyers and Tom admitted that they had taken artifacts illegally. ‘They were guilty,’ he said. For over a year, Tom and the museum waited, hoping to work things out with authorities. Hoping the state would see that the museum's intention all along was to preserve artifacts and maybe they could make a deal.
FARNQUIST: They're not in a hurry, you know, down there. ... We're up here biting our fingernails and thinking what's gonna happen to us, you know?
HOWARD: But for some people, the answer was clear.
SANDRA CLARK: They were doing some extraordinary work at Whitefish Point, but they also had done work that was not legal.
HOWARD: That’s Sandra Clark – director of the Michigan History Center. She says yes, it was common for divers to take things back then. But also, divers could recover artifacts with some planning. It’s not like it took a year to get a permit, she says.
CLARK: So some of that may have been just not wanting to take the time to do it once they saw something that they thought would be important to have or to use in the museum.
HOWARD: She says she worried, along with her staff at the history center, that if the state let this slide, it could weaken the law.
CLARK: Michigan had a different way of doing things now. There was a law that people needed to obey it, and part of this was protecting this history for future generations.
HOWARD: Finally, Tom heard back from the Michigan Attorney General’s Office. They were ready to hear arguments. Tom headed down to the state capitol with another board member.
FARNQUIST: I didn't go down to be baptized in fire by myself.
HOWARD: Tom says at least two state conservation agencies were there too, and they argued against the museum: they said the museum had broken the law. Then it was Tom's turn to speak.
FARNQUIST: I was the one that had to argue in defense of, put it that way.
HOWARD: What was, I mean…
FARNQUIST: But there was no defense. We did wrong. We admitted it. But let's try and settle this thing.
HOWARD: And eventually, they did. The state said they would loan the museum the artifacts they’d originally stolen. The museum could go on exhibiting all the pieces they had gathered throughout the years – it would just be that the state owned the pieces now.
FARNQUIST: They said, even though the letter of the law may have been violated, the spirit of the law wasn't. Our board of directors and our divers agree with the state of Michigan that these artifacts deserve to be protected. And I think we protected some of these artifacts by bringing them up and doing good conservation work on them and displaying and interpreting them.
HOWARD: But the loan included rules. One of them said that if any board member or employee at the museum ever stole artifacts again, all the loaned artifacts could be permanently reclaimed by the state.Tom says no one at the museum has broken the law since.
The Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum is a far way out on Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula. It’s so remote that you’ll be driving and suddenly realize you haven’t seen a gas station in 30 minutes. But visitors don’t seem to care. The parking lot is full. Today the museum is thriving.
(museum ambience)
HOWARD: Yeah, I mean this is really impressive in here. I mean this is– I don’t know what I was expecting. This is quite the presentation.
FARNQUIST: I told ya that. I told ya, ‘You’re gonna be pleasantly surprised.’
HOWARD: In the main showroom, front and center, is the polished bell from the famous Edmond Fitzgerald shipwreck.
FARNQUIST: Some people come because they like lighthouses. People come because of Lake Shipwrecks, but a lot of people come because of Edmund Fitzgerald on the bottom, 17 miles from here.
HOWARD: Tom shows me a restored brass gauge panel of another shipwreck – the SS Samuel Mather. It sank in Lake Superior in 1891.
HOWARD: This is beautiful. I mean, this is beautifully restored.
FARNQUIST: Yeah. … You know, it's better here than somebody's mantle piece and some kids, ‘Oh, dad had these old artifacts.’ What are you gonna do with them? Here they are really appreciated.
HOWARD: Then there are these life-like mannequins all around the museum —sailors, lighthouse keepers, Coast Guard surfmen. One even surprised me as I came around a corner.
HOWARD: This one's pretty good. I came down and I thought it was a person.
FARNQUIST: (laughter)
HOWARD: Chris Hugdoll is visiting the museum for the first time.
CHRIS HUGDOLL: Seeing the artifacts that you’re talking about, is just surreal to see the history that it takes, the courage that it took for all these people to make these voyages and really something that I took for granted for a long time.
HOWARD: It’s been three decades since Tom and the museum settled with the Attorney General’s Office. The stolen artifacts are still on loan and on display. And Tom has no regrets. He says if he hadn’t taken the artifacts, they would have been lost.
FARNQUIST: I don't apologize for bringing artifacts up where we've got 'em on display because thousands of people have a chance to really experience and learn where very, very few divers are gonna be out there diving some of these shipwrecks.
HOWARD: Yeah. And when you say don't apologize, you mean, for the ones you got without permits, is what you're saying?
FARNQUIST: Yes. Yeah, we bit the bullet on that. We feel good about the way it turned out. The state was happy with it.
HOWARD: Tom’s 80. He can’t dive anymore, but he’s still preserving history. Today, he helps other crews look for long-lost shipwrecks in the Great Lakes.
