Porch Notes
The Ghost Ship That Sailed Through a Crack in the Lake
History and culture
Lake Superior is the largest, deepest, coldest, and least forgiving of the Great Lakes. Sailors have a grim old saying about it: Superior never gives up her dead. And no ship haunts the lake’s stories quite like the SS Bannockburn.
She was a steel-hulled Canadian grain freighter. On November 20, 1902, she left port loaded with wheat and a crew of about 20, bound across Lake Superior. The next day, the captain of a passing ship, the Algonquin, spotted her in the distance and recognized her profile. He looked again a few minutes later — and she was gone. A winter storm closed in that night. The Bannockburn was never seen again. No wreck was ever found. The only trace that ever washed ashore was a single oar and a life preserver with her name on it.
Within a year, sailors up and down the lake had given her a nickname: the Flying Dutchman of the Great Lakes. They began to report seeing her on stormy nights — a freighter laboring through the snow and spray, her lamps blinking in the dark, her wheelhouse silent, forever trying to reach a port she’ll never make. The legend was popularized by Michigan-born adventure writer James Oliver Curwood, who deliberately tied the Bannockburn to the old Flying Dutchman tale to give the Great Lakes a ghost ship of their own.
What really happened to her? Almost certainly the plain and terrible answer: she was overwhelmed by a November gale on a lake that has claimed thousands of ships. But on a foggy night out on Superior, when something gray and low slides along the horizon and then isn’t there… you can understand why the sailors believed.
Where to see it
The story of the Bannockburn and hundreds of other Superior wrecks is told at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, near Paradise in the U.P. — one of the most atmospheric spots on the entire lake to stand and look out at the water.