Andrew Pepler — the great-great-great grandson of James Carruthers, the shipping executive after whom a sunken freighter was named — said the news that the missing ship was finally found overwhelmed him with a flood of emotions.
“I cannot tell you the emotional joy, the happiness and the excitement I felt when my dad sent the link to your article in my family group chat,” he wrote in an email to Free Press photojournalist Eric Seals, adding that the report — finally — solved a mystery that has haunted his family “for generations.”
He also offered a coda to the discovery story with one of his own.
The Free Press reported, on Sunday, Aug. 24, that shipwreck expert David Trotter and a tight-knit crew of amateur explorers located the Carruthers, which disappeared along with other vessels in a 1913 storm, never to be seen again — until a few months ago.
It was swallowed by Lake Huron in a terrible storm.
No one aboard the Carruthers survived, and the 550-foot Canadian vessel is now resting upside down at the bottom of Lake Huron on the American side under almost 200 feet of water.
It was untouched by human hands for nearly 112 years.
“Stories like this may not be the most politically shattering, the most world-breaking,” Pepler wrote in his email to the Free Press. “But they always will mean something to someone, and in this case, that someone is myself and my family.”
In telephone interview with the Free Press, Pepler reflected on why the mystery troubled him for so long — and what it now means to other Canadians who feel connected to the missing ship.
Pepler, 32, of Woodstock, Canada, asked Seals to “pass along a message of thanks from me to the dive team.” He also said the Free Press report brought back vivid childhood memories and a tremendous sense of relief.
“Growing up on Georgian Bay, at night you could hear the noise of the engines of the freighters from afar,” he wrote. “My dad would always wake us up to hear the very low bass of the engines even though it was miles away.”
Georgian Bay, in Canada, is tucked into Lake Huron.
Pepler said as a boy he’d “glue my binoculars to my eyes” and watch the ship lights disappear “behind the islands between us” and his father would describe the dangers of the lakes, especially in fall and winter.
Then, when he was 12 or 13, he found a book about the Great Lakes freighters and his late grandmother, H. Clare Carruthers, told him all about the SS James C. Carruthers.
It sank, she told him, a dozen or so years before she was born.
Her father talked about the vessel with her, and how much it meant to him, Pepler wrote, and the conversations inspired “late night sleuthing missions to find more and more information” about the ship.
Back then, he said, internet connectivity was by dial-up phone lines.
Pepler mined “little nuggets” he’d relay to his grandma.
They’d talk about the lakes, ships and storm until she died 14 years ago. And when in got married, he’d bore his wife “to near death or possible divorce with the factoids, tidbits and more” about the Carruthers.
He’d drive to Point Clark, off Lake Huron, where there is an Imperial Tower-style lighthouse, and stare at the water for hours and wonder where the ship might have gone down.
Trotter, who found the wreck with his crew, told the Free Press that it’s not unusual for the solved mysteries to give the living who may have wondered about it a “great sense of closure.”
During the last three years, Pepler said, “life had gotten in the way of my armchair searching,” but then his dad saw the article and “frantically sent it out to our family group chat.”
Pepler said so much of the Carruthers clan, going back to Scotland, where James Carruthers’ parents were from, is known, and so his his final resting place, a cemetery in Montreal.
But what happened to the namesake vessel wasn’t, which weighed on him.
There also, he acknowledged, may have been a sense of family responsibility, perhaps, because of the executive’s position, for the 20-something men who lost their lives — and their families.
That burden now has been lifted.
“You’ve laid to rest a huge looming question that has hounded my family, and the families of James C. Carruthers’ crew, for generations,” Pepler said. He added: “Thank you so very much for finding her final resting place.”Contact Frank Witsil: 313-222-5022 orfwitsil@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Great-great-great grandson of James Carruthers is relieved namesake shipwreck is found
Reporting by Frank Witsil, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
