By Jim Bloch
The Carl D. Bradley sank southwest of Gull Island in northern Lake Michigan in an intense storm Nov. 18, 1958, 65 years ago.
Thirty-three of the 35 men aboard the Bradley died when the freighter went down.
In 1959, U.S. Steel, owner of the Bradley, hired the Global Marine Exploration Company to investigate the incident. The firm’s ship, the Submarex, spent 10 days attempting to photograph the Bradley, concluding that the freighter was in one piece at the bottom of the lake.
Not only did the Global Marine Exploration Company’s conclusion suggest that the sinking of the Bradley was an act of God, not a structural failure, but it challenged the veracity of story told by the disaster’s two survivors, Frank Mays and Arthur Fleming, both of whom said the freighter broke in two before it went down.
Another death
A year after it sank, the Bradley inadvertently climbed another life.
John Martin and his brother Charlie, both fishermen on Beaver Island, were hired to run food and supplies to the Submarex.
The Martin’s boat, the Frances, foundered in seven foot seas off the north end of High Island, roughly midway between Beaver and Gull islands, during a supply run. The boat sunk, taking John to the bottom and pitching his brother Charlie into the lake, according to an article by Charlie’s son Frances E. Martin in the Journal of Beaver Island History, Volume Five, 2002.
In a near miracle, Charlie with the aid of a life jacket and a life ring, swam eight-10 miles to Beaver Island and then walked barefoot to the Beachcomber bar where his wife worked and where young Frances and his little brothers were playing.
St. Clair maritime artist Jim Clary
In 1995 and 1997, noted maritime artist Jim Clary and underwater explorer Fred Shannon spearheaded two dives to the Bradley in an effort to confirm Mays’s version of the sinking.
“I’d never really forgotten the Bradley, but years had passed and I had made a new life for myself,” recalled Mays in his 2003 oral history of the sinking. “Then, out of nowhere (St. Clair) artist Jim Clary called me and he said that there was a chance I could go and make a dive to the Bradley in a submarine.”
“Absolutely, I’ll do it,” said Mays.
Clary, who died in March 2016, traveled with Mays in a submersible to the site of the wreck in 1995 but the water was too stirred up to tell if the ship was in one piece, according to a press release posted on www.boatnerd.com.
Two years later, the trio sent the Phantom DHD2, a remotely operated submarine, to photograph the site and found the ship in two pieces 90-120 feet apart.
“The stern section appears to lie at an approximate forty degree angle with the propeller and rudder well off the lake bottom,” the team reported. The bow was upright on the lakebed in about 360 feet of water.
“U.S. Steel wanted the world to believe that the Bradley never broke into two pieces, and ridiculed my claim to the contrary,” Mays said. “It was with great satisfaction that I was able to say, ‘I saw it in two pieces on the surface, and now I’ve seen it in two pieces of the bottom of Lake Michigan’.”
Clary and his son paint the Bradley
Clary first painted the Bradley in 1976, the 10th major painting of his career. It shows the ship in the midst of the storm, still in one piece, before the sun had set.
“After the 1997 dive, based on the photos, my dad painted seven more renditions of the Bradley,” said Pam Clary Malane on the 60th anniversary of the sinking. Malane now runs her dad’s shop, Cap’n Jim’s Gallery, in Riverview Plaza in downtown St. Clair. “All of them were done in 1998.”
One of Clary’s renditions shows the stern after it had broken free of the bow, propeller-up, steam still pouring from the stack, cabin lights gleaming, about to sink below the storm-tossed surface; nearby, the life raft of Mays and his fellow crewmen careen up a wave.
The other six renditions show the Bradley on the bottom from different angles: The bow head on; from its port side; looking forward to the bow from its break mid-ship; from its starboard side; the stern from its port side; and a slightly elevated view of both halves of the ship on the bottom.
“It astounds me that the bow is sitting nearly perfectly upright on the bottom,” said Malane.
Clary collaborated with his son Don on a kind of time-lapse painting of the Bradley‘s sinking, also in 1998.
Since 2015, Clary had reserved a portion of his St. Clair gallery for the aquatic paintings of Don, who died at age 50 in a car crash Oct. 10, 2014 on Maui in the Hawaiian Islands, where he had lived and painted for two decades.
In contrast to Jim’s often dark, storm-tossed work, Don’s paintings exhibited a touch of surrealism and plenty of Technicolor — palm-studded beaches drenched in citrusy sunsets and giant sea turtles and playful dolphins easing their ways past ghostly ships marooned on the sea floor.
The painting shows an image of the Bradley breaking in two in a trough between two giant waves and another image of the ship’s bow plunging underwater toward the bottom, both painted and signed by Jim; Don painted the bow of ship marooned on the lake bottom, which he signed.
“That tells the story right there,” said Malane.
The hull of ship appears to be pebbled with rust and zebra mussels, just beginning their colonization of the bottom of Lake Michigan in 1997. But look at image just right and it’s obvious: The Carl D. Bradley is sitting on the lakebed weeping.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
