A Michigan couple spent their lives searching for the shipwreck of Le Griffon, the Great Lakes' oldest on record, lost with all hands in 1679. They believe they found it a few miles off the Upper Peninsula, but have run into bureacratic headwaters since trying to prove it. The sheer age of the remains and the many competing claims (be sure to head down the Wikipedia rabbit hole!) makes skepticism an easy default, but some historians, some French officials, and the Detroit Free Press are now on their side. Time is running out: they're getting old and legal routes for recovering the wreck are nearly exhausted.
Sharing the scene with fish and fellow diver Tom Kucharsky, a production worker at Crown Cork & Seal in Dayton, I got within inches of what once had been tall North American trees, shaped by axes centuries ago, now partly buried in sand. I didn't wear an air tank. The setting was so shallow, I could grab air topside, then swim easily down for viewing, pulled down by a weight belt that Steve lent me. I was warm inside my own wet suit. When I ran short of air at the wreck, Tom would swim over and hold out his backup breathing line, known to divers as a "reserve regulator." I'd catch a breath to stay down longer. We swam within inches of the wreckages but didn't touch any part of this algae-covered history tableaux. Steve had given strict orders.
"We don't bring anything up. We're doing everything legally," he advised, before my dives. Without a government salvage permit, nothing should be taken from a shipwreck, he said.
They're not interested in treasure, they say, and there isn't going to be any because it was transporting furs. "They just want, in their lifetimes, to see the wreckage identified and protected."
This seems like one of those things where there are all sorts of obvious reasons why the government might not want something done (there are thousands of old wrecks in the Great Lakes and hauling them up on a whim would be five different types of disaster) but poor transparency and typically bad bedside matter.