The Bruce Peninsula, also known as the Saugeen Peninsula, juts north out of Owen Sound on the southeastern shore of Lake Huron. It’s a 100-kilometre-long, 38-kilometre-wide barrier of cliffs and clay, sandbars and forests, villages and national parks. Such is its size that the peninsula nearly splits Lake Huron in two, separating Georgian Bay on its eastern shore from the lake’s main basin on its west. This is the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation, and includes the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation and the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation.

After 1848, when the first settlers arrived in the area, the waters surrounding this chunk of land grew busy with ships ferrying humans and freight. Vessels moved between new settlements like Collingwood and Midland and Sarnia, gateway to the St. Clair River and the booming industrial cities of the United States. But travel on this inland freshwater sea was risky business. Ships were not always well-maintained and sometimes overloaded with cargo — a combination that put crews at risk when gales swept over the lake, as they often did. The ships were staffed largely by people of British and Irish origin and the poor, whose names are sometimes missing from official records. In stormy seasons, ships disappeared with alarming frequency. All souls on board were lost forever, their fate a mystery to their grieving families. In tribute, the communities of the region often adopted the names of captains or their ships: Larsen Cove, Severn, Silversides Point.

Patrick Folkes, a marine historian and author of Shipwrecks of the Saugeen, estimates that a minimum of 100 ships went down off the coast of the Saugeen alone between 1848 and 1930. Somewhere between 40 to 50 ships have never been located, identified or studied. Many were battered to bits. “Sometimes the only clue [that a ship had been lost] was when bodies or wreckage washed ashore,” he says.

The last intact ship discovered in the region was the Jane Miller, a package-and-passenger steamer that disappeared in a blizzard near Wiarton, Ont. in 1881. American ship hunters found her in 2017 after scanning the area with sonar.

A handful of wrecks are believed to lie intact in Lake Huron’s depths, still bearing the remains of their cargo and the humans who travelled on them and hidden from all but the fish — until now.

Drebert and Melnick started dating in high school in Cayuga, Ont. and moved to the Saugeen Peninsula in 2017. They’ve been together for 23 years. Married for half of those years and colleagues for most of them, the couple jump in and out of each other’s sentences. Drebert gets a kick out of the way her husband talks to the fish that show up on screen as their robot scans the underwater world: It’s cool, guys. I’m just going to hang, he’ll coo into his monitor.

Their documentary company, Inspired Planet Productions, makes films about the environment and science. In 2021, after finishing a 17-part series for TVO about Canadian biospheres, they decided to shift their focus to what was happening in the water in front of their home.

The Great Lakes are experiencing massive ecological upheaval, in large part thanks to invasive species like the quagga mussel and its fingernail-sized cousin, the zebra mussel.

The mollusks, native to lakes in southern Russia and Ukraine, found their way into Canadian waters via the ballast tanks of ships, which hold water to stabilize the vessel when it is carrying little to no cargo. Once the ship arrives in port, it dumps its load of ballast water, releasing non-native organisms into the local environment.

A single female quagga mussel releases up to a million eggs each spawning season, although most do not survive. Even so, once the mussel arrived in the Great Lakes, it spread quickly, forming vast underwater colonies. They feed by filtering phytoplankton and other microscopic particles out of the water; each two-centimetre-long mussel clears up to a litre of water per day. These invaders are so plentiful in Lake Huron that they’ve depleted the plankton upon which native species also rely, with cascading effects up the food chain. 

“It certainly had some dramatic influences on absolutely everything that’s going on in the lake. We see the effects of that every single day,” says Ryan Lauzon, Fisheries Management Biologist for the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation. The quaggas are such efficient filter-feeders that they have cleaned the water of everything that impedes visibility. As a result, sunlight penetrates more deeply into the water and gives life to algae called cladophora. These are now growing more plentifully and coat the nets of fishers, who are trying to catch dwindling numbers of fish. Species that previously thrived on plankton are struggling to survive. “It’s become so difficult to make a living from fishing that most individuals have had to get out of it,” says Lauzon.

The mussels are also destroying human infrastructure. A quagga mussel will lie flush to a surface and then anchor itself using strands of protein known as byssal threads. The mussels do this layer by layer, building on top of each other until thousands of individuals are squeezed into the same square metre of space.

When Drebert and Melnick decided to film the quagga mussels, they invested in a high-end cinematic remotely operated vehicle, or robot, made by New Zealand’s Boxfish Robotics. The robot can travel underwater and record high-quality images in the now-crystalline waters of the Great Lakes. Because the robot moves with fish-like motion, real fish allow the device to trail after them and feed information back to the filmmakers about spawning, food sources and habitat. Drebert and Melnick then pass this footage on to scientists, who use it to study the quaggas’ effect. (Drebert received a grant from the Trebek Initiative to facilitate this research.)

Their work has allowed them to witness events rarely seen, like lake whitefish spawning and different species of young fish hanging out on the lake’s bottom.

But the pair never expected to find a missing steamship.

The question on everyone’s mind was: who was she?

Googling, Drebert and Melnick quickly narrowed the field to three ships: the Eclipse, last seen in 1883; the Africa, sunk in 1895; and the Saturn, lost in 1901. They reached out to anyone who could tell them what to do when you’ve found a mystery ship at the bottom of a lake. They brought Folkes, the historian, on board, along with Scarlett Janusas, a marine archeologist. Janusas helped them register the wreck as an archeological site, which protects it from scavenging or looting. Anyone who tampers with the site could now face a fine of up to $1 million or imprisonment for up to a year.

One way to confirm the ship’s identity would be to clear the mussels covering her name. But any effort to scrape away the mussels would rip the wood to pieces; as the mollusks settled on the downed ship, they hooked their filaments onto its surface. Cleaning the mussels would change the ship’s natural exterior, violating the Ontario Heritage Act under which it is now protected.

Drebert and Melnick returned to the wreck site a few weeks after they first spotted the ship and picked out more details. Pieces of coal sat in the silt beside the ship, remnants of her cargo. Her measurements, even under a coating of mussels, suggested a vessel of unusually long length—perhaps as long as 45 metres.

Two days later, the ships hit a windstorm in the late afternoon off the Saugeen Peninsula. Around 4 p.m., Larsen came out on deck to take in some linen that he’d put out to dry. The wind grew fiercer, and even brought snow. The gale ripped the Severn’s sails to shreds, and by 7 p.m., both vessels were in serious trouble. Larsen made the call for the Africa to release the Severn from her tow line. “Capt. Larsen either thought that we were sinking, or his vessel was foundering,” the Severn’s captain, James Silversides, told a local newspaper days after the storm. “I think it was the latter, because he is a grand fellow, and would never have deserted us if he thought we were in a bad way.”

The sky began to turn inky with night. The Severn was rolling heavily. Her crew worked furiously to keep her afloat. In the dark, they could just make out the Africa’s bobbing outline about half a mile away. On each ship, a Mann brother was trying to save his own life by keeping his vessel afloat, while worrying about his brother doing the same nearby.