A Tale of Two Schooners

by Valerie van Heest

What's the chance that two small 2-masted schooners, each a diminutive sixty-feet in length and heading from Chicago to St. Joseph with very unique cargoes, would go down during the same season 140 years ago and be found within a year and a few miles of each other in southwest Lake Michigan?! Well it happened!

Join explorer Valerie van Heest as she recounts the discovery of these vessels made with Clive Cussler, the NUMA team and her team Michigan Shipwreck Research Associates while searching for Northwest Flight 2501 off South Haven, Michigan.

One vessel, the William Tell (named after the famous Austrian archer), sank due to a chemical reaction while the other, the A.P Dunton, went down in a violent storm that claimed the lives of the 4-man crew and took with her a load of school-house furniture destined for a new one room schoolhouse in Benton Harbor, Michigan.

(Live narration to video program- 35 minutes)