The Three Princesses of Pelee Passage
Three historic shipwrecks lie along a straight line running the seven miles (11 kilometres) between the actual “point” of Point Pelee on the Canadian mainland and the northeastern tip of Pelee Island.
These three sidewheel steamers, used by railroads to convey passengers and goods from one end of Lake Erie to the other end before any railroad was constructed along that length of the 241-mile (390-kilometer)-long Lake Erie, were part of a large fleet of vessels kept busy by increasing business activity in the Great Lakes and to the heavy influx of immigrants from Europe arriving during that era and heading to destinations in the West. These vessels were huge, averaging 275 feet (83.3 metres) in length, and, considering that Lake Erie was part of the sparsely-settled, North American wilderness at that time, the luxurious comforts of these ships seemed entirely at odds with the setting.
In the 1850s, Lake Erie witnessed more maritime traffic, by far, than any of the other four Great Lakes; this contributed, in large part, to the fact that Lake Erie has the highest number of shipwrecks of any Great Lake: more than 1,700 of them.
One of the first, and certainly the most infamous, of these 1850s Lake Erie losses was that of the passenger steamer named the Atlantic, sunk in a collision with the steamer, Ogdensburg, on the night of August 20, 1852, off Long Point, Ontario, with the tragic loss of approximately 130 lives. But this accident did little to slow down the brisk maritime traffic of the times. Numerous other elegantly outfitted paddlewheelers continued to convey new arrivals and goods into the interior of the continent.
Most of Lake Erie’s length, from east to west, can be sailed with few concerns or worries over navigation. Long Point is certainly an obstruction, as this narrow sliver of land reaches far out into the open lake. But there are no shallow reefs or islands in this vicinity, which, incidentally, provides the deepest waters in all of Lake Erie. It is not until one
