Tale of the fisherman and the shipwreck
Bullets were hard to come by on Manitoulin Island, and Finny James had a family to feed. A boat engineer by trade, the industrious James — birth name Feltus Rutherford — had taken his wife and four children to the western coast of the Canadian island in the early 1920s, to a little place called Meldrum Bay. They stayed in a makeshift structure until a proper log house was built; in the meantime James fished on his boat the Raney, and hunted for food. It was then, during those early days in the clear water of Lake Huron, that James may have stumbled upon one of the longest-running mysteries in Canada: the wreck of the Griffon.
“He had no idea,” said Betty Dearing. Living alone in her Sarnia apartment, the 87-year-old Dearing still recalls the first time she heard her father tell the story, back when she was 10 and the Second World War was reaching its climax. “He had just moved there, and he was out hunting, but there were no stores or nothing. So you couldn’t get gun supplies. So he’d go there and get lead out of the old boat.” Linked to the famous French adventurer René-Robert Cavelier — known better through Southwestern Ontario as La Salle — the Griffon is said to be the first ship to sail the Great Lakes. It was to serve Cavelier as he searched for the fabled Northwest Passage to China; these days Sarnia still boasts a plaque, located in a park under the Bluewater Bridge, commemorating the ill-fated ship. It disappeared in 1679.
The Griffon’s final resting place is a well-documented scavenger hunt at this point, but the answer likely lies on Manitoulin Island. A handful of skeletons bearing French coins and other telltale trinkets were found in a cave near the old wreck, the same wreck scavenged by James, Dearing said. “It was all wrecked up on the rocks,” Dearing added, remembering the story her father told her. “Pieces, big chunks of timber.” Much of that wood washed away in a terrific storm in 1942, but authors of the book The Wreck of the Griffon, Cris Kohl and Joan Forsberg of Windsor, claim the Manitoulin Island wreck remains the most likely answer. Dearing’s memory is not what it used to be, but many details of those early days on Manitoulin Island remain crystal clear: the days her father took her fishing, the day he and his brother Fred caught a sturgeon weighing over 100 pounds.
“He would cook whatever we had: perch, bass, trout. Sturgeon,” Dearing said, laughing. “He was a wonderful person.” Dearing was the seventh of nine children. Shortly after that storm in 1942 her father switched to the timber business, pulling them out of Meldrum Bay.
Dearing and her children moved to Sarnia in 1970. In the meantime other adventurers dove into Lake Huron, many on the American side, in search of La Salle’s doomed vessel.
For Dearing, the answer has been as clear as the water off those western shores.