Early one May morning in 1889, a lumber schooner called the Bavaria was being towed across eastern Lake Ontario. As the night gave way to dawn, a forceful gale hit the vessel, grounding it on nearby Galloo Island. According to legend, she was found stranded on a shoal with no crew in sight, but the ship’s effects were in perfect order: a freshly baked loaf of bread in the oven, an opened can of tomatoes, untouched life preservers.
Then, in late June 1900, another gale took out the schooner Picton as it sailed from Charlotte, NY, to Belleville, Ont., while two other boats sailed close behind. As the story goes, the Picton simply vanished into thin air never to be seen again. It left behind only a floating sailors cap, some wooden debris, and a cryptic message in a bottle.
These mysterious wrecks both occurred in what is now called the Marysburgh Vortex or Ontario’s Bermuda Triangle—a swath of water bounded by Wolfe Island near Kingston, Mexico Bay off of Oswego, NY, and Point Petre in Prince Edward County that has claimed anywhere from 270 to 500 shipwrecks.
The tales go on: another schooner, the George A. Marsh, goes down in 1917 after violent waves rip into her hull. In 1952, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot crashes into the vortex and vanishes without a trace. In the same spot two decades later, an amateur pilot flying in calm conditions is inexplicably pitched from side to side as if “an invisible giant took hold of the wing,” the pilot told Global News in 2021.
With so many wreckages—both explainable and seemingly inexplicable—the vortex has acquired a paranormal reputation over the years. The folkloric explanations have grown increasingly outlandish, spanning everything from ghost ships to alien encounters. But according to Brendon Balliod, a maritime historian who has researched Great Lakes shipwrecks for over two decades, the true causes are far more mundane.
Take the Bavaria, for example. The mysterious disappearance of the crew was actually a myth invented long after the event. “Even at the time, it was known that the crew had abandoned the shoal in a lifeboat. Their lifeboat capsized, and they all floundered and died,” says Balliod. “It doesn’t need a supernatural explanation, but it is an interesting story that has found its way into the mythos of the vortex.”
He also clears up the Picton disappearance. “The way this legend reads is that she vanished mysteriously while other vessels were nearby and no one saw a thing. Of course, that puts her in the whoo-whoo category,” says Balliod. “But in point of fact, her distress signals were witnessed by nearby vessels, identifiable wreckage did wash ashore, and even a message in a flask from the captain was found that essentially said, ‘Hey, this isn’t going to work out for us.’”
But even if the wrecks can all be explained, why have so many vessels met their watery demise in the Marysburgh Vortex?
Balliod says there are a few factors at play, one being sheer boat traffic in the region. In general, the Great Lakes are extremely well-travelled. “We saw a higher volume of vessel traffic on the Great Lakes in the 1800s than any comparable body of water on the planet had ever seen, per square mile,” he says. “And when you have a situation like that, you have a lot of shipwrecks.” Indeed, the Great Lakes are known as the ship graveyard of the world, containing some 6,000 wrecks in their depths.
Compared to Lakes Huron, Erie, and Michigan, Lake Ontario saw less traffic at this time, with the exception of its eastern end—where the vortex lies—which was an extremely busy shipping corridor connecting the upper lakes with the St. Lawrence River. Geographically, this part of the lake is also a captain’s worst nightmare, with offshore islands, shoals, reefs, rapidly changing weather, and high boat traffic posing genuine navigational dangers.
“It wasn’t like being on the ocean, where you can sail ahead of a storm for a couple of days until it blows itself out,” says Balliod. “You try that on the Great Lakes, and in two or three hours, you’re going to be in someone’s cornfield. So most of these ships were wrecked by driving on shoals and reefs and going ashore.”
But the region where the Marysburgh Vortex is located also holds a hidden geological anomaly that makes it particularly treacherous for navigators. Resting on the lake bed is an ancient bolide impact crater rich in iron deposits that throw off basic navigational devices. “Off of Kingston, there are places where your compass can deviate by as much as 37 degrees,” says Balliod.
Despite the rational explanations that demystify the vortex’s fatal pull, believers in the supernatural have turned the phenomenon into popular legend. Balliod says this shift began long after most of the wrecks took place. “The Marysburg Vortex, the Bermuda Triangle, all of these phenomena, they’re going to tell us more about the popular culture of the 70s than they do about the maritime history on the Great Lakes,” he says.
Though shipwrecks had been consistently occurring in the region as far back as the 1700s, the name Marysburg Vortex has its origin in the 1970s, because it was then that author Hugh Cochrane published his book Gateway to Oblivion: the Great Lakes’ Bermuda Triangle, offering up fantastical explanations for the region’s high number of wrecks.
“[The book] was really more of a response to the supernatural explanation craze of the mid-70s following the moon landings and movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” says Balliod. “It’s a cultural phenomenon. And not to discredit it, it’s an interesting way of trying to organize these historical events, and make them a little more interesting.”
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