Wild Gales and Tattered Sails: The Shipwrecks of Northwestern Lake Michigan From Two Creeks, Wisconsin to Dutch Johns Point, Michigan and All of the Bay of Green Bay by Paul J. Creviere, Jr. List: $24.95 Availability: Little Professor Book Center East Town Mall 2350 E. Mason St. Green Bay, WI 54302 (920) 465-4100 The Reader's Loft 611 George St. De Pere, WI 54115 (920) 337-8240 (800) 840-5037 Paperback Published by Paul J. Creviere Jr. Publication date: September 1997 ISBN: 0-9660328-1-0 Excerpt from Wild gales and Tattered Sails

Probably like a lot of Door County divers, my first guide to the area's many shipwrecks was the venerable Fredrickson's Chart of Ships Wrecked in the Vicinity of Door County, Wisconsin. With its accompanying two paperback volumes, Ships and Shipwrecks of Door County, Wisconsin, the 1959 Fredrickson's Chart was the major published source of Door County shipwrecks until Walter and Mary Hirthe's excellent Schooner Days in Door County appeared in 1986. I can well remember the first time I laid hands upon a copy of Fredrickson's Chart, at about the age of nine. Encountering it under a pile of tomes in the back of a second-hand bookstore, the yellowed, dusty document with its cryptic notations seemed like a pirate map of old, and the offshore world of the Door, sunken mysteries beckoned to me as it did to so many.

A number of other publications on Door County shipwrecks have appeared since 1959, including articles and a book on the "Mystery Ship" Alvin Clark, several diver's guides, and a series of underwater archaeological surveys of individual wrecks. However, none of these publications have done what Fredrickson's Chart attempted to do: create an inventory of all known wrecks in Door County waters.

That is, until now. Paul J. Creviere's Wiled Gales and Tattered Sails is the most comprehensive inventory of northeastern Wisconsin shipwrecks ever published. Over a decade of careful research, gleaned from local archives and newspapers, have produced a remarkable volume of new information about the many wrecks, salvages, and legends of this historic expanse of freshwater. Creviere's research does not stop at the Door, but extends into the upper and lower reaches of Green Bay, into the Fox river, and down the Lake Michigan coastline to Two Creeks.

With historical summaries and references for each shipwreck, supplemented by historical photographs and essays on associated maritime topics, Wild Gales and Tattered Sails is an invaluable resource for historians, divers, maritime museums, underwater archaeologists, and local history buffs alike. Anyone who has conducted research on shipwrecks knows and will appreciate the years of painstaking effort that this study entailed.

Wild Gales and Tattered Sails will no doubt become a basic reference for all future shipwreck research in northeastern Wisconsin, furthering the study and preservation of the area's maritime historical and underwater archaeological treasures.

David J. Cooper
State Underwater Archaeologist
State Historical Society of Wisconsin