It would take a volume to describe the adventures of these early Fighters of the Faith, their trials and sacrifices, their successes and failures. The briefness of our sketch compels us to move quickly from these absorbing scenes to the first great event in the history of Lake navigation, and to the beginning of that encroachment of the English which was to develop a hundred years of war along the Inland Seas. While the Jesuit Fathers were sacrificing their lives among the savages and while the Indian wars of extermination were still in progress, the French farther east had already begun to feel the hostile influence of the English. To check this influence La Salle and Count Frontenac brought about the erection of Fort Frontenac, in 1673, on the present site of Kingston. At this time, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, a young man of eminence and learning, was of the supreme faith that he was destined to discover a water passage through the American continent to China and Japan, and the building of Fort Frontenac was only the first step in the gigantic scheme which he planned to carry out. A part of this scheme was the building of a vessel of considerable size in which La Salle planned not only to make a complete tour of the Lakes but in which he hoped to discover the route that would lead to the Orient. Five years later, the young adventurer made the portage around Niagara Falls, and at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, in Niagara County, New York, where is now located the town of La Salle, he began the construction of the first vessel ever to sail the Inland Seas.
There are different estimates as to the size of the ship, but that it was somewhere between fifty and sixty tons there is little doubt. Assisting in this work were Tonty and Hennepin, and it took all of the persuasive powers of the three to keep the Griffin, as the vessel had been named, from the hostile hands of the Senecas as she lay in her stocks. The ship, when launched, was completely rigged, found with supplies for a long voyage, and armed by seven pieces of cannon and a quantity of muskets. She carried two masts and a jib, and was decorated with the usual ornaments of an ancient ship of war, including a flying griffin at the jib-boom and a huge eagle aft. For hundreds of miles about, the Indians came to see this wonderful “floating fort” before she set sail. Thirty-two souls were to form the crew of the Griffin in her adventurous search for the route to Cathay, and on the day that she turned her prow up the Niagara River, La Salle and his followers fell upon their knees, invoking upon themselves the mercies of God in an undertaking which, they believed, was to be one of the most venturesome of their age. With all on board singing the Te Deum Laudamus, the Griffin passed into Lake Erie, and while at the sight of the great water ahead of them the priests again invoked the blessings of God, the first ship to sail the Lakes boldly headed into those “vast and unknown seas of which even their savage inhabitants knew not the end.”
According to the historian Hennepin, who was a member of the expedition, days and nights of the wildest speculation, of hope, of fear, and of anxious anticipation now followed. Rumour filled the seas ahead of them with innumerable perils. The hardy navigators knew not at what instant destruction might overtake them in any one of a dozen ways in which they supposed themselves to be threatened. Each morning and night the entire crew joined in prayers and in singing the hymns of the Church. Lake Erie was crossed in safety, and on the eleventh of August the Griffin entered the Detroit River. Hennepin was enthralled with its wonderful beauty. “The river was thirty leagues long,” he says, “bordered by low and level banks, and navigable throughout its entire length. On either side were vast prairies, extending back to hills covered with vines, fruit trees, thickets, and tall forest trees, so distributed as to seem rather the work of art than nature.” Passing between Grosse Isle and Bois Blanc Island, the Griffin sailed slowly up the river, frequent stops being made along its course; it passed the present site of Detroit, and on the day of the festival of Saint Claire the navigators entered the lake which they gave that name. On the twenty-third of August, the Griffin entered into Lake Huron, the Franciscans chanting the Te Deum for the third time, and the entire crew joining in offering up thanks to the Almighty for the smiling fortune that had thus far accompanied them on their voyage.
Crossing Saginaw Bay the Griffin lay for two days among the Thunder Bay islands and then continued her way into the North. Almost immediately after this, La Salle and his companions were caught in a terrific storm, and in the height of its fury, when it was thought that the end had come and that all the demons of this mysterious world were working their destruction, La Salle made a vow that if God would deliver them he would erect a chapel in Louisiana to the memory of St. Anthony de Padua, the tutelary saint of the sailor. As if in response to this vow, the wind subsided and the storm-beaten Griffin found shelter in Michilimackinac Bay, where a mission had been built among the Ottawas. Early in September, the Griffin sailed into Lake Michigan and continued to Washington Island, at the entrance to Green Bay. Here a party of missionaries and traders had been established for a year. They had collected a large quantity of furs, valued at about twelve thousand dollars, and La Salle changed his original plans and sent the Griffin back to Niagara with this treasure, with the idea of continuing his own exploration by canoe.
On the eighteenth of September, 1679, La Salle bade adieu to the Griffin and her crew, and from the point of a headland watched her white sails until they dropped below the horizon. It was the last he ever heard or saw of the ship. No sign of her was ever afterward found, no soul who sailed with her lived to tell the story of her tragic end. In the years that followed, it was rumoured that Indians boarded and destroyed her, and massacred her crew. Hennepin was of the opinion that she was lost in a storm. Others believed that some of her crew had mutinied and that after murdering their companions they had joined the Ottawas, where they met their own fate. From time to time in recent years, relics have been found along the Lakes which have revived stories of the mysterious disappearance of the Griffin, but none of these finds have yet thrown reasonable light upon the tragic end of this first vessel to navigate the Inland Seas and of the venturesome spirits who manned her. By all but a few the Griffin is forgotten, or has never been known. Yet by the millions who live along the Great Lakes she should be held in much the same reverence as are the caravels of Columbus by the whole nation.
Marquette’s Grave, St. Ignace, Michigan.