A chronicle of a unique waterscape and how its inhabitants navigated, claimed, and reshaped the region. Few maritime landscapes in the Great Lakes remain so deeply and clearly inscribed by successive cultures as the St. Clair system—a river, delta, and lake found between Lake Huron and the Detroit River. The St. Clair River and its environs are an age-old transportation nexus of land and water routes, a strategic point of access to maritime resources, and, in many ways, a natural impediment to the navigation of the Great Lakes. From Indigenous peoples and European colonizers to the modern nations of Canada and the United States, this work traces the region's transformation through culturally driven practices and artifacts of shipbuilding, navigation, place naming, and mapmaking. In this novel approach to maritime landscape archaeology, author Daniel F. Harrison unifies historiography, linguistics, ethnohistory, geography, and literature through the analysis of primary sources, material culture, and ecological and geographic data in a technique he calls "evidence-based storytelling." Viewed over time, the region forms a microcosm of the interplay of environment, culture, and technology that characterized the gradual shift from nature to an industrial society and a built environment optimized for global waterborne transport.

This is the harrowing story of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history. In the early morning hours of November 29, 1966, the S.S. Daniel J. Morrell was caught in a deadly storm on Lake Huron. Waves higher than the ship crested over it, and winds exceeding sixty miles per hour whipped at its hull, splitting the 603-foot freighter into two giant pieces. Amazingly, after the bow went down, the stern blindly powered itself through the stormy seas for another five miles! Twenty-eight men drowned in the icy waters of Lake Huron, but one sailor—26-year-old Dennis Hale—miraculously survived the treacherous storm. Wearing only boxer shorts, a lifejacket, and a pea coat, Hale clung to a life raft in near-freezing temperatures for 38 hours until he was rescued late in the afternoon of the following day. Three of his fellow crewmates died in his raft. In Deadly Voyage, Andrew Kantar recounts this tale of tragedy and triumph on Lake Huron. Informed by meticulous research and the eyewitness details provided by Hale, and illustrated with photographs from the Coast Guard search and rescue operation, Kantar depicts one of the most tragic shipwrecks in Great Lakes history.

This title is a comprehensive survey of maritime archaeology as seen through the eyes of nearly fifty scholars at a time when maritime archaeology has established itself as a mature branch of archaeology.