This is Angela Odell, and you are listening to Real Cool History for Kids, a podcast show featuring history told from a distinctly biblical worldview perspective.

Welcome to an adventure.

Welcome to episode 170 of Real Cool History for Kids. This episode is for Warren Shea, who wanted to hear about the sunken ships resting at the bottom of Lake Superior.

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area. And you guys, some places in that lake are 1,300 feet deep. Isn't that crazy?

On calm days, it can be peaceful and beautiful like a giant mirror stretching all the way to the horizon. But when storms rise up, Lake Superior can become really scary and dangerous very, very quickly.

Sailors who work on the Great Lakes have a saying, the lake is the boss.

And when we look at history, we can kind of understand why.

Before I tell you those stories, though, we need to understand something important about why

Lake Superior is such a famous place for shipwrecks. Lake Superior is cold. And when I say cold,

I mean really cold. In the summer, the deepest parts of that lake stay just above freezing.

So if you fall into that lake, that is not a good thing to do because you could very easily die of hypothermia.

That cold water slows down decay.

And deep underwater, there is very little light and less oxygen, which is also it slows down the way wood and metal break down over time.

Unlike oceans, Lake Superior is a freshwater lake and doesn't have many organisms that eat wood.

All of this means that when a ship sinks in Lake

Superior, it can remain preserved for decades, even centuries, like, well, kind of like an underwater

time capsule. Today, we're going to explore the stories of two of these ships that vanished during fierce

storms on Lake Superior.

When I was getting ready to record this podcast, you guys, I looked at all of the different

shipwrecks that happened in Lake Superior, and I had to choose two to tell you. So I chose the two

that I thought you would find the most interesting. Their stories help us to understand not only

the power of nature, but also the limits of what humans can know. The first story that I want to tell you is the story of the Henry B. Smith.

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