Outliers: CT scanner takes on a nautical mystery

The hunt for the Griffin, a ship built and once commanded by legendary French explorer La Salle, has taken an unlikely detour from northern Lake Michigan to a small-town hospital, where modern technology may help determine whether a wooden slab is wreckage from the 17th century vessel.

A team led by explorer Steve Libert, who has searched 30 years for the mysterious craft, hauled the roughly 400-pound beam ashore in June. He discovered a 10½-foot section of it protruding from the lake bed in 2001 during a dive near uninhabited Poverty Island and received permits this summer to dig beneath it. But his crew discovered the beam wasn't attached to anything.

Disappointed but undaunted, Libert's next goal is determining the age of the tree that produced the timber. He thinks the beam could be the bowsprit—a spur or pole that extends from a vessel's stem—of the Griffin, which disappeared with its six-member crew and a cargo of furs in 1679.

Late last month, his crew lugged the massive object to the radiology section of Otsego Memorial Hospital in Gaylord, Mich., for a procedure usually performed on humans: a CT scan, which generates detailed X-rays.

In this case, the plan is to produce images of tree rings within the beam.

“This is a very important step,” Libert says. “If that piece comes out of the CT scan and it's some 330 years old ... there's only one ship it could belong to, and that's the Griffin.” No other ship of European design was sailing on northwestern Lake Michigan at that time, he says.

The images will be sent to Carol Griggs of Cornell University, an expert in dendrochronology, which uses ring patterns to date trees.

Griggs will try to match the timber's ring patterns with those in a Cornell archive that includes trees from centuries ago. If the timber has enough rings, Griggs says, she should be able to estimate the year the source tree was felled.

“I'm a little worried about the bowsprit because from what I could see, it doesn't have that many rings in it. I could see rings at the narrowest end, but there just aren't a whole lot. But that's why we're doing the CT scan,” Griggs says. It may take a year to complete the analysis and write a report, she says.

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