The Associated Press is reporting that a ship which sank during a violent storm a century ago has been found in Lake Superior off the shores of Marquette.  The vessel is reportedly largely intact.

The Henry B. Smith freighter went down in Lake Superior with a crew of 25 after sailing into the Great Lakes Storm of November 1913.

The Duluth News Tribune reported on Sunday that shipwreck hunters found the boat last month in about 535 feet of water off the shore of Marquette.

Upper Michigan maritime historians say 17 ships went down in the storm, including the Henry B. Smith.

Secrets of the deep: The ‘flying bridge’ of a previously undiscovered shipwreck in Lake Superior about 30 miles north of Marquette, Michigan almost 100 years after the boat is believed to have sunk in a huge storm

Watery grave: The SS Henry B. Smith was a steel-hulled, propeller-driven lake freighter which sunk in 1913, killing all 25 crew on board

The group says it hasn’t seen the name of the ship on the wreck yet, but all signs indicate it’s the Smith, sitting amid a spilled load of iron ore.

‘It’s the most satisfying find of my shipwreck-hunting career,’ said Jerry Eliason, of Cloquet, part of the group that has found many lost ships in recent years.

‘It’s a fantastic find,’ said maritime historian Frederick Stonehouse, of Marquette, who has written about the Smith.

The storm in November of 1913 was one of the biggest on the lakes, and killed about 250 sailors.

The Smith was safe in the Marquette harbor on November 7 and 8, and loading iron ore, but on the evening of November 9, Captain James Owen decided to leave port for Cleveland.

Hidden depths: The shores of Lake Michigan where shipwreck hunters recently found a boat believed to have sank 100 years ago

‘The lake was still rolling, but there seemed to be a lull in the wind, the velocity having dropped to 32 mph,” shipwreck expert and longtime University of Minnesota Duluth professor Julius Wolff wrote in Lake Superior Shipwrecks.

‘The gale … should have blown itself out. But, this was no conventional storm. In taking his vessel out of the safety of Marquette Harbor, Captain James Owen sailed into eternity.’

Sailors on other boats reported seeing Smith deckhands battening down hatches as it went onto the open lake, Stonehouse wrote in his book, Went Missing.

Other witnesses watched the ship make a turn to port, as if Owen had decided to head back to shore.

Then the Smith vanished – and entered Great Lakes lore as a ‘ghost ship’.

Calm exterior: The North shore of Lake Superior. The 1913 storm is legendary in the area, wrecking more than a dozen ships and killing 250 sailors

Eliason isn’t revealing exactly how his group found the Smith, because he hopes to use the same method to find other wrecks. But he said it wasn’t a case of merely running a grid pattern over the lake in hopes of getting lucky. He said the group used a culmination of hunches, research and data to pinpoint a specific search area.

The data pointed them toward a possible wreck about 30 miles north of Marquette, and the hunters found the Smith just 20 minutes after dropping a sonar unit into the water. An underwater camera captured enough detail in videos and photos to convince the group that they found the Smith.

‘A number of wrecks we’ve found have been over the span of 20 years searching, multiple times a year,’ said Kraig Smith, a member of the hunting group from Rice Lake, Wisconsin.

‘Going and finding a wreck 20-some miles offshore in the span of a couple hours is extraordinary.’

Fellow hunter Ken Merryman, of Minneapolis, said it appears the ship is broken in the middle but largely intact in the front. The stern has more damage, Merryman said.

‘It’s a beautiful wreck’ with great visibility, he said. ‘No zebra mussels; clean.’

The crew will return to the site this summer in hopes of getting more questions answered. But the group is already starting to piece together events that led to the Smith’s demise.

‘It’s very clear to me that this one appeared to have broken on the surface, spilled its iron ore contents over the bottom, and then landed on the iron ore,’ said Eliason, who had been considering retiring from wreck hunting partly because he wasn’t expecting any more significant finds on Lake Superior.

‘This was a gift from the lake gods,’ Eliason said.