David Saint-Pierre says he had little information to go on in his effort to hunt down the keeper of a 111-year-old artifact from the shipwrecked Empress of Ireland.
He had a photo of a man in a diving suit, an address from 1975 and a name: Ronald Stopani.
Saint-Pierre — a maritime historian who has studied artifacts recovered from the site of the 1914 shipwreck off the coast of Rimouski, Que. — treated it like a modern-day scavenger hunt.
He was looking for the Marconi wireless apparatus, the communication system used to receive and send wireless telegraphs on the ship before it sank, claiming the lives of more than 1,000 people. The system included a tuner, work table and keys to send messages.
Saint-Pierre and staff at the Empress of Ireland Museum in Rimouski discovered it was found and recovered during an expedition to the site 51 years ago by a diving crew from Rochester, N.Y.
With Saint-Pierre’s help, the museum found Stopani — a member of the diving crew who first pulled it up from the water in the 70s — and in the spring, the apparatus was sent back to Quebec.
‘I didn’t even know if that man was still alive’
The process of finding Stopani involved dozens of emails, Facebook messages, a handful of phone calls and physical letters, says Saint-Pierre.
“I didn’t even know if that man was still alive,” said Saint-Pierre. “It was a shot in the dark.”
He says he wrote to “probably anyone” with the last name Stopani on Facebook for a few weeks. “If your name is Stopani, you probably have one of my messages in your junk box,” joked Saint-Pierre.
One day in January, he got a call back.
In an interview with CBC News, Stopani said he still had the apparatus stored in a clear storage box in his home in Las Vegas — and he was eager to donate it.
“As soon as I opened up the letter, it even had a picture of me in there so I knew exactly what it was,” said Stopani, reached in Las Vegas.
“I wanted to donate them for a while, but I had no way of contacting anybody.”
The 81-year-old, who splits his time between his homes in Florida and Nevada, says he half expected to be contacted.
Years earlier, the family of his best friend, Fred Zeller — who had led diving expeditions to the shipwreck and who recently passed away — told Stopani that they travelled to the Rimouski museum to donate artifacts Zeller found and documents from over the years.
Included in the donation was the photo of Stopani with the Marconi and correspondence between him and Zeller from the mid-1970s — when the pair met up to dive the shipwreck together.
It was that photo and letter which first inspired Saint-Pierre and museum staff to find Stopani — and the pictured artifacts.
Five decades later, Stopani still remembers the day he pulled the items up from the floor of the St. Lawrence River — decades before it was prohibited to recover artifacts.
“Believe me, it was cold,” he said, adding that during the dive in July, he could see small pieces of ice floating in the river.
He recalled inflating his dry suit to float up to the surface with a bag that he says weighed about 30 kilograms.
For the next 51 years, the artifact was well-travelled as he brought it with him on his moves from Rochester to Brampton, Ont., to Florida and finally Las Vegas. Having shipped the Marconi out a few months ago, he says sending it back to Quebec made him feel “elated.”
Artifact to be sent for restoration work
Roxane Julien-Friolet, a museologist, says the Marconi arrived at the museum in mid-March and in great condition.
“We’re just amazed and really honoured to have this really important object part of our collection now,” said Julien-Friolet.
She says it will be sent for restoration work and then displayed.
Operated by telegraphist Ronald Ferguson, this device was a very useful tool, she says, and part of the reason some were saved from the wreck in 1914 after an SOS message was sent.
Saint-Pierre says laying eyes on the device gives historians even more information as to what happened on board. In a photo, Saint-Pierre’s friend noticed the switch on the tuner was turned off.
“It means that … [Ferguson] had to abandon his post [but] he took the time to turn the machine off,” said Saint-Pierre.
“Which was standard protocol. So really a professional man.”
Ferguson was one of the 465 survivors of the wreck and lived until the 1980s, he says.
Saint-Pierre has since connected with Ferguson’s son, who lives in the U.K., and informed him that his father’s instrument was finally found.
“That was also a great moment for me to be able to tell [him],” said Saint-Pierre.
“Knowing that it was still in existence and that it would be in the museum was really emotional for him.”
