Steve Libert has worn many hats in his seven decades, but he wouldn’t say treasure hunter is one of them. Contrary to public opinion, his work really lies in historical preservation.
Steve and his team seek to preserve the legendary French vessel Le Griffon. Her owner was Robert La Salle—a priest-turned-fur trader and one of the first Frenchman to sail the Great Lakes. Le Griffon, built in 1679, was the first commercial vessel both constructed and sailed in the upper Great Lakes.
After losing much of their supplies in a shipwreck, La Salle’s crew was forced to improvise the build with lumber sourced from the surrounding area of Niagara Falls. Once the ship was completed, the crew set off on two missions: find a route from the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi and pick up and sell beaver pelts from the northern settlements to pay off La Salle’s debts.
Once La Salle and his team picked up their cargo of beaver pelts, the crew split up. La Salle went off in a canoe and planned to regroup with the rest of his crew and Le Griffon at Niagara Falls after they sold their cargo of pelts there. While La Salle would eventually chart a path down the Mississippi, he never saw Le Griffon or the rest of his crew again.
About 300 years later, Libert was growing up in Dayton, Ohio. During one of his history lessons in junior high, his teacher spoke of the Le Griffon shipwreck. The teacher placed his hand on Steve’s shoulder and said to the class, “Who knows, maybe someone in this room will find it someday.”
After college, Steve served in the Marines and then in naval intelligence, including underwater expeditions and research projects. But Libert never forgot the lost ship.
He learned to dive in Dayton, and later learned to circumnavigate the lakes without sophisticated equipment and preserve historical artifacts.
His work kept bringing him back to Michigan, so after retiring from the government, the Liberts came to Charlevoix permanently to find the famed French shipwreck.
They assembled the Great Lakes Exploration Group. Volunteer professional divers, site interpreters, field explorers, and researchers were ready for action.
Libert is adamant that they are not looking to obtain ownership over anything recovered. For them, it’s all about the history.
They’ve been working in conjunction with France and a team of their experts for decades, because Steve knows that legally Le Griffon isn’t his, Michigan’s, or America’s. The ship is French, and a recovered Griffon would rightfully be returned.
After years of research and chasing down clues, Libert finally honed in on an area where the team felt confident the Griffon could be found. His wife, Kathie, had actually been telling him for years to look in that area.
Even in bad visibility, they immediately found a wooden structure that looked promising. Diving back down again with the team, it looked to them like what could be the bowsprit of Le Griffon. That’s when the problems started.
Further research was needed, and the team wanted to bring up the potential bowsprit by the books. “I believe you should do it properly,” Steve said, though he can acknowledge the double standard in the field. “But when an archeologist does it it’s fine, even without permits, as it happens all the time”.
After submitting his paperwork, Jennifer Granholm, both as attorney general and governor, fought against him every step of the way. Every permit was denied by the State of Michigan, and a torturous 13-year court battle ensued.
Once the cases moved to the circuit court of Cincinnati, Libert won unanimously.
In the book that he and his wife Kathie put together, “Le Griffon and the Huron Islands”, Libert writes: “Most sensible people would have quit.”
But sensibility doesn’t move the needle forward.
With experts from both France and Canada, the team finally brought the wooden structure up in 2013. They carbon dated the wood to the same time period of Le Griffon, and the structure remains properly preserved in water to this day.
French archaeologists said the feature was sophisticated, showcasing markings of a French bowsprit or figurehead, excavated with wooden wedges that would support the “knee” attached to the bowsprit wood. But as Steve found one knee, he also lost another.
A total knee replacement in 2014 put Steve down in recovery, stopping his dives altogether. Bedridden, he kept researching. The question now was, where’s the rest of it?
For four years, he prayed and waited for doctors to approve his underwater activities. Then something odd began to happen: Steve began to have a recurring dream about an old photo of him taken for an article. For weeks he wondered why he was dreaming of it, not being a regular dreamer, but then he realized something he hadn’t noticed before. The shape of a cross was on the finger of his right hand.
He knew the exact picture from his dream. After months, he finally called up the journalist who took it.
Libert wrote to a colleague of the revelation: “The image of the cross has gone unnoticed for thirteen years, not only by me but also the thousands who read the hard copy and online versions of the Detroit Free Press.”
“Unlike the thousands of people, the only difference is that I had prayed for the Lord to give me a sign that my prayers were being heard. Not only were my prayers being heard but they were also answered,” Libert wrote.
Still laid up in recovery, he took to satellite imagery. His years of experience in naval intelligence lended a sophisticated eye to this task. He went over areas he hadn’t considered, others suggested by evidence, and finally he came across something he hadn’t seen before on the map: clear and as distinct as could be was a shape of a cross on the water’s surface.
He further studied the imagery of the area to find evidence of a potential shipwreck.
“Had it not been for this cross, I would have never discovered this anomaly which turned out to be ship wreckage,” Libert explained.
In 2018, an underwater expedition was scheduled. It had been over six years since Libert had been in the water. The water was below 50 degrees. Visibility was low.
“I was extremely concerned that something could go fatally wrong,” Steve said.
Coming to the site of where the cross was on the satellite image, the GLX crew came across something that looked like a shipwreck, but visibility was rough.
Libert was keen to go back to the promising site, but the pandemic slowed their work. Then it came to a halt when he was diagnosed with cancer in 2020. Chemotherapy treatment took over the exploration schedule. Thankfully, he is in remission now.
Without giving away precious intel, the team still works surrounded by looters, treasure hunters, and various camps of archeologists retracing their steps. Steve’s colleagues and volunteers from the Great Lakes Exploration Group are continuing their decadeslong search, heading directly for the cross.
And wouldn’t you know it, it was a shipwreck. As if marked by God.
“What was it?” I asked him.
“I can’t say with 100% certainty yet, but it’s the Griffon,” he replied.
While the visibility of the lakes has vastly improved over the decades because of zebra mussels, it still can be murky. It’s going to take a lot more than one dive to get the information they need to support the discovery.
Steve will be 71 at the end of March and is not slowing down, telling me, “I’m not letting it go like this, there’s too much at stake.”
You can even catch a tiny fragment of one of Libert’s many incredible discoveries today on the History Channel’s “Hunting History” with another adventurous Michigander, Steven Rinella. But I’d keep an eye out for his future presentations to get the whole story first hand. As Libert told me, “I wasn’t going to show him everything of course, just a small segment.”
What everyone says about Le Griffon is that if you find the cannons said to be onboard, you’ve found it.
I asked Libert about the cannons.
“How do you know we haven’t found any?” he replied.
Devinn Dakohta is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer. Follow her on Instagram @Devinn.Dakohta and X @DevinnDakohta.
