Rebel Montreal sea captain Brian Erb's dramatic flight from the Coast Guard - what became of the Errol Flynn of the St. Lawrence River?

    Brian Erb's mysterious fate befits his grandiose career as an undersea treasure hunter who once led a dedicated crew to flee the RCMP in an 11-day pursuit up the St. Lawrence River.
  Erb was born in Montreal in 1944* and migrated to California where he became a professional deep sea diver.
   He founded his own company to raise ships from the seabed and extinguish oil well fires.    Too much diving left him debilitated so he left for Mexico to recuperate.
   A scorpion bite put an end to his convalescence and he returned to Montreal in around 1967 without a cent to his name.
    Erb then purchased The Morrisburg, a small ship that allowed him to navigate the St. Lawrence for sunken treasures. In 1968 he salvaged a large bronze propeller from The Empress of Ireland, which went down in a crash with another ship in the St. Lawrence in 1914, claiming 1,012 lives.
   In November 1969 Erb managed to dislodge the grounded 528-foot, 2,500 ton MV Clara Clausen, a Danish-owned cattle freight ship built five years earlier in Yugoslavia.
   The ship had been beached by a storm 100 feet from shore near Les Escoumins, 140-miles from Quebec City.
   Erb and his team blasted a channel under the vessel and floated it back to the St. Lawrence.
  He took ownership of the ship for $1, renamed it the Atleantean and brought it to Kingston drydock for repairs and renovations.
   Erb welcomed anybody aboard who could pitch in with the effort, offering a share of future discovered treasures and a stipend of about $20 a day for 14-hour days of toil
   He attracted about a dozen workers and that sprouted to about 40 crew mates who'd rise at 6:45 a.m. and work until 7:30 p.m, with only short breaks for meals.
   Some hard men from Point St. Charles, including Danny Neeson and Roy England, showed up for duty after being recruited in a tavern
     Erb's chief engineer was a brilliant Chinese refugee who dreamed of cashing in on loot and resettling in Hong Kong so he could mount a strategy to get his wife and kids out of China.
   Others included ne'er-do-well James, pushing a broom, who claimed "the National Geographic knows I'm here."
   The Chinese cook (local restaurant fare) got fired as two young women signed on to those duties.
   Erb's attempts to seduce one of them went nowhere, alas.
   Erb ordered welders from Montreal to cut a 30-by-60 foot hole in the bottom of the hull to create an  "interior access wall" to allow for easy access for treasure hunters to dive beneath icy waters.
   Some workers, including the Second Engineer, expressed their doubts that the project would go anywhere. "The sea claimed this ship once and it will never let her sail again," said the Second Engineer, according to a 1975 article by Marianne Ackerman, who sacrificed a semester at university to be part of the crew the dream.
     Ackerman, like many others, expressed profound admiration for Captain Erb.

   His singleness of purpose and obsession with an idea represents more than desire to acquire money or fame. His motivation can only be explained in highly romantic terms and can only be understood by idealists. 

   She said that three brothers from Montreal, who worked as movie stuntmen, bankrolled the affair but a legit bank loan was also in place. 

   Erb's plan was to sail to Rimouski for a salvage job but by mid-October the ship was still under repair and the chances of hitting the St. Lawrence River before winter ice set in were shrinking fast. 

   Reassurances became less persuasive and the once-sky high morale started crumbling.
   About a half a dozen left the ship and Captain Erb graciously thanked them for their participation and took their coordinates so he could forward a cut of future treasures.
    The ship left Kingston for Montreal in December with all engines purring smoothly but some crew feared for their lives whenever waves would hit the newly-cut cavity in the hold.
   Erb's plans hit the skids when bank investors - who are said to have invested $70,000 into the project with the ship itself as collateral - threatened to pull the plug on his financing unless he sealed the customized access hatch and ordered him to reconvert the ship to a cargo carrier.
   Erb sold the ship to Concorde Marine Ltd. who kept him on as Captain while the renovations were undertaken at the Lauzon shipyards.
    Erb's problems continued when a crew member sued for back wages and courts ordered the ship sold at auction to Vitral Campagnie Navieres of Boston.
    The new owners kept Erb on as master and ordered him to bring the ship to Boston to be refitted to be a salvage vessel.
    The ship and Erb, during the same period, were the subject of a dizzying number series of Quebec court verdicts.
   Small Claims Court Judge Alexandre Bastien ruled in mid-November 1974 that the ship must go to auction for failing to pay unpaid wages, following the suit over $250 of unpaid wages.
   The Federal Court put the ship up for auction and Paul-Emile Caron of Louiseville won the ship with a bid of $28,500.
     Amidst this confusion, on February 23 Erb and his crew sailed the ship into international waters, with the aim of delivering it to the Boston owners, who he considered its rightful owners.
  The chase was on. The Canadian Coast Guard was in hot pursuit.
   In one incident four police boarded the ship but disembarked when the situation became tense.
   One version has it that the officers had failed to bring a warrant and left when Erb pointed this out.
   As the chase went on, Erb and his runaway crew attracted massive media attention as the RCMP and Coast Guard sought to stop the ship, now rechristened The Answer, “because she could be just that for us all. When we get all this legal business straightened away w'ell be able to get down to work and we could make a good living doing interesting work," he said.
   Erb explained his philosophy: "You've got to be doing something you enjoy in this life. I could never take the punch clock routine," leading media, including CBC TV, to portray him a folk hero.       “Salvage wizard, deep sea diver, ship's captain, financial genius and charismatic character, Brian Erb is a living exaggeration to the people who have followed his exploits up and down the St. Lawrence River for the past eight or nine years," began a front page story published midway through the case in The Montreal Star on Friday March 1, 1975.

  Erb's crew were effusive in their praise for their captain. 

 “Captain Erb is probably one of the most optimistic and unique men one can meet. He is totally optimistic and knows one hell of a lot of things about a lot of things. He is a tremendous captain. ” said Tony Hargreaves, 30 of Ste. Adele. “

   Shipmate Gervais Carpin, 31, of Paris, France concurred.  “He wants to satisfy himself and he wants to be happy. The ship is his whole life.”
   "I'd like to be more than an ordinary seaman and being with Captain Erb will make me so,” said Pierre Fournier, 23, of Lauzon Quebec
  “Everyone tried to their little part, it was a group effort” said crew member Greg Middleton of Lacombe, Alberta.
    Erb's peers also expressed admiration. "I admire him. has put a lot of work into that ship. I'ts a bloody awful business said Cpt George Burdock.    The chase ended on 6 March after 11 days with The Answer immobilized by the icy waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 60 miles northeast of the Magdalen Isands.
    A half dozen Coast Guard agents left the federal Icebreaker John A. MacDonald and walked several hundred yards over ice while hauling ladders so they could board the ship and arrest Erb and his crew of 18 men and five women.
   Captain Erb looked relaxed and was smiling when arrested, telling his captors that he had his ownership papers in order.
   The two dozen were brought to Gaspe by helicopter and then transported 450 miles to Quebec City. None of the crew were charged.
   Courts heard the ownership issue case, resulting in a series of conflicting judgments.
     In March 1975 Provincial Court Judge Joseph Marineau sided against purchaser Caron but Superior Court Judge Maurice Jacques agreed with the Small Claims Court.
   Erb was slapped with a $10,000 fine. Failure to pay would be met with two years in prison. It's unknown whether Erb either paid the fine or went behind bars.
    A Montreal newspaper reported in 1978 that Erb was living in Las Vegas running a specialty hardware store.

   In 1981 Erb was slapped with 15 years in prison in Florida for attempting to import cocaine. West End gang's Johnny Maguire attended a meeting alongside Erb but he was not charged. 

   Veteran Montreal criminal Dick Foley, who happened to be with Erb when he was arrested, was charged but acquitted. 
  And in 1987, according to accounts, Erb captained the Charlotte Louise trawler,  which moved 500 kilos of hash from an island off Newfoundland to Blanc Sablon for Vito Rizzuto and Raynald Desjardins.

   Rizzuto, Desjardins and others were busted for it later that year but Erb had vanished by that time.
   Erb's subsequent fate remains unknown, although one persistent account has him being killed either by Italian Mafia or somewhere in Latin America.

*Most accounts suggest Erb was born in 1944 but another puts it at 1938, which seems credible given his timeline and appearance in photographs.