SS Edmund Fitzgerald

The Vessel

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a 13,632-ton bulk freighter, 222 metres long, launched at River Rouge, Michigan, on 8 June 1958 by the Great Lakes Engineering Works for the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. She was named for the company's president at the time, and at the moment of her launch was the largest ship ever to have sailed fresh water.

She was classified as a "footer" in Great Lakes terminology, the first of the 700-foot class that would transform the Lakes iron-ore and grain trade in the 1960s and 1970s. Single-screw, single-boiler, single-rudder: the standard Lakes configuration, with cargo holds arranged fore-and-aft and accessible only through twenty-one hatch covers along the spar deck. She was chartered throughout her career to the Oglebay Norton Corporation, which operated her under contract to the U.S. Steel Corporation's Columbia Transportation Division.

For seventeen years she held and broke her own Lakes seasonal tonnage records. Her captain from 1972 was Ernest McSorley, a Nova Scotian whose Great Lakes career reached back to 1939; he was due to retire at the end of the 1975 season. He was said to be proud of her but also known among Lakes captains for complaining that she worked hard in heavy weather, that her hull flexed visibly at the deck seams in big seas, and that he sometimes heard her hull panting. Every Lakes freighter of her class did.

The Voyage

She cleared the Burlington Northern Ore Dock at Superior, Wisconsin, at 14:15 on 9 November 1975 with 26,116 tons of taconite pellets consigned to Zug Island, Michigan. The National Weather Service was tracking a November gale that had not yet declared itself and that would, by the early morning of 10 November, become one of the most severe storms in Lakes history. Winds on Lake Superior were expected to reach force 8; in the event they reached sustained hurricane force.

The Anderson (SS Arthur M. Anderson), out of Two Harbors, Minnesota, sailed roughly two hours behind her on the same course toward the Soo Locks. The two ships were in visual and radio contact through the evening of 9 November and into the morning of 10 November. At 14:20 on the 10th, with winds to 50 knots and seas to seven metres, McSorley reported to Captain Jesse Cooper on the Anderson that the Fitzgerald had lost two vent covers and a section of her fence rail, had developed a list, had lost both her radars, and was slowing to let the Anderson close.

The two ships stayed in radio contact across the afternoon. Cooper offered to stand by, guide, or escort. At 19:10 on 10 November, during an exchange about the depth of snow in her pilot house, McSorley's last words were "We are holding our own." At 19:25 the Fitzgerald vanished from the Anderson's radar. There was no distress call, no debris visible in the visibility that remained, no lifeboats launched, no bodies recovered. Seventeen miles short of the shelter of Whitefish Point.

The Disaster

The mechanism of her loss has been the subject of four formal investigations, dozens of expert reports, and fifty years of Great Lakes argument. The four prevailing theories are hatch cover failure (the 1977 Coast Guard report), topside damage (the 1978 NTSB report and most maritime engineering analysis), shoaling (the Shoal theory, favoured by some of the Anderson's crew), and a single rogue wave or pair of waves breaking over the bow and stern simultaneously (the "two-boarder" theory).

The Coast Guard concluded that ineffective hatch closures had admitted progressive water into her cargo holds through the afternoon and that her stability had failed without warning. The NTSB, dissenting, argued that the progression would have been visible to McSorley and reported, and that a sudden structural failure aft was more consistent with the loss pattern. The subsequent surveys of the wreck by Jean-Michel Cousteau's Calypso in 1980, by the Canadian Navy in 1989, and by the ROV expeditions of 1994 and 1995 all found the ship broken into two sections roughly twenty metres apart on the bottom, bow section upright and largely intact, stern section inverted, cargo spilled across the seabed between them.

What is indisputable is this: at some point between 19:10 and 19:15 on 10 November 1975, a ship 222 metres long carrying 26,000 tons of cargo slipped under the surface of Lake Superior without a distress call in conditions that Anderson was riding out without distress of her own. She broke in two on the way down, or at the bottom, or both. The 29 men aboard, from McSorley to the 20-year-old wheelsman Bruce Hudson, were never seen again.

The Legacy

The storm of 9-10 November 1975 became the reference point for Lakes meteorology for a generation. The Coast Guard's subsequent review changed Lakes hatch-closure regulations and load-line requirements. The seasonal freighter fleet shrank through the 1980s; the Fitzgerald's sister-class boats were scrapped or converted to cement carriers.

Gordon Lightfoot's November 1976 ballad "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" placed the ship permanently in North American popular memory. Lightfoot, a lifelong Great Lakes boater, had read the Newsweek account of the sinking, wrote the lyrics in three weeks, and released the record to a cultural response the folk-rock idiom had not previously commanded. The song did more to preserve the names of the 29 dead than any inquiry, and it made the "gales of November" a phrase a non-Lakes audience knows.

The 200-pound bronze ship's bell was recovered from the wreck on 4 July 1995 by the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society in cooperation with the Canadian Department of National Defence and the families of the crew. A replacement bell inscribed with the names of the 29 dead was welded to the bow in its place. The original bell is displayed at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, where it is rung once each 10 November for each of the crew.

The wreck itself lies at 160 metres in Canadian waters. The Ontario government declared the site a war grave in 2006 and prohibits further dives; the families of the crew asked for this protection. The exact sequence of her loss remains contested, and at this depth and in this weather pattern it will almost certainly never be resolved. She went down on her captain's watch, twenty minutes short of safe water, without a word.