The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
On November 10, 1975, the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a Lake Superior storm with all 29 crew, becoming the Great Lakes' most famous shipwreck.
"Superior, they said, never gives up her dead when the gales of November come early."
That's the opening of Gordon Lightfoot's haunting ballad about the SS Edmund Fitzgerald — and on November 10, 1975, the lake proved it.
The Fitzgerald was a queen of the Great Lakes. Launched in 1958, the 729-foot freighter was the largest ship on the lakes, and for 17 years she hauled taconite — iron ore pellets — from Minnesota's Iron Range to steel mills in Detroit and Toledo, setting seasonal haul records again and again. Her captain on that final voyage, Ernest McSorley, was a 44-year veteran of the lakes.
On November 9, 1975, the Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin, with a full load of 26,000 tons of ore, bound for a Detroit steel mill. A second freighter, the Arthur M. Anderson, sailed nearby. The next afternoon, a monster storm swept across Lake Superior with near-hurricane-force winds and waves reaching 35 feet. McSorley radioed the Anderson that he had lost his radar and was listing badly — in what he called one of the worst seas he had ever been in. His last reported words: "We are holding our own."
Minutes later, the Fitzgerald vanished from the Anderson's radar. She sank suddenly, in about 530 feet of water roughly 17 miles from Whitefish Bay, with no distress call. All 29 crew members were lost — the worst single accident in Lake Superior's history.
The wreck was found four days later, broken in two on the lakebed. The exact cause has never been settled: investigators pointed to possibly faulty cargo hatches, the ship riding low with a heavy load, and a massive wave overwhelming her all at once.
Lightfoot read about the disaster in Newsweek and wrote "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" within weeks. Released in 1976, it reached No. 1 in Canada and No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States — and turned the 29 lost sailors into a legend. The Fitzgerald remains the largest ship ever to sink in the Great Lakes, and the last commercial vessel lost there.
Half a century later, her story still haunts the lakes — a reminder that even the mightiest ship is small against a November gale.
The Fitzgerald had been named for Edmund Fitzgerald, the president of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, the company that financed her construction. When she launched on June 7, 1958, she was the largest ship on the Great Lakes — a distinction she kept, in a sense, as the largest ever to sink there. In seventeen seasons she set haul records six times, often breaking her own.
Photo: Greenmars, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
