Gitche Gumee, The Great Lakes and the Edmund Fitzgerald

The Ojibwe called Lake Superior Gitche Gumee, the great sea. They were not being poetic. Lake Superior is, by surface area, the largest freshwater lake on earth.

Its waters cover nearly thirty-two thousand square miles. Its deepest point is over thirteen hundred feet. The lake holds ten percent of all the surface fresh water on the planet.

When winter storms build across its open fetch, some stretches run three hundred miles without a break of land, the waves they produce are indistinguishable from ocean swells. The Great Lakes together, Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, contain twenty-one percent of the world's surface fresh water. Michigan is the only state in the contiguous United States that touches four of the five.

No point in Michigan is more than six miles from a lake or stream. The state has more miles of freshwater coastline than any other jurisdiction in the lower forty-eight. The lakes give and the lakes take.

For a hundred and fifty years, the shipping lanes of the Great Lakes carried the raw materials of American industry, ore and grain and limestone and coal. The vessels that sailed them grew so large that they became their own category of ship: the Great Lakes freighter, the laker, purpose-built for inland water, too wide to fit through any ocean canal. On November tenth, nineteen seventy-five, the Edmund Fitzgerald, a seven-hundred-twenty-nine-foot ore carrier heading from Superior, Wisconsin, to Detroit, vanished in a November gale on Lake Superior.

She was carrying over twenty-six thousand tons of taconite pellets. She went down seventeen miles from the shelter of Whitefish Point in Michigan, taking all twenty-nine crew members with her. No distress call was ever received.

No survivor was ever found. The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald was not the first Great Lakes disaster and not the last. The lakes have claimed an estimated six thousand vessels over recorded history.

But the Fitzgerald's disappearance, without warning, without explanation, in an era of modern navigation, made her a symbol of the ancient power of the inland seas. Gordon Lightfoot wrote the ballad the following year. The bell recovered from her wreck tolls each year at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, once for each of the twenty-nine lost.