The Edmund Fitzgerald, Twenty-Nine Men and Twenty-Nine Minutes from Shelter
Wisconsin
The Edmund Fitzgerald left the port of Superior, Wisconsin on the afternoon of November ninth, nineteen seventy-five, loaded with twenty-six thousand tons of taconite pellets bound for a steel mill in Detroit. It was the largest vessel on the Great Lakes when it was launched in nineteen fifty-eight, though by nineteen seventy-five it had been surpassed. Its captain was Ernest McSorley, a veteran lakes sailor with decades of experience on these waters. The weather forecast called for deteriorating conditions. McSorley joined a convoy with another freighter, the Arthur M. Anderson, for safety in numbers.
By the morning of November tenth, Lake Superior had become what Great Lakes sailors call a witch of November: waves that mariners who survived described as the worst in their careers, some estimates placing them at twenty-five to thirty-five feet. The Fitzgerald was taking on water, or losing buoyancy, or both. At seven ten in the evening, McSorley told the Anderson by radio that his vessel was holding its own. There was no further communication. No distress signal. No mayday. When the Anderson looked for the Fitzgerald on its radar, the ship was simply gone. Twenty-nine men. None recovered.
The Fitzgerald went down approximately seventeen miles from the entrance to Whitefish Bay on the Michigan shore, which sailors call the graveyard of the Great Lakes. It was twenty-nine minutes, by the Anderson's estimate, from reaching shelter.
Gordon Lightfoot released "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" in nineteen seventy-six, before the official investigation had concluded. The song gave the disaster its public narrative. The actual cause of the sinking remains disputed among maritime historians. The official National Transportation Safety Board finding in nineteen seventy-eight attributed it to flooding through improperly secured hatch covers. Other investigators have proposed structural failure, a shoaling event, or the combined weight of ice on the deck. No one survived to say.
