The gales of November came early that year, in that cold 1975 autumn in and around Lake Superior, and once the waves had subsided and the wind had calmed, the Great Lake had claimed another ship. The Edmund Fitzgerald was an ore-freighter, 222 metres of reinforced steel hull, with coal and oil-fired boilers, and with a deadweight capacity of 26,000 long tons, the ship was once the largest ship to sail the Great Lakes shipping routes in the northern United States, which earned her the nickname “Queen of the Lakes.” It remained one of the most revered ships in the region throughout its lifespan, and its fame only increased with the sinking of the ship on November 10th, 1975 under mysterious circumstances, with all 29 hands lost, including Captain Ernest M McSorley. The ship was only further brought into the spotlight with Gordon Lightfoot’s 1976 track “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”, famously recorded in one take barely a year after the disaster.
Now, on the 50th anniversary of the ship’s demise, the recent death of Lightfoot, and the recent surge in popularity the song and the story has enjoyed on the male-centred side of social media, the wreck has been placed in a new light.
It would be shortsighted to simply say that the continued modern fascination with the Fitzgerald is solely explained by Lightfoot’s song or by the current 50th anniversary remembrance. Modern content about the tragedy includes everything from reels of young men flipping the bird to the shores of Lake Superior, to dapper-looking armchair historians with bubble pipes partaking in 4 hour YouTube video essays. The thing that ties this content together is the masculine aspect of the obsession. Men, mourning the loss of other men by respecting their sacrifice, fantasise about the adventure and romance of dying at sea, or in war. Several scientific studies have even proven that some young men would prefer dying like this over dying in a hospital surrounded by friends and family. In this case, with the waves over 10 metres high according to multiple sources, and winds past 113 kph throughout that fateful night, it is safe to say that part of the reason young men love the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald is because they managed to die in the midst of both: At war with the sea.
It is a shame that we cannot find the same levels of romance in good planning and execution that we can in the stubbornness that results in death. Captain Dudley J Paquette of the Wilfred Sykes, another ship out in the storm, later testified to this when asked about that night. “I’ll tell anyone that it was a monster sea washing solid water over the deck of every vessel out there.” Yet, Paquette knew that a storm was coming, and plotted a route upwards along the north shore of the lake to protect the boat from the rougher seas out in deeper water. Captain McSorley, meanwhile, was known as a “heavy weather captain” and never took pride in never dropping anchor in rough seas, not even amidst the tempest on that fateful night, which he called the worst seas he had ever seen in one of his last radio broadcasts. McSorley admitted that the build of the Fitzgerald, which had recently been outfitted with oil-burning boilers, hull extension, and her extra cargo space, scared him. Her bow hooked to either port or starboard and never recovered, with the tension on the steel rivets below heard all the way from the bridge. The renovations were made by the ship’s corporate owners for the sole purpose of giving her more room to haul goods, even at the expense of safety and manoeuvrability. The ship was a “wiggling thing” according to McSorley, who forthrightly acknowledged that the recent retrofit of the ship was cookie-cutter quality at best. Still, McSorley pushed on, with 40 years of seamanship on the Great Lakes to back him up. Perhaps it was stubbornness, or naivete, or a freak accident that even McSorley’s experience at the helm could not prevent: in the same way that no one truly knows what dragged the Fitzgerald to the bottom, except the 29 who went down with her.
Whether the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald is made a tragedy by naivete, stubbornness, corporate greed, or just mother nature, the reason why the wreck remains famous 50 years later is because it proved that what we thought was tamed was indeed wild all along. Lake Huron rolls, and Superior sings in the rooms of her ice-water mansion: and then the waves and north winds blowing are personified into the oldest story we know as humans: fighting for survival. As Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams, and farther below Lake Ontario takes in what Lake Erie can send her, we remember that nature is more than just what we take from it, it is what it gives in return: exquisite beauty, and extreme danger. Complacency breeds destruction even in the landlocked waters of the most powerful nation on Earth. Now, while iron boats go as the mariners all know, the gales of November are remembered forever.
Yet, as years go by, the 29 lost still do not wonder for whom the bell tolls, as it tolls for them 31 times each year at Mariner’s Church in Detroit, with two rings added for all the lives lost throughout the centuries of Great Lakes shipping, and once for Gordon Lightfoot, who saw fit to immortalise the sailors even further. Whatever the story may be to the men who tell it, the Edmund Fitzgerald fought to the end, and as tragedies go, at least this one was not helpless. And so we say Godspeed!
