“We’re Holding Our Own”: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

This is Our American Stories, and our next story comes to us courtesy of Rick Mixter, a shipwreck researcher and diver who’s explored over one hundred and thirty shipwrecks, one of which is the subject of this story on the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes. Here’s our own Montae Montgomery with a story.

When we think of the word “lake,” we often think of a calm, placid, and small body of water. But the Great Lakes are anything but that.

People underestimate them. You know, literally, they think they’re ponds. They think that they’re, you know, they’re much smaller than the ocean. And the truth is that the Great Lakes span over one thousand miles. You know, Lake Superior is immense, and unfortunately, it has these jagged shoals that, unlike the ocean, it’s confined. So these shoals bounce waves back and forth. And these confused waves on the Great Lakes tend to really mess with ships and make it very difficult to navigate in a storm.

And the results of these confused seas have often been deadly.

There’s a huge argument on how many shipwrecks are on the Great Lakes because it’s really hard to judge. Most of the time, we would put it to insurance settlements. Let’s look at Lloyd’s of London or other places that paid out, but we don’t know if they were recovered. If you sat on the bottom, most people would probably throw out a number between six thousand and ten thousand shipwrecks that are still on the bottom.

But out of all these shipwrecks, there’s one that has been etched into the collective consciousness of the people of the Great Lakes: the Edmund Fitzgerald. And there’s a reason for that.

The Fitzgerald is famous for two words: Gordon Lightfoot. It’s literally a wreck that I think would have been forgotten if not for a Canadian songwriter who took the story and turned it into a seven-and-a-half-minute song that went to number two on the charts. And once that happened, it became enamored not only by the people of the Great Lakes; it became their song. Played every November. Every time you turn on the radio, somebody plays it at that time because of the Gales of November, and to remember the crew. Nobody argues that it’s not Gordon Lightfoot. It is the largest shipwreck on the Great Lakes by a couple hundred feet. The Fitzgerald was seven hundred twenty-nine feet long and lost with all hands, which was part of the mystery. I think that captivated even Gordon Lightfoot, and that’s why it kind of became a story. How in nineteen seventy-five could you have a seven-hundred-foot freighter with twenty-nine men completely vanished? The Fitzgerald was one of the last of the ships built in Michigan, which we used to have an amazing shipbuilding prowess. We were number one on the Great Lakes for years. Just a massive ship. I mean, it was the flagship for Columbia Transportation. So when it was launched, not only was she the biggest, but she was well-appointed. She had the best skipper, according to Columbia, the best cook, because they would entertain many of the steel companies, like National Steel’s president or, you know, big weeks would come on board, bring their family along, and, you know, it would have inside. Jail. Hudson Company, the famous Hudson Store, had all of the appointments inside. So your beds, all of the furniture, which had to be custom cut to fit the canter of the floor of the Fitzgerald, which was, you know, slightly rounded. They had to cut the legs of the beds to fit correctly. So it was the flagship. It was the ship that everybody wanted to be assigned to, and it was certainly the ship that gave out many rides to people. It was also fast. They called it the Toledo Express because it made that run so quickly.

And for the next seventeen years, the Edmund Fitzgerald would continue to make that trip from Superior, Wisconsin, to Detroit, laden with iron ore, and there was no reason to expect that on November ninth, nineteen seventy-five, her trip under the command of Captain Ernest McSorley, would go any differently.

It was a Sunday, and it was in Superior, Wisconsin, on a beautiful day, and Jack McCarthy, the first may, would be in charge of telling the guys, you know, the loading, make sure that the ship was loaded evenly, in which they would go underneath a gravity-fed doc, and it would actually spill these round taconite pellets into the cargo hold, which they took twenty-six thousand tons. This is where Gordon Lightfoot was wrong: on a couple of accounts. In his song, he said “fully loaded for Cleveland,” but it wasn’t fully loaded. It was less than two-thirds loaded because she was actually going to River Rouge, near the area to Zug Island, and in order to get into that slip, she couldn’t carry all of her cargo because she would hit bottom in the Detroit River. So, not fully loaded, not going to Cleveland, actually going into the Detroit area with a load of iron ore that would eventually become automobiles. And they take off into a beautiful day, and as they do, McSorley in the pilothouse actually sees that a big storm is coming up. He’s got a radio that he can get reports through, and he’s a weather ship, so he takes his observations and adds them to the weather reports to help forecasters try to develop where the storm’s going to go. And it’s quickly ascertained that he’s going to get a storm that’s going to come right through from Oklahoma all the way up to Marquette, and so he starts to calculate how long that would take and uses the forecast that he’s getting given as well and has to determine what he’s going to do.

But McSorley was a well-seasoned captain, and the coming storm likely didn’t phase him too much, despite some of the reservations he may have had on the ship.

McSorley had been a skipper that had been on the Great Lakes for years and years and worked his way up to the Edmund Fitzgerald. He was very stern from the people that I talked to, a very matter-of-fact guy. As we talked to a third mate in my documentary called ‘The Fitzgerald Investigations,’ he remembered going through a Lake Superior storm with just ten-foot waves, where the Fitzgerald would flex so crazily, unlike any ship he had been on. And he looked at McSorley and he said, “Man, it should it be bending like this?” And McSorley said, “Sometimes it scares me.” So, literally, he knew that this ship was different than other ships. He knew that it would flex in these storms. But because, as a part-time job, he did hull inspection, he was very well versed in the strength of these ships, and he unfortunately pushed the Fitzgerald way beyond its means. As I did the investigation documentary, I found the Coast Guard looked into it. They looked at ten years at the Soo Locks, the worst storms that ever happened up until nineteen seventy-five, and the one ship that kept pushing every storm and made it through the locks during those gales was the Edmund Fitzgerald. So, he was a rough-weather skipper. He pushed the heck out of the ship, and it eventually broke because of it.

So the Fitzgerald pushed forward, and soon they would get company to ride out the storm with in the form of the Arthur M. Anderson, another Laker, captain by Bernie Cooper.

And Cooper also is a, you know, these guys are experienced meteorologists. They have to be; their lives depend on it, and they start to figure out when the storm will come and what they’re going to do. As they pass Isle Royale, they’ve got a place that they can hide there from these northwest winds that are starting to build. They continue going, but they take the northern route. The northern route goes closer to Canada. Jokingly, some of the sailors call that the scenic route, because otherwise you might not ever see land as you go around the Keweenaw would be the last spot as you make that long haul past Marquette and make your way to the Soo Locks and of Whitefish Bay. But as they’re going up, they go all the way past Otterhead, a second spot that they could throw out their anchor. Because it’s so close to the Canadian shore, the waves can’t build there, so you’re pretty safe. You could wait it out, but they didn’t. They decided they were going to make it for Whitefish Bay. They thought that the storm would take an extra hour to get to them, and they were wrong. As they got past Caribou, it was the worst the storm could be, and they were in the absolute worst place they should be, on Lake Superior, where those winds now could build the entire length of the lake and crash into the ship and crash into them in the stern and on their starboard side. So if they had any problems at all, they were going to get into real trouble there. And that’s what happened to the Fitzgerald.

And you’re listening to Rick Mixter tell the story of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. As he put it, “How in nineteen seventy-five could you have a seven-hundred-twenty-nine-foot freighter with twenty-nine men completely vanished?”

The answer to that question, you’ll hear.

It, after these messages here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and our story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. When we last left off, Captain McSorley and his crew were battling the brutal storm on Lake Superior alongside another ship, the Arthur M. Anderson. Here’s Rick Mixter with the rest of the story.

As the ‘Fitz’ is going past Caribou, it, it has some kind of problem. They look down the deck, and they could see that at least one of their vents was missing. These looked like mushrooms that are on the deck, and they’re very large, and they’re used to equalize the pressure below decks. But, of course, the ‘Fitz’ has two-thirds of a cargo in there. Well, as he noticed that one of those is missing, he also finds out from his engineers that he’s taking on water, so they’re running their pumps to try to keep that water out. He also mentioned something really unique. He says, “Our fence rail is down,” and that has been interpreted in a couple of different ways. The fence rail could be the guide rails that are on the side of the ship that perhaps some piece of debris came on, smashed its vent off, and also damaged that part of the rail. So, he’s radioing back and forth to the Anderson that he’s got these problems, and then, all of a sudden, mentions his radars are out, and he was worried because McSorley had noticed that out of Whitefish Bay there were several saltwater ships, including a big freighter called the William Clay Ford, and another one that we’re trying to get out of Whitefish Bay, and he worried he’d get into a collision situation and the blinding snow that was happening, so he asked the Anderson to keep an eye out for them because his radars were out, so he’s going blindly into this storm. The Anderson is now trying to close the distance because the Fitzgerald, being a faster boat, was a, or several, miles ahead of them. The last broadcast came from Morgan Clark, the first mate on board the Anderson, who asked the Fitzgerald, “How are you making out with your problems?” And the Fitzgerald, McSorley, answered back, “We are holding our own,” and unfortunately, in a blinding snow squall, the Fitzgerald disappears. It disappears from radar because the blinding snow also blinded the radar out. When it finally clears, the Anderson can’t see the Fitzgerald, and now their job is trying to notify the Coast Guard that a seven-hundred-twenty-nine-foot freighter is miss scene.

The last time that you talked about, at what time I want to work, I had, and I was making out with the problem, and that he loved those vans, and he had a left, and he said he was holding his own the last time I stopped with him, that he was holding his own and got the last time I loved contact.

After that, good. Nobody wanted to believe that the Fitzgerald was gone, especially the Coast Guard, as, and we’re very lucky that immediately the Coast Guard started recording all of these conversations, so we actually have the conversations as Cooper is trying to tell the Coast Guard that they have missed the Fitzgerald. So here, the Anderson is now making the safety of Whitefish Bay. After now twenty-nine guys have been lost. A massive steel modern freighter has been lost to the storm, and they call the Coast Guard, who tells them, “We don’t have a ship that can go out there.” So the Coast Guard has to convince the captain of the Anderson, that just went this freighter sinking, to turn around, come out of the safety of Whitefish Bay, and go back into that killer storm. And he definitely did not want to do that. Right from the radio broadcast, we hear Cooper say, “You know, there’s going to be two of us on the bottom.” You know, he really believed going back out there was going to be, you know, a bad mistake, but he knew he was the only choice, so they went back out there. You know, at that time it was sixty-mile-an-hour wins. It was going to take him two hours to go seventeen miles with those intense winds that blowing right against them, and I don’t think they believed that anybody would survive it. You know, with big thirty-foot waves and water temperatures that were just above freezing, there really wasn’t much chance. And unfortunately, it was a futile attempt. But I think that that was the spirit of the Lakes. You do what you can, first safe, make sure your crew is going to survive it, and then, you know, if you can safely do it, you go out there and make the rescue. And he did the truest tradition of sailors: you know, try to find those guys. But unfortunately, you know, as we know, nobody survived, and no bodies were found.

Then came the task of actually finding the final resting place of the Fitzgerald on the bottom of Lake Superior.

It didn’t take them very long, so they used this robot called the CURV-III to not only find it but to secure it. The CURV-III came out, and they flew that down to five hundred fifty feet, and as they saw the bow, they noticed it was upright. But as they went around the stern section, which was broken over one hundred feet away, they noticed that the lettering was upside down. And the Coast Guard investigators immediately thought the ROV, or the robot, was inverted, and the pilot said, “No, it’s not. This is the back section, two hundred feet, of the Edmund Fitzgerald that was upside down.” So the horrible act of it tearing apart somewhere in the the water column actually flipped the entire stern upside down, and the bow section is resting proudly upright on the bottom, where you can actually see every deck in the pilothouse as well.

And there the Fitzgerald sat, a gravesite for her twenty-nine crew, none of which were ever recovered. Immediately, there were questions on why this modern lake freighter sank, and these questions still brew today.

Did she hit bottom? Did she get hit by a rogue wave? Or did her hatch covers cave in? Answers were hard to find, as the wreck site was soon protected by the Canadian government at the request of the families of the victims, so very few people have actually seen the wreck. But in ’94, Rick did.

In ’94, we took the submersible Delta, which had been famous for diving the Lusitania, and we went down in this two-man yellow submarine, and I was the third dive on the Delta expedition. When you dive a shipwreck, you get down to it. If you’re free diving it, or you’re doing it on scuba equipment where you don’t have a submarine around you. You can actually go up to it and touch it, you know. The cold steel and the immense size of these vessels is what really becomes apparent to you. The Fitzgerald was surreal in the fact that I was down five hundred feet. The lights stopped at about two hundred fifty, so it’s pitch black beyond, you know, whatever you have on board your submarine, which we had lots of lights, so it becomes very surreal. As you look through the porthole, you can see glimpses of the ship, but not the whole ship at the same time. So, as we went past the name, the letters are over a foot and a half tall. I’m trying to remember exactly how big they were, but that’s what first captured my mind was it said “Edmund Fitzgerald,” and it was horribly torn up on the port side. So the collision with the bottom had just ripped apart spar deck from the side of the ship, and the name had been scratched up and beat up so badly that it took my breath away. And as we went around the bow, and to see, the bow was actually bent almost ninety degrees. The force of the storm was just incredible. And then the tiny details, as you’d see a blanket hanging out of the pilothouse, or you go up to the top and you’d see the radars that were, you know, Panasonic on top. It’s a plastic, like just a little sliver of plastic ripped off, and the wires were just there. So you start to piece together the story from that. Each one of those pieces not only awed me, but, you know, you were just so excited to see this great shipwreck. And then when I came up, we actually had a power left in the submarine, and so it was decided that the owner of the tugboat who we were renting from would actually get to take his son down there for a look. And we’re eating lunch, and we got a a report from the submarine through the sonophone, the sound waves from the… it’s like a radio that goes through water, and we found out that they found a missing crewman. So we went from this incredible high of me just visiting the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, the largest shipwreck on the Great Lakes at five hundred fifty feet, down to a horrible low of, “Oh my God, there are twenty-nine people that were lost.”