Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Fascinating recap and look at our Great Lakes' most iconic and mysterious tragedy. I learned a ton!

“It all happened too quickly for anyone aboard to do anything but react to the moment. The pilothouse windows blew in, and inrushing torrents of water hurled everyone backward. The front of the ship, now angling downward toward the bottom of the lake, wavered unnaturally, sinking from the weight of the boarding water and rapidly shifting taconite pellets. At the back of the ship, the propeller continued to turn and drive the Fitzgerald forward. The middle of the ship buckled. The bow portion of the Fitz bent downward, laboring to drag the rest of the ship with it, while the stern section stubbornly held to the surface. The ship plunged to the depths in dark, frigid water, its running lights still on, every pocket of air filling with water, from front to back of the vessel…”
-tMichael Schumacher, Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

In November 1975, Lake Superior took the lives of 29 sailors.

In August 1976, a song made them immortal.

On November 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Canadian waters during a severe storm. She had been carrying a load of taconite from Superior, Wisconsin, to Detroit, Michigan. Her last radio contact occurred when Captain Ernest McSorley radioed the nearby SS Arthur Anderson and reported that: “We are holding our own.” Soon after that call, the Fitz disappeared with all hands. No distress signal was ever sent.

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A long ship makes its way across Lake Superior

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The Great Lakes are not oceans, but they can whip up storms of hurricane-force magnitude. For hundreds of years, these storms have been taking vessels to the bottom. Thus, when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down, there was no reason to think she would ever be more than a local tragedy, mourned only by those most directly affected. Who, after all, remembers the Carl D. Bradley?

Then, in the summer of the following year, Gordon Lightfoot unleashed The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald upon the world. His ballad gave the ore-carrier both national and international renown. Instead of disappearing into history with the same finality with which she’d disappeared, the Edmund Fitzgerald gained a name recognition at least on par with the Andrea Doria, if not the great Titanic.

As a native Minnesotan who grew up summering in Duluth, visiting maritime museums, and hunting agates on Superior’s shores, I’ve long been interested in the Edmund Fitzgerald. With that said, it’s been tough to find the right book about it. After all, despite her fame, the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald is a small-scale tragedy, and most of the ship’s chroniclers have been regional historians with perhaps more passion than literary talent.

Though the competition is not exactly robust, Michael Schumacher’s Mighty Fitz is easily the best and most polished I’ve read on the Edmund Fitzgerald’s doomed voyage.

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The Edmund Fitzgerald

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At less than 200 pages, Schumacher doesn’t waste time. Mighty Fitz is focused, efficient, and well-paced. The curtain rises with the Edmund Fitzgerald receiving her final load of cargo, and moves quickly to a recounting of the final voyage. He intersperses the known details of the Fitz’s last run with lively descriptions of the history of Lake Superior, her weather, and some of the other shipwrecks that litter the lakebed. These asides are woven expertly into the narrative so that they don’t feel digressionary, but seamlessly bridge the obvious factual gaps you have when a ship goes down in a blink, taking all witnesses.

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The Edmund Fitzgerald’s last night is told mostly from the perspective of the captain and crew of the Arthur Anderson, which happened to be sailing in close proximity – with the speedier Fitzgerald up ahead – when one of Lake Superior’s infamous November gales came howling.

In the late afternoon, Captain Bernie Cooper of the Anderson received reports from Captain McSorley that the Edmund Fitzgerald had lost vent covers and a railing. The ship had also taken on a list. Less than an hour after this report, McSorley told Cooper that no longer had radar, and wanted the Arthur Anderson to act as his eyes. At 7:10 p.m., McSorley made his grimly optimistic last observation about “holding [their] own.”

Minutes later, the Fitzgerald was gone.

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Schumacher devotes two chapters to answering the looming question of what caused the sinking. The focus is on the United States Coast Guard’s Marine Board inquiry, which eventually concluded that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank due to ineffective hatch closures. During the storm – the hypothesis went – water seeped through the cargo hatches and into the hold, either due to improper sealing, or because the crew had left some of the hatches unclamped, in order to expedite their voyage. In any event, water began to accumulate in the cargo hold, causing a gradual loss of freeboard. The ship settled imperceptibly lower in the water – possibly explaining why Captain McSorley reported higher waves than anyone else – until a massive wave swamped her completely.

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My Goodreads assistant holds up a model of the Fitz to demonstrate the ship's vulnerabilities. The cargo hold was not watertight; there were numerous potential openings all along her deck; and there was always the danger of the midships section hogging

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The Marine Board’s findings were instantly controversial, and Schumacher does a fine job explaining the other theories that have been put forward. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), for instance, targeted the hatches as well. Contrary to the Marine Board, though, the NTSB – which viewed underwater footage of the wreck – believed the hatches had been torn off by the storm. With the hatches sheared away, the lake came pouring in.

Another possible explanation is that the Edmund Fitzgerald grounded off Six Fathom Shoal. This theory – supported by Captain Cooper of the Arthur Anderson – posits that the Edmund Fitzgerald’s long, vulnerable midsection hit the lake floor, causing it to rise (or hog, as the book’s helpful glossary notes) while the bow and stern bent down at either end. Hogging puts incredible physical stress on the unsupported midsection, and if this happened, it might have precipitated a breakup. Of course, no answers have come simply, and an investigation of Six Fathom Shoal after the wreck showed no evidence that it had been struck.

In any event, I’m sure there are still dimly lit taverns and dive bars along the Great Lakes where you can get into a fight discussing these alternate scenarios. Schumacher is mostly content to simply lay out the evidence for and against, implicitly accepting that only god and the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald knows the real truth, and maybe not even the crew.

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Schumacher ends Mighty Fitz by describing efforts to find and explore the wreck.

Unlike the Titanic, lying two miles beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean – and periodically killing explorers – the Edmund Fitzgerald can be reached by divers without the need for multimillion dollar investments in equipment. Also unlike the Titanic, the saga of the Fitz still exists in the realm of human memory. This makes her status as a graveyard far more potent than a ship that foundered in a distant epoch, back when high-bred men dressed in their dinner jackets to drown. Finally, the wreck did not take place in the midst of the wide blue ocean, but in Canadian waters, falling within the ambit of her laws. These factors make exploration of the Fitz incredibly fraught with legal and ethical implications.

The discovery of a body during an expedition ratcheted these complications up to eleven.

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There are aspects of Mighty Fitz that compare favorably with Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. That said, there’s something about The Perfect Storm that transcends its subject matter. You do not have to be interested in shipwrecks, sword fishermen, or the Andrea Gail to enjoy Junger’s masterpiece. Mighty Fitz is tailored more towards students of shipwrecks in general, and obviously the Edmund Fitzgerald in particular. It probably has less appeal to general readers.

It does have a universal lesson, though: life can change from just fine to we’re sunk with startling rapidity, and we must govern ourselves accordingly.

3 1/2 stars

A pretty good history of the famous ship and its sinking. I truly enjoyed how Schumacher dealt with the actual sinking in an understated way, mirroring (or at least attempting to) the feeling that the other boats would have at the sudden disappearance of the ship.

This is a comprehensive account of one of the most well-known Great Lakes shipwrecks - the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Immortalised in a Gordon Lightfoot song, the massive ore carrier sank in a brutal November storm in Lake Superior in 1975 leaving no survivors and a vexing mystery as to just why it sank. No distress call was made and the crew seem to have had no warning that their ship would sink before it was too late to make any effort to abandon ship. This book provides what information is know about the last voyage of the ship along with a history of the ship, interesting background on other similar sinkings of Great Lakes freighters, and a thorough account of the aftermath of the disaster. It’s these later sections focusing on the investigation of the wreck, some disputes over the treatment of the underwater wreckage, and explorations of the wreckage by documentarians and Jacques Cousteau’s son that drag a bit and somehow seem superfluous to the topic. The book strives towards an encyclopedia-like thoroughness on the topic of this famous ship that waters down the compelling and fascinating early account of the fateful voyage complete with biographical information of the crew of mostly lifelong midwestern seamen whose careers at sea lasted anywhere from a few years to 4 decades. It’s these personal details drawn from news accounts and interviews with friends and family that make this such a rich account and give it a personal dimension. There are plenty of facts and figures about this 729 foot long ship carrying over 26,000 tons of iron ore in this book but it’s the stories of people like Captain Ernest McSorley who made the last communication from the ship when he told a nearby ship “We are holding our own” that make this book such an interesting sea tale.

1 / 4 : If your kind of thing, read
NON-FICTION
[The Midwest's great wreck, and the saga, years later, of a deep-water bell-swap]

Your Boomer Dad book, with lots of surface level facts and speculation, but no central take. Where's the through-line? Where's the story?

Deferent to the survivors, which, well and good, but a sort of caution pervades the narrative.

I was 8 when the Edmund Fitzgerald sank and I remember being told about it in class [I lived in Ohio, where quite a few of the men were from] and we discussed it and what it meant. The following year the song by Gordon Lightfoot was released and I became even more interested in this story and what had really happened that fateful night [I was a very odd and particular child]. I have read articles about it and had made plans to visit the museum but those plans fell through [I will be rectifying that soon - plus a visit to the church in Detroit], but every November I light a candle and say a prayer for the families that are still dealing with the tragedy. This book brought back that thirst for knowledge, but I have to say that I believe that we will never know the real truth of what brought The Mighty Fitz down that night. I think we will all have to be content with what we know and just be willing to continue to honor the dead the best way we all know how.

There were issues with this book; the chapters were obscenely long, there were multiple spelling, punctuation and grammar errors and it did get sloggingly repetitive at times, to the point that I found myself skimming at points. That said, this was still an amazing read. I had never read a full account what happened that night [just shortened articles in papers and magazines] and that was horrifying and enthralling all at the same time. The author does a really good job of not sensationalizing it and just writing what was known and you are swept into that story and even though the end is known, I had to admit that I kept hoping for a different outcome as the story progressed - I cannot think of a better compliment to give an nonfiction author.

IF you have any kind of interest in this tragedy, I highly recommend this book. It will not disappoint.

Great book. The 3rd book on Great Lakes maritime history that I have read. Pretty much direct and to the point writing. Not a lot of unnecessary details. Got hard to put down at some points. A terrible tragedy that will leave you wondering what the heck happened! A question that will never be answered. If you aren't currently a fan of maritime disasters, this book might make you one.