Every year on November 10th, many people memorialize the sinking of a seemingly random freighter ship from Milwaukee. The story of the SS Edumund Fitzgerald is no different from the countless other freighter ships to sail across Lake Superior, but why is it the only one that is well-known?
Canadian Singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about Edmund Fitzgerald, titled The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1976. He was inspired by an article he saw about the numerous ships that sank in Lake Superior over the month of November in 1975. This random song about a random ship on the bottom of Lake Superior would be the biggest song of Lightfoot’s career. The song is similar to that of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire, in the sense that it recaps a historical event in a story/chronological way. Without the song, I doubt hardly anyone would remember the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald today, or at least to the extent that they do.
The Edmund Fitzgerald’s final voyage started a day before its sinking, around 2 PM the ship and 29 crew left Wisconsin, en route to Detroit, with 26,000 tons of iron ore. When the doomed ship left port, the initial forecast for the next day wasn’t as grave as it would become. The “gales of November” that Lightfoot sings about weren’t forecasted to be as rough, but the crew would soon find out how bad they would become.
The next day, a large storm with winds up to 60 miles per hour washed over Lake Superior, and the National Weather Service (NWS) issued a gale warning for the entirety of Lake Superior. The gale warning was then moved to a storm warning at 2 AM on November 10th. As the crew awoke that morning, they were faced with rough seas, and they couldn’t make breakfast, as the seas were too rough. From here on out, we are unsure about what happened aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald, however we do know that the crew did not eat dinner, and around 7:00 PM, the main hatchway of the ship gave in, and this was the final nail in the coffin of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Captain Ernest M. McSorley was sailing the Edmund Fitzgerald that fateful night, and he was a veteran captain, making countless voyages across the Great Lakes before. He kept in radio contact with the SS Wilfred Sykes, as the ships had been near each other until midday on the 10th, as the storm worsened and snow started to fall. The last radio contact heard from the Fitzgerald was at 7:10 PM, when Captain McSorley radioed: “We are holding our own.” The ship was without both radars, and had a heavy list, their ship leaning to the side. McSorley called the seas the worst he had seen, and his ship kept taking in water. It was doomed to sink from the start, but the crew didn’t go out without a fight. 29 crew died that night, and the bell of the Maritime Sailors Cathedral in Detroit rang 29 times on the morning of November 11th, and every Nov. 10th until 2003.
The fate of the Edmund Fitzgerald and its popularity have earned it the nickname “the Titanic of the Great Lakes”. Thanks to Lightfoot, the 29 souls who perished with the ship that night were immortalized and memorialized. When Lightfoot died in 2023, the general consensus was to memorialize him as one of the crew, and the church bells in Detroit rang 30 times, 29 for the crew, and 1 for Lightfoot.
The fate of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald will live on, and I’m sure of this due to the flood of posts I’ve seen on social media about the song and ship over the last few days. The ship and its fate are forever engraved in pop culture, and will always be talked about on November 10th, and Lightfoot will have his song played posthumously across the world, seemingly forever. 50 years after her sinking, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald lives on.
