Things I didn't know even though this is one of my favorite songs:
1. The person the ship was named after died 27 years after the ship named after him did (he hadn't wanted the naming, the board overruled him).
2. The wreck is in Canada.
3. Gordon changed the lyrics of his live performances to take in new information not available at the time of writing.
Great Lakes have claimed so many ships, deadliest being the Lady Elgin with a loss of approximately 300 lives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Lady_Elgin).
The huge waves that brought down Edmund Fitzgerald are thought to be caused by the mythical Gales of November phenomenon on Lake Superior (https://www.mprnews.org/story/2022/11/10/lake-superiors-gale...), which is due to cold Arctic air from north colliding with very warm air from the Gulf of Mexico (we had 70s in Chicago this week!).
From the MPRNews article:
"John Swenson, a professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Minnesota Duluth who grew up on Lake Superior, has looked at records of the biggest storms over the past 30 years.
'I find that the average storm, so in terms of time of the year, actually falls on about Nov. 10. So long story short, we get a storm like this, you know, on average on Nov. 10.' "
More historical photos that include some shots of the underwater remains of the wreck:
https://www.mlive.com/news/2021/11/wreck-of-the-edmund-fitzg...
If you haven't visited the Great Lakes, it can be hard to fathom how vast they are. They are really more like inland seas than lakes. At its deepest point, Lake Superior is about 1300ft deep, and edge-to-edge it measures about 350 miles across. If Lake Superior were drained, it could cover the entirety of North and South America with a foot of freshwater.
The northwestern coast of Michigan and the Upper Peninsula that bounds Lake Superior is absolutely worth a trip if you haven't been there.
The most fascinating aspect of the incident to me is that the Edmund Fitzgerald was 728' long and sank in 535 feet of water. One video I saw analyzing the sinking showed that it was possible the ship's bow was forced down hit the bottom with 200' or so still above the surface.
I strongly believe that iron ore liquefaction ultimately proved the ship's demise. More about how this can happen here[1]. The facts all line up:
- Tons of water likely getting into the cargo hold, wetting it down, especially if the
crew didn't take care of shutting the cargo hold top.
- Lots of rocking back and forth
- They were carrying tons of iron ore
- That stuff can absorb a ton of water, then when rocked, let it all loose at once,
thus causing a top-heavy rocking motion that will capsize a vessel within minutes.
Well worth a read, if you're seriously interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Fitzgerald#Maintenance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Fitzgerald#Structural_f...
Huge waves (running down the ship's length) obviously put extreme stresses on the hull of a long, thin, heavily-loaded ship. And the Fitzgerald's wreck is broken into two pieces, right in the middle.
I'm a child of the 70s. I grew up with this song being everywhere for a long time, but I never really paid attention, and I lived far from the Great Lakes, so it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized it was about a contemporary disaster and not some long-ago age-of-sail thing.
The song was released in 1976, and details a sinking from only a year before.
(Lost 47 years ago today.)
This told me nothing Gordan Lightfoot hadn’t already.
Obligatory link to the Gordon Lightfoot song about this disaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzTkGyxkYI
Gordon Lightfoot
Interestingly, the SS Arthur M. Anderson which was 10mi behind the Fitz when it went down, is still in use 70 years since launch and currently in Lake Huron.
https://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/details/ships/mmsi:3669720...