Edmund Fitzgerald

When the Edmund Fitzgerald, pictured here four years before it sank, plied the waters of the Great Lakes, it was one of the largest “lakers” in service.

• Main Story

• Could There Be Another Fitz?

• Why Did the Fitz Go Down?
      The Theories

• Diving Deep

An entire generation now has no active memory of November 10, 1975, but the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald continues to fascinate, mystify and preoccupy young and old.

Part of that fascination, despite the 25-year span since the foundering of the big ore freighter, results from Gordon Lightfoot’s monster best-selling recording about the wreck and part likely springs from the inconclusive nature of any “facts” surrounding the sinking. Without direct witnesses or survivors, every explanation about the cause of the wreck is purely theoretical and, from the very beginning, a rash of theories concerning it were postulated. 

What is known is that 29 men lost their lives in the cold waters of Lake Superior and that their families continue to mourn in private amid the celebrity of the shipwreck.

What also can be stated with certainty is that sometime between 7:10 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., the Fitzgerald simply disappeared into Lake Superior about 15 miles from the shelter of Whitefish Bay just west of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, during ferocious northwest winds and seas that washed as high as eight to 12 feet over the ship’s main deck. The Arthur M. Anderson, an ore carrier in the U.S. Steel fleet, had been trailing and providing navigational information to the Fitzgerald because the Fitz’s radars had malfunctioned about four hours earlier. Captain Jessie B. “Bernie” Cooper of the Anderson reported his concern for the Fitzgerald to the Coast Guard station in Sault Ste. Marie at 7:39 p.m., continued to try to raise radio contact with the big ship. He again voiced grave concern that the Fitzgerald was missing at 8:32 p.m.

Search and rescue efforts started immediately after Cooper’s second call, but the nearest Coast Guard vessel that could sail in the huge seas was the Woodrush, stationed 300 miles away in Duluth, Minnesota. Coast Guard aircraft were on the scene by 10:55 p.m. Commercial vessels in the protective waters of Whitefish Bay were requested to form a search effort and several, including the Anderson, did venture out of shelter to search the storm-tossed seas for survivors. None, of course, were found and only floating debris gave clues that the Fitzgerald and its crew were lost.

From construction to launching to life on the lakes for the Edmund Fitzgerald in these 1958 photos. LAKE SUPERIOR MARINE MUSEUM

Within days, the location of the wreck on the bottom of the lake was pinpointed by U.S. Navy aircraft and the following spring the Coast Guard positively identified the wreckage using underwater photography.

But the questions surrounding the cause of the wreck kept mounting and continue to do so. 

Officially, the report of the U.S. Coast Guard marine board of inquiry states that the most probable cause of the sinking was loss of buoyancy due to massive flooding of the cargo hold through ineffective hatch closures.

That finding was quickly challenged by the Lake Carriers’ Association (LCA) and by many seasoned sailors. The LCA stated that the patented steel hatch covers had been in continuous use for more than 30 years and had proven to be effective hatch closures in all weather conditions throughout that period. Instead, the LCA theorized that the lost freighter had stumbled over the Six-Fathom Shoal at the north end of Caribou Island, sustaining damage that would prove to be fatal to the ship.

Whatever the cause, the Fitzgerald took a starboard list as it passed Caribou. Reporting to the Anderson, the Fitz’s Captain Ernest McSorley revealed the list and had activated two large ballast tank pumps to control it. He reduced speed to allow the Anderson to close the 17-mile gap between them. A bit later, McSorley reported that his radars weren’t working and requested that the Anderson keep track of his route and give him navigational aid.

The light at Whitefish Point was out temporarily on the night the Fitz went down. LAKE SUPERIOR MAGAZINE

Meantime, northwest winds built massive seas from the starboard quarter (right rear), washing powerful waves completely over the deck as the ship left the eastern lee of Caribou Island. In testimony before the marine board, Captain Cooper said that 10 miles southeast of Caribou he had waves cresting over the pilothouse - 35 feet above the waterline.

Ten miles ahead, Captain McSorley learned from Captain Cedric Woodard, a U.S. pilot aboard the Swedish-flagged Avafors, that neither the light nor directional radio beacon at Whitefish Point were working. Captain Woodard, who was acquainted with McSorley and had talked with him many times previously, said in testimony that he didn’t recognize the voice when first they spoke and that McSorley sounded strange.

Still later, at about 6 p.m., Woodard called the Fitz to report that the light had just come on at Whitefish Point. During that conversation, he stated that McSorley inadvertently left the microphone on when he said to someone in his pilothouse, “Don’t allow nobody on deck,” also saying something about a vent that Woodard couldn’t understand. 

In Lake Superior Port Cities Inc.’s newly released book, The Night the Fitz Went Down, Captain Dudley Paquette vividly describes his voyage through the massive seas of the November 9-10, 1975, storm as master of the downbound Inland Steel Company’s SS Wilfred Sykes. He is particularly intrigued by the command that Woodard overheard.

“In those seas, such a command goes without saying, so why did McSorley have to emphasize it?” he asks. “There had to have been something happening on the deck that a mate thought they had to get control of - even if it meant putting lives in danger.”

Whatever prompted that command just a little over an hour before the sinking, Paquette analyzes that it would have been catastrophic and visible from the pilothouse in the darkness of an early November evening. That would likely mean that it was at the forward end of the weather deck. Previously suggested possibilities are that a hatch cover washed off or the heavy deck crane or the spare blade for the propeller broke loose and crashed about.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if a hatch cover came off, because I loaded right beside him in Superior on November 9 and the deck crew was still putting on hatch covers when they left the Superior Entry into Lake Superior,” Captain Paquette says. “It’s likely that they didn’t latch a lot of the hatch cover clamps because the crew was on Sunday overtime pay and they were so late getting covered up - and the weather was very nice at that time.” 

Such speculation fits easily into the puzzle of the Fitzgerald tragedy. Adding to that puzzle is the fact that its captain never uttered a word of serious concern for his ship nor reported his problems to the Coast Guard. Captain McSorley told Woodard that the ship “has a bad list,” implying that it had gotten worse since his earlier report to Captain Cooper. But an hour later, when Anderson First Mate Morgan Clark asked how he was making out with his problems, McSorley assured him, “We are holding our own.”

Whether spoken from a desire to maintain calm in his pilothouse or from his own false sense of security, his assessment was obviously quite wrong. Less than 20 minutes later when the Anderson cleared a snow squall, its radars lost contact and the Big Fitz, as seamen called the ship, passed from the land of the living into legend. 

That legend continues to live on.

While the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald remains shrouded in mystery, it is no mystery that ships wreck.

“It’s as certain as anything can be that sooner or later there will be another ship lost on Lake Superior,” says maritime historian Frederick Stonehouse.

His assumption is obviously shared by others in the maritime industry, but changes instituted after the loss of the Fitzgerald are meant to help to prevent some perceived causes of the wreck.

At the time of the foundering, there was no requirement for depth-finding instruments on commercial vessels. Since one theory is that the ship was damaged by grounding, within two years of the wreck all commercial vessels of 1,600 or more gross tons were required to have equipment that would warn the officers of shallow water beneath the hull. Although no findings concluded that the Fitz suffered grounding damage, the addition of depth finders on lake boats now gives officers information not previously required on their vessels.

Canadian flag on the bow, American flag at stern, the Edmund Fitzgerald was a frequent site on the Great Lakes during its almost two decades of service before it sank with the loss of all 29 crew members.

Since no Coast Guard vessel capable of sailing in the conditions prevalent in eastern Lake Superior was available in the vicinity of the wreck, maintenance procedures were amended to ensure that cutters would be in a “ready” condition during the spring and fall periods of bad weather. Also, a larger, more powerful tug, the Katmai Bay, is now stationed at Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. Although not a “heavy weather” vessel like a cutter, it is capable of handling larger seas than the Naugatuck, the harbor tug previously stationed at the Soo.

Improvements in personal lifesaving equipment have resulted in suits to protect sailors from hypothermia in Lake Superior’s cold waters. The suits are also equipped with flashing lights and radio position beacons.

Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB) are now standard equipment on lakes vessels, allowing instantaneous identification of the area where a vessel founders. While EPIRB would not have aided the crew of the Fitzgerald, it would have identified the sunken ship and given searchers a location to start their effort to find survivors.

“From everything we know and remembering that they were not required at the time, neither survival suits nor EPIRB would have helped the crew of the Fitzgerald because the ship sank so suddenly,” Stonehouse points out. “But almost certainly the suits would have saved the lives of some crewmen in the wrecks of the Carl D. Bradley and the Daniel J. Morrell, the two previous Great Lakes wrecks where most of the crews were lost.”

Perhaps the greatest change that came in the aftermath of the Fitz disaster is in navigational equipment. Ships were first equipped with the Long Range Aid to Navigation (Loran-C), an electronic aid for pilots that had previously been widely used by oceanic navigators, but had not extended to the Great Lakes. By 1979, a new Loran broadcast station began operating at Baudette, Minnesota, giving sailors easy access to their location, speed, course being steered and other information.

Within a few years, Loran was rendered obsolete by the pinpoint accuracy of the Global Positioning System (GPS), which uses satellites to answer virtually any navigational question an officer might have.

Beyond these improvements on board the ships, the marine weather reports have become more sophisticated and accessible, with detailed charts now printed out electronically in the pilothouse. Officers and candidates in navigation classes and manufacturer schools receive up-to-the-minute training in using the latest equipment and in interpreting information that equipment provides to keep their ships out of harm’s way.

As Fred Stonehouse points out, nothing completely removes hazard from life at sea, for nature still enforces its whim and ships are still expected to brave adverse weather to deliver their cargoes. Today’s captain, however, has much more accurate and immediate information than did those sailing even 25 years ago, when the Fitzgerald was virtually blind and wallowing in huge seas and heavy winds on its way from Caribou Island to its final resting place.

Hugh E. Bishop, senior writer for Lake Superior Magazine, is author of The Night the Fitz Went Down, published in August by Lake Superior Port Cities Inc., which also publishes this magazine. 

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"They might have split up
or they might have capsized,
they may have broke deep
and took water …"

The official Coast Guard board of inquiry came to the conclusion that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank as a result of “massive flooding of the cargo hold,” saying that this likely resulted from “ineffective hatch closure.” Noting that many of the hatch clamps photographed on the sunken freighter show little or no damage or distortion, the report states that this could result from improper maintenance of the adjustment bolts that put tension on the hatch covers and secured them to the top of the coamings around the hatches. Another explanation offered from the many undamaged hatch clamps is that the clamps were never latched in the first place.

Either of these explanations fails to address the fact that the ship had a list, which would not be likely if water were invading the large central cargo hold, but would be if water were leaking into ballast tanks or a tunnel along the side of the hold. Also, the Fitzgerald’s officers had started two pumps to evacuate water, but those pumps would only remove water from the ballast tanks, not the cargo hold. That would seem to indicate that their instruments convinced them that water was leaking into the tank area.

Perhaps the most widely accepted of the several theories about the loss of the Fitzgerald is that the ship crossed Caribou Island’s Six-Fathom Shoal, which nestles off the north end of the island with water as shallow as 26 feet. This contact or a near miss would damage the hull and allow water to begin accumulating inside the affected ballast tanks. Significantly, within a few minutes of passing the shoal, the Fitz’s Captain Ernest McSorley reported a starboard list, missing vents and a fence rail down. Beyond that, Captain “Bernie” Cooper of the Anderson commented in testimony that his radar showed the Fitz to be closer to the shoal than he wanted his ship to be. 

Despite many people accepting this as the most likely scenario for the sudden list and deck damage, the photographic evidence for such a grounding simply doesn’t exist. Every expedition to the freighter has reported that there is no evidence of scraping, gouging or damage to the rudder or propeller, which should show on the overturned bottom of the stern. Diving expeditions on the shoals also found no evidence of any recent groundings there by a ship.

An explanation that has been espoused several times by mariners is that the Fitzgerald suffered a stress fracture and broke apart on the surface from the effects of heavy seas twisting and flexing the hull. Captain Cooper of the Anderson mentioned the possibility of a stress fracture in his testimony before the marine board and also included it in his personal story of the wreck in James R. Marshall’s Shipwrecks of Lake Superior. Captain Dudley J. Paquette of the SS Wilfred Sykes sailed through the entire two-day storm, was part of the search effort and is a vocal adherent of the idea that the sunken ore carrier suffered stress damage at what he calls the “hinge area” where the greatest amount of flex is observed in a ship’s hull. Located about a third forward of the stern, this “working area” is approximately the same as the area where the intact stern of the Fitz separated from the rest of the wreckage.

Marine and other experts who examined Coast Guard photos and videotape of the wreckage for the board of inquiry dismissed fracture as a cause of the wreck, based on the fact that no photo evidence shows “brittle fracture” separation, which is described as having straight or flat edges.

Perhaps the most romantic theory about the wreck of the Fitzgerald is that the ship succumbed to the forces of the Three Sisters, a Lake Superior phenomenon described as a combination of two large waves inundating the decks of a boat and a third, slightly later monster wave that boards the vessel as it struggles to shrug off the effects of the first two.

Again, Captain Cooper of the Anderson provides fuel for this theory, as he relates in Marshall’s Shipwrecks of Lake Superior that slightly before 7 p.m. “we took two of the largest seas of the trip. The first one flooded our boat deck. It had enough force to come down on the starboard lifeboat, pushing it into the saddles with a force strong enough to damage the bottom of the lifeboat.… The second large sea put green water (the powerful center of a wave) on our bridge deck! This is 35 feet above the waterline.”

Since these two large waves struck the trailing Anderson mere minutes before its final radar contact with the Fitzgerald, might they have joined a third rogue wave, overtaken the struggling Fitz 10 or 15 minutes later and overwhelmed the already listing and troubled ship?

As with all of the other theories, it may well be that we will never know the total story of this wreck - leaving each theory, for now, as good as any other.

IMAGES: GREAT LAKES SHIPWRECK HISTORICAL SOCIETY 
AND EMORY KRISTOF, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE

The spring after the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost, the U.S. Coast Guard sent remote cameras more than 500 feet down to it. Five years later in 1980, Jacques Cousteau’s famous Calypso arrived for the first manned dive inside an underwater vessel to the site. Since then, there have been about a half dozen dives to the wreck using deep-diving equipment. Only one man has undertaken a scuba dive, using special air mixtures in his tanks. Eight minutes at the Fitz was all that he earned for his four-hour dive because of the necessary decompression. Great respect must be accorded to the wreck site, however, which still contains the remains of crew members and is considered a gravesite.