“We are holding our own,” Ernest McSorley, the captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald said as the famous freighter made its way through a treacherous evening on Lake Superior. But they weren’t.
His words, sometime after 7.10pm on November 10th, 1975, closed what was the last transmission from a ship that has become the abiding symbol of a sense of community, courage and separateness among the people whose working lives revolve around the Great Lakes. Twenty-nine men went down with “The Fitz”.
Crossing the Mackinac Bridge, the 8km structure that connects northern Michigan to the Upper Peninsula (UP), is one of the more extraordinary travel experiences in North America. I was there last year in the closing weeks of the election: it was late autumn and both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were bombarding the key states of Michigan and Wisconsin with rallies.
But neither candidate would visit the UP, which has 30 per cent of Michigan’s land mass and just 3 per cent of its population. It’s a 480km strip of lush landscape wedged between lakes Michigan and Superior and it’s like nowhere else on the continent: an outdoor paradise of watersports and fishing in summer and snowbound in winter.
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In all seasons, it looks like a National Geographic dreamscape. To make a life there seems like a foolhardy proposition – and also, one suspects, an incredibly vivid and vital experience. In summer, the UP is black with insect life. In winter, residents can be snowed in for weeks. The plethora of cannabis stores on the edge of its small towns makes sense.
“In the 1960s I went up a number of times, and it did not cease to mystify me with its wildness,” Michigan writer and outdoorsman Jim Harrison wrote a decade ago.
“While camping I would study maps to try to figure out where I was other than within a cloud of mosquitoes and black flies, that irritating species that depends on clean water, of which there is a great deal in the UP There is little or no industry; therefore you could drink the water directly from Lake Superior – at least I always did on my long beach walks. There was a place near Grand Marais of nearly 60 miles of undisturbed beach, no people, no dwellings, just beach and water.”
And fishing, and the boating life. It is estimated there are about 500 shipwrecks scattered across Lake Superior alone, whose dimensions run a scarcely fathomable 563km in length and 240km in width. Some 6,500 ships and an estimated 30,000 lives have been lost on the Great Lakes through maritime tragedies over 300 years.
The Edmund Fitzgerald, the largest ship ever launched on the Great Lakes, an oddly graceful workhorse that, since its launch in 1958, had regularly broken its own records for hauling iron ore to and from ports across the Great Lakes, has become a totem for all those sunken vessels, and the souls who perished with them.
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On Tuesday, 50 years after the tragedy, family members of those lost will gather for memorial events in Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, the native state of almost half the victims. Bells will toll 29 times at maritime churches. There will be talks and reminiscences about the victims and a ship that still commands a curious affection in the popular imagination.
The descriptions of those lost contain profiles of some extraordinary lives. Ransom Cundy, a watchman from Superior, Wisconsin, had fought at Iwo Jima. Oliver Champeau of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, had left school at 13 when his father died and later fought in the Korean War. Something about the epic scale and suddenness of the tragedy – it had been snowing on the afternoon of November 10th, and the ship was already in trouble – reinforced the immense indifference of the Lakes.
After reading a Newsweek article on the sinking titled The Cruelest Month, the Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot began working on a ballad, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. A fatalistic and oddly chorus-less ballad set to an Irish dirge was phenomenally popular when it was released in 1976, reaching number one in Canada and number two in the US at a time when the singles charts mattered. (The melody was adapted by Irish republican Bobby Sands when he composed Back Home in Derry).
The foreboding first verse set the tone:
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down/Of the Big Lake they call Gitche Gumee/The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead/When the skies of November turn gloomy.
Although the wreck of the ship was located just four days after it sank and with no warnings issued shortly after Captain McSorley’s final moments, family members were adamant there should be no attempt to raise her. Instead, various artefacts were recovered. The Great Lake Shipwreck Museum, at Whitefish Point in Michigan, has the ship’s bell, adorned with her name – the shipping company named the vessel after its chairman, rather than the Irish revolutionary. Another museum in Sault Sainte–Marie, Michigan, houses a lifeboat recovered from the lake bed. An anchor belonging to the Fitzgerald, lost during a different voyage, has been repurposed as a memorial on a dock in Detroit.
Lightfoot’s chilling tribute remains a phenomenon. The 70 millions views of the version of the song with lyrics on YouTube features a number of comments saluting Lightfoot after his death two years ago. Among them was a message seemingly from Ernest McSorley’s grandniece and this memory apparently written by a crew hand from the locality.
“I was on the Edmund Fitzgerald for four hours in 1973. I was an engineer on the Reserve, a sister ship to the Edmund Fitzgerald. I boarded the Edmund to get spare parts for my ship. The crew of the Edmund were so kind and friendly. The engineers on board gave me beers for four hours and I left with my spare parts. I will never forget how nice the crew was to me.”
