When she was launched on June 7, 1958, at River Rouge, Michigan, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes: 729 feet long and of 13,632 gross tons, built to carry taconite iron ore from the head of Lake Superior to the steel mills of the lower lakes. For seventeen seasons she was among the hardest-worked and best-known carriers afloat, setting cargo record after cargo record. Her master from 1972 was Captain Ernest M. McSorley, who had spent more than forty years at sea.
On November 9, 1975, the Fitzgerald loaded 26,116 long tons of taconite pellets at the Burlington Northern dock at Superior, Wisconsin, and sailed that afternoon, bound for the National Steel mill at Detroit. The ore carrier Arthur M. Anderson was making the same passage, out of Two Harbors, Minnesota, for Gary, Indiana, and in radio contact the two ships took the longer northern route across Lake Superior, hoping for shelter under the Canadian shore from a storm that was deepening over the lakes.
The storm became one of the great November gales. During the night the National Weather Service raised its warnings from gale to storm. In the small hours of November 10 the Fitzgerald herself reported winds of 52 knots and seas of 10 feet, and by evening Stannard Rock light was recording gusts to 66 knots while the Anderson, following astern, reported 50-knot winds and 16-foot seas. In the afternoon the Fitzgerald reported that the sea had carried away part of her deck fence rail and two vent covers, that she had taken a list, and in time that both her radars were gone. She asked the Anderson to stay with her and pass the navigation fixes she could no longer make for herself.
At about 7:10 p.m., with Whitefish Bay some fifteen miles ahead, the Anderson warned her of traffic in her path and asked how she was riding. Captain McSorley’s reply was the last word ever heard from the ship: “We are holding our own.” Minutes later a snow squall blotted the Fitzgerald from the Anderson’s radar screen; when it cleared, she was gone. No distress call was ever sent. At 9:03 p.m. Captain Bernie Cooper of the Anderson reported her missing to the Coast Guard. Searchers found her smashed lifeboats, her life rafts and scattered debris — but of her crew of twenty-nine, not one man was ever found.
On November 14, 1975, a U.S. Navy patrol aircraft searching with a magnetic detector registered a strong contact on the lakebed, and the Coast Guard cutter Woodrush, working side-scan sonar over the following days, traced a wreck in two pieces. In May 1976 the Navy’s CURV-III camera vehicle confirmed the identification. The Fitzgerald’s bow section sits upright on the bottom and her stern lies upside down some 170 feet away, in about 530 feet of water at 46°59.9′ north, 85°06.6′ west — seventeen miles short of the entrance to Whitefish Bay.
The Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, convened at Cleveland on November 18, 1975, delivered its report on July 26, 1977 (Report No. USCG 16732/64216). The Board held that the proximate cause of the sinking could not be determined, but found the most probable to have been a loss of buoyancy through massive flooding of the cargo hold by way of hatch closures that were not effectively sealed: down by the head and listing, the ship “drove into a wall of water and never recovered”. The National Transportation Safety Board’s report, NTSB-MAR-78-3 of May 4, 1978, read the same evidence differently, fixing the probable cause as the sudden massive flooding of the hold through the collapse of one or more hatch covers, upon earlier flooding that had already eaten away her freeboard. The Lake Carriers’ Association, for the shipowners, argued instead that she had struck bottom on the Six Fathom Shoal near Caribou Island — the shoaling view that a dissenting member of the Coast Guard panel also reached. None of it has ever been proved, and the wreck, which lies in Canadian waters, has been left largely undisturbed.
The Fitzgerald remains the largest ship ever lost on the Great Lakes, and the last: no commercial vessel has been lost on Lake Superior since. A year after the sinking, Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” carried her name around the world. Her bell was raised from the wreck in 1995 and is kept at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point, where the families of the twenty-nine still gather every November 10.
U.S. Coast Guard Marine Board Report (1977) — Official PDF