Originally published Nov. 7, 2008
The weak morning light coming across Lake Superior this morning revealed a November day that looked exactly as it should. It was dark and gloomy, the gray-white sky was spitting rain and the lake’s surface rocked and rolled, but only enough to permit the day to be thought stormy. The Gales of November, if they are coming, will have to wait.
But this would have been the day, if the Gales had a sense of history. Today is the anniversary of the first day of one of the worst storms ever to hit Lake Superior and, its great cousin, Lake Huron. On Nov. 7, 1913, a fierce storm roared up that would not go quiet until Nov. 11, four long days in which perhaps hundreds of sailors died, some 20 ships sank or ran aground and millions of dollars in shipping losses were recorded.
November has famously produced stormy weather on the Great Lakes – the anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, on Nov. 10, 1975, is just days away as well, and more on that in a moment – but the storm of 1913 was one for the record books. Some call it the “Freshwater Fury,” and a report on the storm by the Lake Carriers Association later concluded, “No lake master (ship’s captain) can recall in all his experience a storm of such unprecedented violence with such rapid changes in the direction of the wind and its gusts of such fearful speed.”
During those four ferocious days ships were sunk or left battered against islands or other shores. When the storm finally abated on Nov. 11 the only job left was to count the sunken vessels, estimate the number of casualties and assess the material losses. Newspapers of that day were filled with bulletins: “The storm today was sweeping up the St. Lawrence, leaving wrecks of vessels, docks and boathouses in the lake region,” said one report, while another noted, “An unknown 600 foot steel freighter turned turtle several miles north of Port Huron and her entire crew is believed lost.”
“Persons aboard the unknown vessel which yesterday was reported on the rocks near Gull Rock lighthouse on Manitou Island, Lake Superior, pounding badly and in danger of breaking up, are believed to be doomed to death.” Several of the crew were reported to be lashed to the rigging, likely already dead.
But no one would write a famous dirge about that storm, so the sinking of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald will forever reign as the best known, and yet some say most mysterious, shipwreck tale on the Great Lakes. Named for the head of a Milwaukee insurance company, the Fitz departed from Superior, Wisconsin, on her last trip on Nov. 9 that year with a cargo of 26,116 tons of taconite pellets bound for Detroit. But the lake had other plans, and the Fitz and her escort, the Arthur Anderson, met heavy weather on Nov. 10 off Whitefish Bay, Michigan. For reasons that are still studied and debated, Capt. Ernest McSorley indicated by radio that his ship was taking on water. She had lost her radar and severe damage had occurred in what McSorley described as the worst storm he had ever seen. And the last. He and his crew of 28 all went down with the ship. The Gales of November conference of maritime scholars and fans remembers the event and reports the latest findings of ongoing research each year in Duluth.
The Fitzgerald’s 200-pound bronze bell was later recovered from the wreckage and is now on display as a memorial to the crew at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Mich. If you are like me you have to like the irony of shipwrecks being remembered in Paradise. I was there a few years ago on one of the anniversaries of the sinking, and would suggest the museum (http://www.shipwreckmuseum.com/) is well worth seeing if the lake and its notorious past are of interest.
Just good luck getting that darn song out of your head if you go.
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