Nobody Knows What Sank the 'Edmund Fitzgerald.' But Its Doomed Final Voyage Will Always Be America's Defining Shipwreck

Nobody Knows What Sank the ‘Edmund Fitzgerald.’ But Its Doomed Final Voyage Will Always Be America’s Defining Shipwreck

Fifty years after the freighter disappeared into the depths of Lake Superior, the mystery of its demise—and the mournful ballad it inspired—still haunt the popular imagination

By the day he died, Ernest McSorley had built a reputation as the captain who could weather any storm.

He was one of the best sailors on the Great Lakes, where he had been assigned to pilot the Edmund Fitzgerald, the flagship of Oglebay Norton’s Columbia Transportation Division. At 729 feet long, the American freighter was among the largest ships in the region. McSorley prided himself on his efficiency, and he always delivered his cargo on time, navigating skillfully through dangerous waters.

“We have no record of him ever turning around,” says John U. Bacon, author of The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. “He always went, which is why the company loved him, of course. He was very aggressive.”

But by late 1975, the 63-year-old captain was ready to retire. He had been sailing for more than 40 years, and now his wife, Nellie, was in poor health. After the Fitzgerald met its quota for the season, McSorley would receive a bonus for any additional cargo delivered. He hoped one final voyage would cover the cost of Nellie’s care.

On November 9, the Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin, carrying around 26,000 tons of iron ore. Its destination was Detroit, and the temperature was unseasonably warm, an early sign that something was amiss. “The longer winter takes to arrive,” says Bacon, “the angrier it shows up.”

Angry winter weather was already on its way. At 7 p.m., the National Weather Service issued a gale warning for Lake Superior, predicting waves up to ten feet tall. McSorley had two options: He could sail straight across the lake to Whitefish Bay, a familiar 30-hour journey, or take the so-called northern route, a 44-hour passage that hugged the Canadian shore, which would protect the vessel right up until the final stretch of the voyage.

McSorley had initially resolved to sail the shorter passage. But as conditions deteriorated, he changed his mind. The captain known for his boldness and efficiency made an uncharacteristically cautious decision, opting for the longer northern route.

Around 3 p.m. on November 10, Captain Bernie Cooper of the Arthur M. Anderson, a freighter traveling nearby, noticed something alarming on his radar screen. “Look at this,” he said to his first mate. “That’s the Fitzgerald.” The vessel appeared to be nearing Six Fathom Shoal, a dangerously shallow reef near Lake Superior’s Caribou Island. Minutes later, the Fitzgerald radioed the Anderson reporting trouble: “I have sustained some topside damage,” McSorley said. “I have a fence rail laid down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list. I’m checking down. Will you stay by me ’til I get to Whitefish?” Soon after, McSorley learned that both of the Fitzgerald’s radars had stopped functioning, and the lighthouse at Whitefish Point had gone dark.

Despite his decades of experience, McSorley reported over the radio that he was witnessing “one of the worst seas I’ve ever been in.” Just after 7 p.m., the Anderson checked in again and asked how the Fitzgerald was faring. “We are holding our own,” the captain said.

After that final transmission, the Fitzgerald stopped answering calls from the Anderson and disappeared from the radar. Without ever sending out a distress signal, the ship went down about 17 miles (15 nautical miles) from safety, taking all 29 crew members with it.

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Fifty years after the Fitzgerald slipped beneath the surface of Lake Superior, the tragedy has become deeply embedded in the popular imagination. While its death toll is eclipsed by those of calamities like the Titanic and the Lusitania, and its journey lacks the grand adventure arc associated with expeditions like John Franklin’s failed quest to discover the Northwest Passage, the doomed freighter easily ranks among history’s most famous shipwrecks. Known as the “Titanic of the Great Lakes,” the vessel is a reminder of maritime disasters’ enduring power to captivate, regardless of their scale.

But why are shipwrecks so uniquely compelling? What motivates someone, for instance, to pay more than $1 million to purchase the violin that played as the Titanic went down?

“There is just an inherent, fundamental fascination with human beings and a ship, fighting the elements for their lives,” says Bacon. “This goes back to Noah’s ark.” Shipwrecks have long breathed life into celebrated literature and poetry—not to mention Titanic, one of the highest-grossing movies of all time. Media about other disasters like plane crashes (think Sully and “The Rehearsal”) occasionally breaks through, but the most successful examples (such as Cast Away, Lord of the Flies and “Lost”) typically focus on stranded passengers fighting for survival after a crash, not the incident itself.

While air disasters hinge on the split-second decisions of highly trained pilots, perhaps shipwreck stories resonate because anyone can picture themselves as central characters. These tales pull from a menu of familiar narrative beats, such as passengers sacrificing themselves to help women and children into lifeboats, says Bruce Lynn, executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan. “It’s the romance of the story,” he explains. “What would I have done? Would I have survived?”

For mariners and their families living on the Great Lakes in the 19th and 20th centuries, these scenarios were even easier to imagine. The lucrative shipping industry has long been central to the economy of the Upper Midwest, but that prosperity came with a cost. The five lakes stretch across 94,250 square miles—about the size of the United Kingdom—making them the largest body of fresh water in the world by surface area. Between October and December, when cold air masses from the north collide with warm air masses from the south, the lakes can erupt with hurricane-force winds and waves as tall as buildings.

“There’s a character to the lakes that’s not predictable,” says Lynn. “It is so amazing sometimes how it can go from glassy smooth, like a mill pond, just amazingly calm one minute—and not too long after that, it can suddenly be this roaring, amazingly strong winds, six-, eight-, ten-foot waves crashing into the shore. And it doesn’t seem to always take a lot of time for that change to take place.”

Nobody knows exactly how many shipwrecks lie beneath the lakes’ waters. Bacon estimates that between 1875 and 1975, a total of 6,000 commercial wrecks killed roughly 30,000 mariners—which amounts to about one death per day for 100 years. Of those 6,000 shipwrecks, the Fitzgerald is the most notorious. It’s also the last.

Since 1975, there haven’t been any major industrial wrecks on the Great Lakes. What changed? Advances in weather forecasting and communication technologies have certainly done their part to keep ships afloat. But so have evolving norms in commercial shipping. The Fitzgerald’s downfall sent “shock waves through the whole industry,” says Bacon. “It was so cataclysmic that they finally woke up.” Bacon was at Lake Superior last November, and when the weather turned angry, “every single ship was anchored in Whitefish Bay,” he says. “And 50 years ago, trust me, none of them would’ve been.”

The Fitzgerald’s allure also comes from the enduring mystery. While numerous theories have attempted to explain the vessel’s rapid demise, the cause of the wreck has baffled experts for half a century. We may never know what happened in its final moments.

And then, of course, there’s the song.

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Nine months after the disaster, Gordon Lightfoot released “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” The ballad became one of the Canadian singer-songwriter’s career-defining hits, topping the charts in both the United States and Canada. If shipwrecks captivate because of their human dramas, Lightfoot captured the narrative stakes with poetic precision. He also gave voice to its characters, even writing in imagined dialogue between the crewmen. “It has the ring of authenticity,” says Nicholas Jennings, a journalist who published an acclaimed biography of Lightfoot in 2017. “You hear in Lightfoot’s voice that he’s mourning the loss of these young men.”

On the night the Fitzgerald sank, Lightfoot, a recreational sailor himself, was working on music at his home in Toronto. He was struck by the storm’s power. “He actually told me that he thought, ‘Wow, I wonder what it’s like out on Lake Superior or Lake Huron,’” says Jennings. “And then he heard about the sinking of this ship, and it captured his imagination—just how horrific that must have been.”

Gordon Lightfoot - Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald (Official Audio)

Lightfoot followed the news coverage in the wake of the disaster and was particularly moved by an article he read in Newsweek. It began with the words: “According to a legend of the Chippewa tribe, the lake they once called Gitche Gumee ‘never gives up her dead.’” Lightfoot adapted these lines into his opening verse:

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee

The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead

When the skies of November turn gloomy

Newsweek went on to describe how the vessel went down just “15 miles from the relative calm of Whitefish Bay,” a figure that Lightfoot adapted into the line “The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay / If they’d put 15 more miles behind her.” The article ended with a scene at the Mariners’ Church of Detroit, where a minister “tolled the church bell 29 times in grim tribute to the unslaked furies of Lake Superior”—details Lightfoot incorporated into his final verse:

In a musty old hall in Detroit, they prayed

In the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral

The church bell chimed ’til it rang 29 times

For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald

“Lightfoot was always meticulous about researching his subject matter,” says Jennings. He was also obsessed with historical accuracy, which is why details from news coverage, rewritten in a lyrical format, became so central to his final composition. He decided to pair his lyrics with a melody he had already started working on, finishing the song in just a few weeks.

“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” was a huge success, despite having none of the ingredients of a typical hit. Clocking in at more than six minutes long, “it doesn’t have a chorus, and yet I think what makes it work is that it has a very hypnotic quality,” says Jennings. “The drone and the rhythm—the push and pull of the song’s rhythm—it really does give a whole feel of being out on the water and of the surging waves and the wind.”

The victims’ families also embraced the song. When they sent Lightfoot letters, he “would painstakingly write back to each and every one,” says Jennings. “It was a very intimate kind of relationship he developed with that whole community.” The singer took his role as the documentarian of their pain seriously, meeting with them backstage at his concerts and mourning with them at memorial events.

When Jennings visited Lightfoot’s home for the first time, he noticed that the living room walls were decorated with Fitzgerald-related mementos—paintings, photographs, a sculpture—that he had acquired as thank-you gifts, which he displayed prominently in his home for the rest of his life. “I realized, well, that’s just what has come back to him because of what he’s given,” says Jennings. “Nothing has done more to keep the memory of the shipwreck and its victims alive than that song.”

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While Lightfoot’s lyrics were based on meticulous research, the fourth verse ventures into contested territory: the mystery of why the ship went down.

When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin’

“Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya”

At 7 p.m., a main hatchway caved in, he said

“Fellas, it’s been good to know ya”

The Fitzgerald was built with 21 openings known as hatches, which crew members used to load and unload cargo. Each of these openings was covered by a heavy steel hatch cover, which deckhands secured in place using 68 clamps, meaning a total of 1,428 clamps needed to be secured during each voyage. Three years after the wreck, the Coast Guard published a report suggesting the vessel most likely sank due to flooding caused by “ineffective hatch closure”—the same theory that Lightfoot based his lyrics on.

However, the report included important caveats. Without witnesses or survivors, “the actual, final sequence of events culminating in the sinking of the Fitzgerald cannot be determined,” it cautioned. “Whatever the sequence, however, it is evident that the end was so rapid and catastrophic that there was no time to warn the crew, to attempt to launch lifeboats or life rafts, to don life jackets, or even to make a distress call.”

Investigators reached their conclusions using the limited evidence available to them. In May 1976, the Navy had used an unmanned submersible to capture images of the wreckage, which rests some 500 feet below the surface of Lake Superior. These photos showed the stern of the ship—the words Edmund Fitzgerald still visible—upside down on the lake bed. The bow was positioned right side up 170 feet away, while the middle of the vessel was missing. The images also showed that only a few of the clamps appeared to be damaged. Authorities reasoned that if the hatches had been properly secured, the clamps would have sustained more damage during the trauma of the disaster.

The “ineffective hatch closure” theory has been controversial ever since the report’s publication. “That is not only almost certainly inaccurate, it’s also unfair to the deckhands,” says Bacon, who interviewed two men who had worked aboard the Fitzgerald before its final voyage. These men knew the first mate, John McCarthy, who died in the wreck, and they insisted that he would never have allowed the ship to sail in November without all of the clamps secured.

The Coast Guard’s conclusion also bothered some of the victims’ families, including Ruth Hudson, whose only son, Bruce Lee Hudson, had died in the disaster. When the ship went down, 22-year-old Bruce was one of the Fitzgerald’s three deckhands—the men responsible for securing the hatch covers.

Since the 1970s, many competing theories have emerged to explain why the ship sank. About 15 years ago, for instance, a documentary television program reasoned that a rogue wave, rather than improperly secured hatch covers, was responsible for the wreck. Lightfoot watched the program and found its argument convincing.

“There’s no hatch cover trouble involved, so a couple of guys are off the hook there,” he told the Connect Savannah newspaper in 2010. Eager to correct the record, he explained that he would change the lyric in his song “the very next time I sing it,” and he hoped Ruth, who had worried “all her life” about the hatch covers, would be able to hear the amended version. True to his word, in every live performance thereafter, he removed the line about the hatchway caving in:

At 7 p.m. it grew dark, it was then he said

“Fellas, it’s been good to know ya”

In recent years, researchers have provided new insights into the weather that night. Computer models have suggested that the Fitzgerald was caught in the storm’s worst conditions, while other ships managed to avoid them, and experts have calculated that the vessel might have faced two or three 50-foot waves and potentially even one or two 60-foot waves.

While the new information has helped fill in the gaps, experts maintain that we may never fully understand what happened that day. “The bottom line is—and we tell [this to] people that visit the museum every day—we don’t know,” says Lynn. “We do not know why this ship sank.”

Gales of November: Diving the Edmund Fitzgerald | Documentary

Bacon says it’s possible that several cascading disasters doomed the Fitzgerald, though he’s especially intrigued by the theory that it bottomed out over Six Fathom Shoal. Not long after the disaster, Oglebay Norton hired diver Dick Race to investigate the area. Bacon wasn’t able to locate the report, but he interviewed three of Race’s friends, who said that he’d found the Fitzgerald’s red paint on the seabed at Six Fathom Shoal. Without the report, Bacon says it’s impossible to draw any conclusions, but the Six Fathom Shoal theory “would explain water coming in to create a list.”

Bacon also thinks McSorley’s decision to take the longer northern route could have worsened the ship’s odds. He describes the captain’s caution as a “pay me now, pay me later” calculation: The longer route provided more shelter through much of the trip, but it allowed the storm more time to catch up and gather strength. It also meant that rough waves would have been hitting the vessel from the side during the final stretch of the journey, when the ship was unprotected from the elements.

“I swear to God,” says Bacon, “I think if he went straight across—he would’ve gotten there 14 hours earlier before the worst of the storm, you’re not going over Six Fathom Shoal, and you’re not getting hit broadside—I think they make it.”

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In the first and final verses of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” Lightfoot sings that Lake Superior “never gives up her dead.” This lyric is perhaps the song’s bleakest. It’s also rooted in fact.

Normally, a body submerged in water will eventually float to the surface once the bacteria inside the torso produces enough gas to increase its buoyancy. But Lake Superior is so cold that bacteria often doesn’t grow in the first place, leaving the bodies motionless beneath the waves. The 29 men who died in the Fitzgerald are likely all still inside the wreckage.

Initial investigations didn’t capture any images of the victims at the bottom of the lake. But in 1994, businessman Fred Shannon organized seven dives to the site, and his video footage included an image of a crewman who appeared to be wearing a life jacket. The families of the victims protested, eventually convincing the Canadian government to protect the area as a gravesite.

But the families did advocate for one last dive to the wreck, which was arranged by several organizations, including the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, the National Geographic Society and the Canadian Navy. In 1995, this joint expedition retrieved the ship’s 200-pound bronze bell and replaced it with a replica engraved with the names of the victims. After a careful restoration, the original bell went on display at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. Every year on November 10, the victims’ families come together to ring the bell for each of their loved ones, and again for all of the sailors lost on the Great Lakes over the centuries.

Several other organizations also host annual memorials. The beacon at Split Rock Lighthouse in Lake County, Minnesota, is lit every year in remembrance of the tragedy. Lightfoot’s song describes a scene at the Mariners’ Church of Detroit, where the “bell chimed ’til it rang 29 times” following the disaster; that ritual has continued annually in honor of all victims who perished on the lakes. When Lightfoot died in 2023, the church rang its bell a 30th time in his honor.

Over the years, Lightfoot had attended some of these memorials, including the 40th anniversary events in 2015. When he arrived, he asked after Ruth, then 90, who had sent her niece in her stead. Her health was rapidly deteriorating, and she had declared her intention to die just before the November 10 anniversary so she could spend it with her son. When Lightfoot learned of Ruth’s condition, he called her. “Aunt Ruth on her deathbed on November 9, 2015, is talking to Gordon Lightfoot on the phone,” says Bacon. “That’s how close they were.”

This year, an extensive itinerary has been planned to mark the 50th anniversary, including commemorative events organized by the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, the Mariners’ Church, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Detroit Historical Society, the University of Detroit Mercy School of Law and Toledo’s National Museum of the Great Lakes. Over the summer, 68 participants swam the final 411 miles of the Fitzgerald’s journey, which was supposed to continue through Lake Huron and end in Detroit.

Many of the upcoming events are already sold out, and some are anticipating turnouts in the thousands. But while the devoted families will be among those in the crowds, many of the spectators will have no connection to the Fitzgerald. What draws them to a maritime tragedy that happened half a century ago?

“It’s not always something we can explain,” says Lynn, “but certainly people feel like they have a connection to it.”

As one of Lynn’s colleagues has theorized, “everybody’s lost a loved one—not quite in the same public way that these families did, who lost a loved one on the Fitzgerald when it sank—but everybody’s had that loss.” Perhaps some unknown share of the people who gather each year to memorialize the wreck are carrying their own personal griefs—private losses with no annual commemorative ritual. And so they come to the shores of Lake Superior to hear church bells chime for loved ones lost in an impenetrable expanse of cold, unforgiving darkness.