The gales of November are upon us. On this day, 50 years ago, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior during a storm. All 29 crew members drowned.
The sinking of the Fitzgerald remains one of the most mysterious shipwrecks of the Great Lakes — with a handful of competing theories about what went wrong. Decades later, Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” continues to garner public interest in the ship wreck not just in the Midwest, but worldwide.
What happened to the Fitzgerald?
The Fitzerald set sail from Superior, Wisconsin, on Nov. 9, 1975, joining an additional freighter, SS Arthur M. Anderson. The two vessels were en route to a still mill near Detroit, Michigan, each carrying a full load of iron ore pallets. That's when a storm hit, with 100-mile winds, 60-foot-high waves and low visibility from heavy snowfall.
"With the weather worsening, they decided to use the buddy system," says Kay Dragan, curator and exhibits manager at the Door County Maritime Museum. "And so the Anderson kept eyes on the Fitzgerald, and the Fitzgerald tried to keep eyes on the Anderson. There are several recordings of their conversations."
At around 7:10 p.m., the Fitzgerald went down about 17 miles from Whitefish Bay — not far from the twin cities of Sualt Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault. Ste. Marie, Ontario.
Seventeen years earlier, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was commissioned by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company and named after the chairman of the board. When it first launched in 1958, it was the largest vessel to ever set sail on the Great Lakes. The ship's dimensions were just shy of the maximum size requirements for passing through the Great Lakes' locks and channels. Dragan says misfortune plagued the Fitzgerald from the time of its launch.
"It apparently took Mrs. Fitzgerald three tries to break the champagne bottle across the bow," she says. "It hit the water wrong and caused a massive wave — and in that startling [moment], a gentleman had a heart attack and died at the launching."
As for what really went wrong that night, there are a few competing theories. A 1977 U.S. Coast Guard report points to faulty hatch covers that allowed the Fitzgerald to take on water and lose buoyancy as waves crashed across the deck. Dragan believes another common theory: "the shoaling hypothesis," which holds that the Fitzgerald suffered structural damage when it allegedly hit bottom near Six Fathom Shoal, a shallow point near Ontario's Caribou Island.
"It's 36 feet deep at its shallowest ... and the Fitzgerald, when fully loaded, is almost 30 feet underwater," she says. "So any sort of large wave — which, they had [at least] 30 foot waves that night — could have caused it to bounce off the bottom."
The tragedy has led to stronger maritime safety regulations, Dragan says, including life jacket requirements and a lower "freeboard." That's how much of a ship must remain above water when fully loaded with cargo.
"Of course, those changes always happen after tragedies," she says. "Never before."
Remembering a tragedy
Today, the Door County Maritime Museum is remembering the Fitzgerald with the special exhibit, "We are holding our own." The title refers to the final radio dispatch that Fitzgerald Captain Ernest McSorley gave to the captain of the Anderson.
The exhibit honors the lives of Oliver "Buck" Champeau Jr. and Russel G. Haskell, two Fitzgerald crew members from Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. Haskell and Champeau went to high school together, before serving in the military and later on the Fitzgerald — as second and third assistant engineers, respectively. Both are remembered fondly by their families. Haskell left behind a daughter, Deb, who was 17 at the time.
"Hearing her talk about her father even 50 years later is both heartwarming and heartbreaking because she very obviously loved her dad," Dragan says. "And she still remembers him as this kind, funny, generous man."
The exhibit runs through the end of 2025, and includes various artifacts from the Fitzgerald, along with one of the searchlights from the deck of the Anderson.
"Imagining that someone's trying to see through an entire snowstorm 9 miles ahead to spot another vessel that's over 700 feet long with just this one light is a bit spooky, Dragan says. "Kind of puts into perspective what they could have seen or what they didn't see."
The story of the Edmund Fitzgerald continues to haunt and intrigue to this day, aided by the enduring popularity and recent TikTok resurgence of Gordon Lightfoot's song about the tragedy.
"Everyone loves a good mystery," Dragan says. "So yes, 29 people died, and yes, it is very, very unfortunate that happened — but there has been more attention on shipping and folk music because of it."
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