August 26, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, on November 10, 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald vanished beneath the stormy waters of Lake Superior, taking all 29 crew members with her. The tragedy became one of the most famous Great Lakes shipwrecks, inspiring Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Historian Ric Mixter — a shipwreck diver and documentarian who has actually seen the wreck on the lake bottom — shares the story of the freighter’s final hours and why the Edmund Fitzgerald remains the most legendary shipwreck in American maritime history.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American Stories, and our next story comes
to us courtesy of Rick Mixter, a shipwreck researcher and
diver who's explored over one hundred and thirty shipwrecks, one
of which is the subject of this story on the
most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes. Here's our own
Montae Montgomery with a story.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
When we think of the word lake, we often think
of a calm, placid and small body of water. But
the Great Lakes are anything but that.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
People underestimate them, you know it literally, they think they're ponds,
they think that they're you know, they're much smaller than
the ocean. And the truth is that the Great Lakes
span over one thousand miles. You know, Lake Superior is immense,
and unfortunately it has these jagged shoals that, unlike the ocean,
it's confined. So these shoals bounce waves back and forth.
(01:07):
And these confused waves on the Great Lakes tend to
really mess with ships and make it very difficult to
navigate in a storm.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And the results of these confused seas have often been deadly.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
There's a huge argument on how many shipwrecks are on
the Great Lakes because it's really hard to judge. Most
of the time we would put it to insurance settlements.
Let's look at Lloyd's of London or other places that
paid out, but we don't know if they were recovered.
If you sat on the bottom, most people would probably
throw out a number between six thousand and ten thousand
(01:40):
shipwrecks that are still on the bottom.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
But out of all these shipwrecks, there's one that has
been etched into the collective consciousness of the people of
the Great Lakes, the Edmond Fitzgerald. And there's a reason
for that.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Fitzgerald is famous for two words. Gordon Lightfoot. It's literally
a wreck that I think would have been forgotten if
not for a Canadian songwriter who took the story and
turned it into a seven and a half minute song
that went to number two on the charts. And once
that happened, it became enamored not only by the people
(02:17):
of the Great Lakes, it became their song. Played every November.
Every time you turn on the radio, somebody plays it
at that time because of the gales of November, and
to remember the crew. Nobody argues that it's not Gordon Lightfoot.
It is the largest shipwreck on the Great Lakes by
a couple hundred feet. The Fitzgerald was seven hundred and
twenty nine feet long and lost with all hands, which
(02:41):
was part of the mystery. I think that captivated even
Gordon Lightfoot, and that's why it kind of became a story.
How in nineteen seventy five could you have a seven
hundred foot freighter with twenty nine men completely vanished. Fitzgerald
was one of the last of the ships built in Michigan,
(03:01):
which we used to have an amazing shipbuilding prowess. We
were number one on the Great Lakes for years. Just
a massive ship. I mean, it was the flagship for
Columbia Transportation. So when it was launched, not only was
she the biggest, but she was well appointed. She had
the best skipper according to Columbia, the best cook. Because
they would entertain many of the steel companies like National Steels,
(03:24):
President or you know, Big Weeks would come on board,
bring their family along, and you know it would have
inside jail. Hudson Company, the famous Hudson Store had all
of the appointments inside, so your beds, all of the
furniture which had to be custom cut to fit the
canter of the floor of the Fitzgerald, which was, you know,
slightly rounded, They had to cut the legs of the
(03:45):
beds to fit correctly. So it was the flagship. It
was the ship that everybody wanted to be assigned to,
and it was certainly the ship that gave out many
rides to people. It was also fast. They called it
the Toledo Express because it made that run so quickly.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And for the next seventeen years, the Edmond Fitzgerald would
continue to make that trip from Superior, Wisconsin to Detroit
laden with iron ore, and there was no reason to
expect that on November ninth, nineteen seventy five, her trip
under the command of Captain Ernest McSorley, would go any differently.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
It was a Sunday, and it was in Superior, Wisconsin
on a beautiful day, and Jack McCarthy, the first may
would be in charge of telling the guys, you know,
the loading, make sure that the ship was loaded evenly,
in which they would go underneath a gravity fed doc
and it would actually spill these round taconite pellets into
the cargo hold, which they took twenty six thousand tons.
(04:41):
This is where Gordon Lightfoot was wrong. On a couple
of accounts. In his song, he said fully loaded for Cleveland,
but it wasn't fully loaded. It was less than two
thirds loaded because she was actually going to River Rouge
near the area to the Zug Island, and in order
to get into that slip, she couldn't carry all of
her cargo because she would hit bottom in the Detroit River.
(05:03):
So not fully loaded, not going to Cleveland, actually going
into the Detroit area with a load of iron ore
that would eventually become automobiles. And they take off into
a beautiful day, and as they do, McSorley in the
pilot house actually sees that a big storm is coming up.
He's got a radio that he can get reports through,
and he's a weather ship, so he takes his observations
(05:25):
and adds them to the weather reports to help forecasters
try to develop where the storm's going to go. And
it's quickly ascertained that he's going to get a storm
that's going to come right through from Oklahoma all the
way up to Marquette, and so he starts to calculate
how long that would take and uses the forecast that
he's getting given as well and has to determine what
he's going to do.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
But mcsorly was a well seasoned captain and the coming
storm likely didn't phase him too much, despite some of
the reservations he may have had on the ship.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Mcsorly had been a skipper that had been on the
Great Lakes for years and years and worked his way
up to the Edmond Fitzgerald. He was very stern from
the people that I talked to, very matter of fact guy.
As we talked to a third mate in my documentary
called the Fitzgerald Investigations, he remembered going through a Lake
(06:16):
Superior storm with just ten foot waves, where the Fitzgerald
would flex so crazily, unlike any ship he had been on.
And he looked at McSorley and he said, man, it
should it be bending like this? And McSorley said, sometimes
it scares me so literally. He knew that this ship
was different than other ships. He knew that it would
(06:38):
flex in these storms. But because as a part time
job he did hull inspection, he was very well versed
in the strength of these ships, and he unfortunately pushed
the Fitzgerald way beyond its means. As I did the
investigation documentary, I found the Coastguard looked into it. They
looked at ten years at the Sioux Locks, the worst
(06:58):
storms that ever happened up until nineteen seventy five, and
the one ship that kept pushing every storm and made
it through the locks during those gales was the Edmund Fitzgerald.
So he was a rough weather skipper. He pushed the
heck out of the ship and it eventually broke because
of it.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
So the Fitzgerald pushed forward and soon they would get
company to ride out the storm with in the form
of the Arthur m Anderson, another Laker captain by Bernie Cooper.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And Cooper also is a You know, these guys are
experienced meteorologists. They have to be. Their lives depend on it,
and they start to figure out when the storm will
come and what they're going to do. As they pass
Isle Royal, they've got a place that they can hide
there from these northwest winds that are starting to build.
They continue going, but they take the northern route. The
northern route goes closer to Canada. Jokingly, some of the
(07:52):
sailors call that the scenic route, because otherwise you might
not ever see land as you go around the Keeweaw
would be the last spot as you make that long
haul past Marquette and make your way to the Sioux
Locks and of Whitefish Bay. But as they're going up,
they go all the way past Otterhead in a second
spot that they could throw out their anchor. Because it's
(08:12):
so close to the Canadian shore, the waves can't build there,
so you're pretty safe. You could wait it out, But
they didn't. They decided they were going to make it
for Whitefish Bay. They thought that the storm would take
an extra hour to get to them, and they were wrong.
As they got past Caribou, it was the worst the
storm could be, and they were in the absolute worst
(08:33):
place they should be, on Lake Superior, where those winds
now could build the entire length of the lake and
crash into the ship and crash into them in the
stern and on their starboard side. So if they had
any problems at all, they were going to get into
real trouble there. And that's what happened to Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
And you're listening to Rick Mixter tell the story of
the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. As he put it,
how in nineteen seventy five, could you have a seven
hundred and twenty nine foot freighter with twenty nine men
completely vanished.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
The answer to that question, you'll hear.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
It after these messages here on our American story, and
(09:39):
we continue with our American stories and our story of
the Edmund Fitzgerald. When we last left off, Captain McSorley
and his crew were battling the brutal storm on Lake
Superior alongside another ship, the Arthur M Anderson. Here's Rick
Mixter with the rest of the story.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
As the fits is going past Caribou, it realizes it
it has some kind of problem. They look down the
deck and they could see that at least one of
their vents was missing. These looked like mushrooms that are
on the deck, and they're very large and they're used
to equalize the pressure below decks. But of course fitz
has two thirds of a cargo in there well, as
he noticed that one of those is missing. He also
(10:18):
finds out from his engineers that he's taking on water,
so they're running their pumps to try to keep that
water out. He also mentioned something really unique. He says,
our fence rail is down, and that has been interpreted
in a couple of different ways. The fence rail could
be the guide rails that are on the side of
the ship that perhaps some piece of debris came on
(10:39):
smashed its vent off and also damaged that part of
the rail. So he's radioing back and forth to the
Anderson that he's got these problems, and then all of
a sudden mentions his radars are out, and he was
worried because the mixerly had noticed that out of Whitefish
Bay there were several salt water ships and including a
big freighter called the William clay Ford and another one
(11:01):
that we're trying to get out of Whitefish Bay, and
he worried he'd get into a collision situation and the
blinding snow that was happening, so he asked the Anderson
to keep an eye out for them because his radars
were out, so he's going blindly into this storm. The
Anderson is now trying to close the distance because the Fitzgerald,
being a faster boat, was a or several miles ahead
(11:25):
of them. The last broadcast came from Morgan Clark, the
first mate on board the Anderson, who asked the Fitzgerald,
how are you making out with your problems? And the
Fitzgerald McSorley answered back, we are holding our own, and unfortunately,
in a blinding snow squall, the Fitzgerald disappears. It disappears
(11:46):
from radar because the blinding snow also blinded the radar out.
When it finally clears, Anderson can't see the Fitzgerald, and
now their job is trying to notify the Coastguard that
a seven and twenty nine foot freighter is miss scene.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
The last time that you talked about at what time
I want to work, I had and I was making
out with the problem, and that he loved those vans,
and he had a left and he said he was
holding his own the last time I stopped with him,
that he was holding his own and got the last
time I loved contact.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
After that good Nobody wanted to believe that the Fitzgerald
was gone, especially the coast Guard as and we're very
lucky that immediately the coast Guard started recording all of
these conversations, so we actually have the conversations as the
cooper is trying to tell the coast Guard that they
have missed the Fitzgerald. So here the Anderson is now
(12:42):
making the safety of Whitefish Bay. After now twenty nine
guys have been lost. A massive steel modern freighter has
been lost to the storm, and they call the coastguard,
who tells them, we don't have a ship that can
go out there. So the coast guard has to convince
the captain of the Anderson that just went this freighter
sinking to turn around, come out of the safety of
(13:03):
Whitefish Bay and go back into that killer storm. And
he definitely did not want to do that. Right from
the radio broadcast, we hear Cooper say, you know, there's
going to be two of us on the bottom. You know,
he really believed going back out there was going to be,
you know, a bad mistake, but he knew he was
the only choice, so they went back out there. You know,
(13:24):
at that time it was sixty mile an hour wins.
It was going to take him two hours to go
seventeen miles with those intense winds that blowing right against them,
and I don't think they believed that anybody would survive it.
You know, with big thirty foot waves and water temperatures
that were just above freezing, there really wasn't much chance.
And unfortunately it was a futile attempt. But I think
(13:48):
that that was the spirit of the lakes. You do
what you can first safe make sure your crew is
going to survive it, and then you know, if you
can safely do it, you go out there and make
the rescue. And he did the truest tradition of sailors,
you know, try to find those guys. But unfortunately, you know,
as we know, nobody survived and no bodies were found.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Then came the task of actually finding the final resting
place of the Fitzgerald on the bottom of Lake Superior.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
It didn't take them very long, so they used this
robot called the Curve three to not only find it,
but to secure it. The Curve three came out and
they flew that down to five hundred and fifty feet
and as they saw the bow, they noticed it was upright.
But as they went around the stern section, which was
broken over one hundred feet away, they noticed that the
(14:40):
lettering was upside down. And the Coastguard investigators immediately thought
the rov or the robot was inverted, and the pilot said, no,
it's not. This is the back section two hundred feet
of the Edmund Fitzgerald that was upside down. So the
horrible act of it tearing apart somewhere in the the
(15:00):
water column actually flipped the entire stern upside down, and
the bow section is resting proudly upright on the bottom
where you can actually see every deck in the pilot
house as well.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
And there the Fitzgerald sat a gravesite for her twenty
nine crew, none of which were ever recovered. Immediately, there
were questions on why this modern lake freighter sank, and
these questions still brew today.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Did she hit.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Bottom, did she get hit by a rogue wave, or
did her hatch covers cave in. Answers were hard to find,
as the wreck site was soon protected by the Canadian
government at the request of the families of the victims,
so very few people have actually seen the wreck. But
in nineteen ninety four Rick did.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
In ninety four, we took the submersible Delta, which had
been famous for diving the Lusitania, and we went down
in this two man yellow submarine, and I was the
third dive on the Delta expedition. When you dive a shipwreck,
you get down to it. If you're free diving it,
or you're doing it on scuba equipment where you don't
have a submarine around you. You can actually go up
(16:10):
to it and touch it, you know. The cold steel
and the immense size of these vessels is what really
becomes apparent to you. The Fitzgerald was surreal in the
fact that I was down five hundred feet. The lights
stopped at about two hundred and fifty, so it's pitch
black beyond, you know, whatever you have on board your submarine,
which we had lots of lights, so it becomes very surreal.
(16:34):
As you look through the porthole, you can see glimpses
of the ship, but not the whole ship at the
same time. So as we went past the name, the
letters are over a foot and a half tall. I'm
trying to remember exactly how big they were, but that's
what first captured my mind was it said Edmund Fitzgerald,
and it was horribly torn up on the port side.
(16:56):
So the collision with the bottom had just ripped apart
spar deck from the side of the ship, and the
name had been scratched up and beat up so badly
that it took my breath away. And as we went
around the bow and to see the bow was actually
bent almost ninety degrees. The force of the storm was
just incredible and then the tiny details, as you'd see
(17:20):
a blanket hanging out of the pilot house, or you
go up to the top and you'd see the radars
that were you know, Panasonic on top it's a plastic
like just a little sliver of plastic ripped off and
the wires were just there. So you start to piece
together the story from that. Each one of those pieces
not only awed me, but you know, you were just
(17:41):
so excited to see this great shipwreck. And then when
I came up, we actually had a power left in
the submarine, and so it was decided that the owner
of the tugboat who we were renting from, would actually
get to take his son down there for a look.
And we're eating lunch and we got a a report
from the submarine through the sono phone the sound waves
(18:03):
from the it's like a radio that goes through water,
and we found out that they found a missing crewman.
So we went from this incredible high of me just
visiting the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, the
largest shipwreck on the Great Lakes at five hundred and
fifty feet, down to a horrible low of oh my god,
there are twenty nine people that were lost there you
(18:25):
lose that connection, I think, because you're in the sub
and you're safe when you're diving. It's really apparent that
these shipwrecks are you know, this is a final grave,
because you have this water around you and you've got
to be so careful when you're scuba diving to do that.
I never lost that connection, but I think I did
on the Fitzgerald because I felt so protected in the submarine.
(18:48):
But that immediately was erased when they found a first
missing crewman, a body lying off of the bow of
the shipwreck wearing a life jacket. There's nothing more sobering
than that, and instantly we were transported back to this
is a grave site.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
The day after the wreck, the Mariner's Church in Detroit
rang its bell twenty nine times for each of the
crewmen lost, and this ceremony continues in Michigan today of
the ship's actual bell, raised in nineteen ninety five and
kept at Whitefish Point. But for the families of those
lost on November tenth, nineteen seventy five, the Edmund Fitzgerald
(19:40):
is more than just a song. It's a tragedy that
will always be remembered for our American stories I'm Monty Montgomery.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And great job is always to Monty Montgomery. A terrific
job producing that piece and re special thanks to Rick Mixter, who,
as you can tell, doing what he does is more
than a vocation. It's his life. The story of the
Edmund Fitzgerald Here on our American Stories
This is our American Stories, and our next story comes
to us courtesy of Rick Mixter, a shipwreck researcher and
diver who's explored over one hundred and thirty shipwrecks, one
of which is the subject of this story on the
most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes. Here's our own
Montae Montgomery with a story.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
When we think of the word lake, we often think
of a calm, placid and small body of water. But
the Great Lakes are anything but that.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
People underestimate them, you know it literally, they think they're ponds,
they think that they're you know, they're much smaller than
the ocean. And the truth is that the Great Lakes
span over one thousand miles. You know, Lake Superior is immense,
and unfortunately it has these jagged shoals that, unlike the ocean,
it's confined. So these shoals bounce waves back and forth.
(01:07):
And these confused waves on the Great Lakes tend to
really mess with ships and make it very difficult to
navigate in a storm.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And the results of these confused seas have often been deadly.
Speaker 3 (01:20):
There's a huge argument on how many shipwrecks are on
the Great Lakes because it's really hard to judge. Most
of the time we would put it to insurance settlements.
Let's look at Lloyd's of London or other places that
paid out, but we don't know if they were recovered.
If you sat on the bottom, most people would probably
throw out a number between six thousand and ten thousand
(01:40):
shipwrecks that are still on the bottom.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
But out of all these shipwrecks, there's one that has
been etched into the collective consciousness of the people of
the Great Lakes, the Edmond Fitzgerald. And there's a reason
for that.
Speaker 3 (01:54):
Fitzgerald is famous for two words. Gordon Lightfoot. It's literally
a wreck that I think would have been forgotten if
not for a Canadian songwriter who took the story and
turned it into a seven and a half minute song
that went to number two on the charts. And once
that happened, it became enamored not only by the people
(02:17):
of the Great Lakes, it became their song. Played every November.
Every time you turn on the radio, somebody plays it
at that time because of the gales of November, and
to remember the crew. Nobody argues that it's not Gordon Lightfoot.
It is the largest shipwreck on the Great Lakes by
a couple hundred feet. The Fitzgerald was seven hundred and
twenty nine feet long and lost with all hands, which
(02:41):
was part of the mystery. I think that captivated even
Gordon Lightfoot, and that's why it kind of became a story.
How in nineteen seventy five could you have a seven
hundred foot freighter with twenty nine men completely vanished. Fitzgerald
was one of the last of the ships built in Michigan,
(03:01):
which we used to have an amazing shipbuilding prowess. We
were number one on the Great Lakes for years. Just
a massive ship. I mean, it was the flagship for
Columbia Transportation. So when it was launched, not only was
she the biggest, but she was well appointed. She had
the best skipper according to Columbia, the best cook. Because
they would entertain many of the steel companies like National Steels,
(03:24):
President or you know, Big Weeks would come on board,
bring their family along, and you know it would have
inside jail. Hudson Company, the famous Hudson Store had all
of the appointments inside, so your beds, all of the
furniture which had to be custom cut to fit the
canter of the floor of the Fitzgerald, which was, you know,
slightly rounded, They had to cut the legs of the
(03:45):
beds to fit correctly. So it was the flagship. It
was the ship that everybody wanted to be assigned to,
and it was certainly the ship that gave out many
rides to people. It was also fast. They called it
the Toledo Express because it made that run so quickly.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
And for the next seventeen years, the Edmond Fitzgerald would
continue to make that trip from Superior, Wisconsin to Detroit
laden with iron ore, and there was no reason to
expect that on November ninth, nineteen seventy five, her trip
under the command of Captain Ernest McSorley, would go any differently.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
It was a Sunday, and it was in Superior, Wisconsin
on a beautiful day, and Jack McCarthy, the first may
would be in charge of telling the guys, you know,
the loading, make sure that the ship was loaded evenly,
in which they would go underneath a gravity fed doc
and it would actually spill these round taconite pellets into
the cargo hold, which they took twenty six thousand tons.
(04:41):
This is where Gordon Lightfoot was wrong. On a couple
of accounts. In his song, he said fully loaded for Cleveland,
but it wasn't fully loaded. It was less than two
thirds loaded because she was actually going to River Rouge
near the area to the Zug Island, and in order
to get into that slip, she couldn't carry all of
her cargo because she would hit bottom in the Detroit River.
(05:03):
So not fully loaded, not going to Cleveland, actually going
into the Detroit area with a load of iron ore
that would eventually become automobiles. And they take off into
a beautiful day, and as they do, McSorley in the
pilot house actually sees that a big storm is coming up.
He's got a radio that he can get reports through,
and he's a weather ship, so he takes his observations
(05:25):
and adds them to the weather reports to help forecasters
try to develop where the storm's going to go. And
it's quickly ascertained that he's going to get a storm
that's going to come right through from Oklahoma all the
way up to Marquette, and so he starts to calculate
how long that would take and uses the forecast that
he's getting given as well and has to determine what
he's going to do.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
But mcsorly was a well seasoned captain and the coming
storm likely didn't phase him too much, despite some of
the reservations he may have had on the ship.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
Mcsorly had been a skipper that had been on the
Great Lakes for years and years and worked his way
up to the Edmond Fitzgerald. He was very stern from
the people that I talked to, very matter of fact guy.
As we talked to a third mate in my documentary
called the Fitzgerald Investigations, he remembered going through a Lake
(06:16):
Superior storm with just ten foot waves, where the Fitzgerald
would flex so crazily, unlike any ship he had been on.
And he looked at McSorley and he said, man, it
should it be bending like this? And McSorley said, sometimes
it scares me so literally. He knew that this ship
was different than other ships. He knew that it would
(06:38):
flex in these storms. But because as a part time
job he did hull inspection, he was very well versed
in the strength of these ships, and he unfortunately pushed
the Fitzgerald way beyond its means. As I did the
investigation documentary, I found the Coastguard looked into it. They
looked at ten years at the Sioux Locks, the worst
(06:58):
storms that ever happened up until nineteen seventy five, and
the one ship that kept pushing every storm and made
it through the locks during those gales was the Edmund Fitzgerald.
So he was a rough weather skipper. He pushed the
heck out of the ship and it eventually broke because
of it.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
So the Fitzgerald pushed forward and soon they would get
company to ride out the storm with in the form
of the Arthur m Anderson, another Laker captain by Bernie Cooper.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And Cooper also is a You know, these guys are
experienced meteorologists. They have to be. Their lives depend on it,
and they start to figure out when the storm will
come and what they're going to do. As they pass
Isle Royal, they've got a place that they can hide
there from these northwest winds that are starting to build.
They continue going, but they take the northern route. The
northern route goes closer to Canada. Jokingly, some of the
(07:52):
sailors call that the scenic route, because otherwise you might
not ever see land as you go around the Keeweaw
would be the last spot as you make that long
haul past Marquette and make your way to the Sioux
Locks and of Whitefish Bay. But as they're going up,
they go all the way past Otterhead in a second
spot that they could throw out their anchor. Because it's
(08:12):
so close to the Canadian shore, the waves can't build there,
so you're pretty safe. You could wait it out, But
they didn't. They decided they were going to make it
for Whitefish Bay. They thought that the storm would take
an extra hour to get to them, and they were wrong.
As they got past Caribou, it was the worst the
storm could be, and they were in the absolute worst
(08:33):
place they should be, on Lake Superior, where those winds
now could build the entire length of the lake and
crash into the ship and crash into them in the
stern and on their starboard side. So if they had
any problems at all, they were going to get into
real trouble there. And that's what happened to Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
And you're listening to Rick Mixter tell the story of
the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. As he put it,
how in nineteen seventy five, could you have a seven
hundred and twenty nine foot freighter with twenty nine men
completely vanished.
Speaker 3 (09:14):
The answer to that question, you'll hear.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
It after these messages here on our American story, and
(09:39):
we continue with our American stories and our story of
the Edmund Fitzgerald. When we last left off, Captain McSorley
and his crew were battling the brutal storm on Lake
Superior alongside another ship, the Arthur M Anderson. Here's Rick
Mixter with the rest of the story.
Speaker 3 (09:56):
As the fits is going past Caribou, it realizes it
it has some kind of problem. They look down the
deck and they could see that at least one of
their vents was missing. These looked like mushrooms that are
on the deck, and they're very large and they're used
to equalize the pressure below decks. But of course fitz
has two thirds of a cargo in there well, as
he noticed that one of those is missing. He also
(10:18):
finds out from his engineers that he's taking on water,
so they're running their pumps to try to keep that
water out. He also mentioned something really unique. He says,
our fence rail is down, and that has been interpreted
in a couple of different ways. The fence rail could
be the guide rails that are on the side of
the ship that perhaps some piece of debris came on
(10:39):
smashed its vent off and also damaged that part of
the rail. So he's radioing back and forth to the
Anderson that he's got these problems, and then all of
a sudden mentions his radars are out, and he was
worried because the mixerly had noticed that out of Whitefish
Bay there were several salt water ships and including a
big freighter called the William clay Ford and another one
(11:01):
that we're trying to get out of Whitefish Bay, and
he worried he'd get into a collision situation and the
blinding snow that was happening, so he asked the Anderson
to keep an eye out for them because his radars
were out, so he's going blindly into this storm. The
Anderson is now trying to close the distance because the Fitzgerald,
being a faster boat, was a or several miles ahead
(11:25):
of them. The last broadcast came from Morgan Clark, the
first mate on board the Anderson, who asked the Fitzgerald,
how are you making out with your problems? And the
Fitzgerald McSorley answered back, we are holding our own, and unfortunately,
in a blinding snow squall, the Fitzgerald disappears. It disappears
(11:46):
from radar because the blinding snow also blinded the radar out.
When it finally clears, Anderson can't see the Fitzgerald, and
now their job is trying to notify the Coastguard that
a seven and twenty nine foot freighter is miss scene.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
The last time that you talked about at what time
I want to work, I had and I was making
out with the problem, and that he loved those vans,
and he had a left and he said he was
holding his own the last time I stopped with him,
that he was holding his own and got the last
time I loved contact.
Speaker 3 (12:18):
After that good Nobody wanted to believe that the Fitzgerald
was gone, especially the coast Guard as and we're very
lucky that immediately the coast Guard started recording all of
these conversations, so we actually have the conversations as the
cooper is trying to tell the coast Guard that they
have missed the Fitzgerald. So here the Anderson is now
(12:42):
making the safety of Whitefish Bay. After now twenty nine
guys have been lost. A massive steel modern freighter has
been lost to the storm, and they call the coastguard,
who tells them, we don't have a ship that can
go out there. So the coast guard has to convince
the captain of the Anderson that just went this freighter
sinking to turn around, come out of the safety of
(13:03):
Whitefish Bay and go back into that killer storm. And
he definitely did not want to do that. Right from
the radio broadcast, we hear Cooper say, you know, there's
going to be two of us on the bottom. You know,
he really believed going back out there was going to be,
you know, a bad mistake, but he knew he was
the only choice, so they went back out there. You know,
(13:24):
at that time it was sixty mile an hour wins.
It was going to take him two hours to go
seventeen miles with those intense winds that blowing right against them,
and I don't think they believed that anybody would survive it.
You know, with big thirty foot waves and water temperatures
that were just above freezing, there really wasn't much chance.
And unfortunately it was a futile attempt. But I think
(13:48):
that that was the spirit of the lakes. You do
what you can first safe make sure your crew is
going to survive it, and then you know, if you
can safely do it, you go out there and make
the rescue. And he did the truest tradition of sailors,
you know, try to find those guys. But unfortunately, you know,
as we know, nobody survived and no bodies were found.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
Then came the task of actually finding the final resting
place of the Fitzgerald on the bottom of Lake Superior.
Speaker 3 (14:18):
It didn't take them very long, so they used this
robot called the Curve three to not only find it,
but to secure it. The Curve three came out and
they flew that down to five hundred and fifty feet
and as they saw the bow, they noticed it was upright.
But as they went around the stern section, which was
broken over one hundred feet away, they noticed that the
(14:40):
lettering was upside down. And the Coastguard investigators immediately thought
the rov or the robot was inverted, and the pilot said, no,
it's not. This is the back section two hundred feet
of the Edmund Fitzgerald that was upside down. So the
horrible act of it tearing apart somewhere in the the
(15:00):
water column actually flipped the entire stern upside down, and
the bow section is resting proudly upright on the bottom
where you can actually see every deck in the pilot
house as well.
Speaker 2 (15:11):
And there the Fitzgerald sat a gravesite for her twenty
nine crew, none of which were ever recovered. Immediately, there
were questions on why this modern lake freighter sank, and
these questions still brew today.
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Did she hit.
Speaker 2 (15:27):
Bottom, did she get hit by a rogue wave, or
did her hatch covers cave in. Answers were hard to find,
as the wreck site was soon protected by the Canadian
government at the request of the families of the victims,
so very few people have actually seen the wreck. But
in nineteen ninety four Rick did.
Speaker 3 (15:48):
In ninety four, we took the submersible Delta, which had
been famous for diving the Lusitania, and we went down
in this two man yellow submarine, and I was the
third dive on the Delta expedition. When you dive a shipwreck,
you get down to it. If you're free diving it,
or you're doing it on scuba equipment where you don't
have a submarine around you. You can actually go up
(16:10):
to it and touch it, you know. The cold steel
and the immense size of these vessels is what really
becomes apparent to you. The Fitzgerald was surreal in the
fact that I was down five hundred feet. The lights
stopped at about two hundred and fifty, so it's pitch
black beyond, you know, whatever you have on board your submarine,
which we had lots of lights, so it becomes very surreal.
(16:34):
As you look through the porthole, you can see glimpses
of the ship, but not the whole ship at the
same time. So as we went past the name, the
letters are over a foot and a half tall. I'm
trying to remember exactly how big they were, but that's
what first captured my mind was it said Edmund Fitzgerald,
and it was horribly torn up on the port side.
(16:56):
So the collision with the bottom had just ripped apart
spar deck from the side of the ship, and the
name had been scratched up and beat up so badly
that it took my breath away. And as we went
around the bow and to see the bow was actually
bent almost ninety degrees. The force of the storm was
just incredible and then the tiny details, as you'd see
(17:20):
a blanket hanging out of the pilot house, or you
go up to the top and you'd see the radars
that were you know, Panasonic on top it's a plastic
like just a little sliver of plastic ripped off and
the wires were just there. So you start to piece
together the story from that. Each one of those pieces
not only awed me, but you know, you were just
(17:41):
so excited to see this great shipwreck. And then when
I came up, we actually had a power left in
the submarine, and so it was decided that the owner
of the tugboat who we were renting from, would actually
get to take his son down there for a look.
And we're eating lunch and we got a a report
from the submarine through the sono phone the sound waves
(18:03):
from the it's like a radio that goes through water,
and we found out that they found a missing crewman.
So we went from this incredible high of me just
visiting the most famous shipwreck on the Great Lakes, the
largest shipwreck on the Great Lakes at five hundred and
fifty feet, down to a horrible low of oh my god,
there are twenty nine people that were lost there you
(18:25):
lose that connection, I think, because you're in the sub
and you're safe when you're diving. It's really apparent that
these shipwrecks are you know, this is a final grave,
because you have this water around you and you've got
to be so careful when you're scuba diving to do that.
I never lost that connection, but I think I did
on the Fitzgerald because I felt so protected in the submarine.
(18:48):
But that immediately was erased when they found a first
missing crewman, a body lying off of the bow of
the shipwreck wearing a life jacket. There's nothing more sobering
than that, and instantly we were transported back to this
is a grave site.
Speaker 2 (19:18):
The day after the wreck, the Mariner's Church in Detroit
rang its bell twenty nine times for each of the
crewmen lost, and this ceremony continues in Michigan today of
the ship's actual bell, raised in nineteen ninety five and
kept at Whitefish Point. But for the families of those
lost on November tenth, nineteen seventy five, the Edmund Fitzgerald
(19:40):
is more than just a song. It's a tragedy that
will always be remembered for our American stories I'm Monty Montgomery.
Speaker 1 (19:54):
And great job is always to Monty Montgomery. A terrific
job producing that piece and re special thanks to Rick Mixter, who,
as you can tell, doing what he does is more
than a vocation. It's his life. The story of the
Edmund Fitzgerald Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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