The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald by John U. Bacon

My friend Eric suggested I read The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald because I'm from Michigan. He didn't even know I'm obsessed with shipwreck stories (should I list them? In the Heart of the Sea, The Wager, Moby-Dick)!

(Parenthetical tangent for other listeners of the podcast Sarah's Bookshelves: I had a moment when Chrissie called The Wager "boring" and neither she nor Sarah could name the Edmund Fitzgerald. Sarah, if you need someone to come on to your show to be an expert on maritime disaster books, consider me your lady.)

So, it turns out that not everyone knows the Edmund Fitzgerald? This is crazy to me. When she was launched, she was the largest ship on the Great Lakes and she was delightful and lovely and fancier than many other ships. 

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At every level in the chain of command, from the captain to the deckhands, the engineers to the oilers, each crew member could be certain that no one at their rank had better accommodations on the Great Lakes. The purpose of all this was not to indulge employees, but to attract the very best crewmen at every position. (location 1164)

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Okay, but before we get to the Fitz, let's talk about the Great Lakes more broadly. For those of you not from (gestures wildly about as if you can see me encompassing the entire Great Lakes region) here, let me give you some facts.

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...hold more than 80 percent of North America’s freshwater, and more than 20 percent of the world’s. If you could empty the Great Lakes over North and South America, you would flood the land in a foot of standing water. (location 226)

From outer space the Great Lakes are North America’s most visible topographical feature. (location 239)

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When people say things like "the only beaches that matter are ocean beaches," I dare them to go to a Lake Michigan beach and think that's somehow worse than Jersey City. *rant kind of over*

Sailors on the Great Lakes are called "lakers" and those who go on the ocean are called "salties." This fact amuses me greatly. And guess what? The Great Lakes are not to be fucked with.

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On the Great Lakes there’s no salt to hold down the waves, so they rise more sharply and travel closer together, like jagged mountains of water coming at you in rapid succession. (location 248)

“When the salty captains first come on the Great Lakes they say, ’How hard can it be?’ ” Rick Barthuli grins, then turns serious. “How hard can it be? Ask thirty thousand men on the bottom of the Great Lakes. That’s how hard. But once the ocean sailors actually sail on the Great Lakes, they stop asking that question.” (location 334)

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So, why do lakers take chances when there have been so many shipwrecks?

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When it comes to hauling goods, trains are roughly twice as efficient as trucks, but ships are almost three times more efficient than trains and six times more efficient than trucks. The difference between ships and trucks, therefore, is not 6 percent or 60 percent—margins any corporation would covet—but 600 percent, an astronomical savings. (location 794)

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So, let's talk about November on the Great Lakes. November is a tricky month. Sometimes it's beautiful - 70 and sunny. Sometimes there's a storm of the century. In the twentieth century, there were two of these storms of the century on November 10. November 10 is the deadliest day on the Great Lakes.

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They then listed other Great Lakes tragedies that occurred on the same deadly day, November 10: the storm of 1913, which killed 254 people; another in 1930, when 67 drowned; and finally the Edmund Fitzgerald, whose twenty-nine-man crew “vanished without a trace in a nighttime torrent of slashing winds and waves on Lake Superior,” Gaines writes. (location 4894)

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The 1913 storm is called the White Hurricane (here's a book to read if that sound interesting to you - Ohio folks, you wouldn't be wrong to go with it) and I was somewhat obsessed with it when I was in high school. It was called the Storm of the Century and then 1975 came around.

In The Gales of November, Bacon walks us through the history of each of the 29 crewmembers on the Edmund Fitzgerald on that fateful November day, from the veteran captain Ernest M. McSorley who was set to retire upon docking the Fitz at the end of this voyage all the way down to the newbie David Weiss, a cadet on board. We then learn about that trip that was going to end the Fitzgerald's shipping season, a trip from Superior, Wisconsin, near Duluth, carrying a full cargo of taconite ore pellets. En route to a steel mill near Detroit, she was caught the next day in a severe storm with near-hurricane-force winds and waves up to 35 feet (11 m) high. 

There was another freighter nearby some 15-20 miles away, the Arthur M. Anderson, and it was in contact as the Fitzgerald as they both headed straight into a deadly storm. Until they weren't in contact anymore. 

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Anderson mate: By the way, Fitzgerald, how are you making out with your problem? 

McSorley: We are holding our own. 

Anderson mate: Okay, fine. I’ll be talking to you later. (location 4427)

McSorley’s simple, stoic statement, “We are holding our own,” are the last known words from the Edmund Fitzgerald. (location 4434)

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Then the book goes through the theories about how and why the ship sank. Outside of the fact that there was no real-time weather updates on the ship, there were still a lot of questions. Was it the construction of the ship that was made to be flexible and move with the waves? Was it that the load line had been lowered and lowered? Was it that the bulkheads leaked and added water to the taconite iron ore, making the vessel heavier and heavier? Was it that the Fitz had run aground on Six Fathom Shoal because McSorley was using outdated navigational maps? Was it complacency (similar to the Titanic, the Fitzgerald had a rep as a ship that couldn't sink and had a decade and a half of weathering Great Lakes storms to prove it)? 

We don't know. The ship was located on the bottom of Lake Superior, split in two. It is now an official gravesite.

The wreck changed things on the Great Lakes and many reforms were put into place after the ship sank, including changes to weather updates, navigation policies, load lines, and changes to late-season Coast Guard inspections. 

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“The Fitzgerald was a very tragic thing,” former GLMA superintendent John Tanner says. “But the safety reforms that were triggered by that accident were incredible.” (location 5426)

In the half century since the Edmund Fitzgerald went under, not one commercial ship has sunk on the Great Lakes, by far the longest run of safe trips since the French fur traders started traversing the same waters four hundred years ago. (location 5459)

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If you know of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it's probably because of the Gordon Lightfoot song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." I don't have much to say about that song, but it's haunting and sad and doesn't have a chorus. How it became a #2 Billboard hit is a mystery. 

Look, this book was rad. 4/5 stars

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Lines of note:

Wading through countless books, documentaries, and articles about the Fitz and conducting hundreds of interviews confirmed two things: there remains a great deal of interest in the subject, and there is little everyone agrees on beyond the fact that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank on November 10, 1975. (location 127)

On May 31, 1889, an epic rainstorm broke an earthen dam in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, killing 2,208 people. The following year President Benjamin Harrison approved the creation of the United States Weather Bureau, forerunner to today’s National Weather Service. (location 382)

They say history is written by the victors. On the Great Lakes, it’s written by the survivors. (location 513)

Tom enrolled at Bowling Green University in Ohio and two brothers went straight to work, while the youngest brother went to college to become an accountant. (location 1414)

I just included this because of the BGSU mention. Someone wrote for the BG News, too, which got a shoutout. (Go Falcons! is implied.)

The Navy’s research on motion fatigue (as opposed to motion sickness) has found the effects so tangible that they can accurately predict the percentage of crewmen who will become effectively dysfunctional after each hour of turbulent seas. “After too many waves,” Michigan Tech professor Guy Meadows says, “anyone can become useless, like being drunk.” (location 4043)

“When the storm was at its worst,” Schwab says, “the Edmund Fitzgerald got to the worst possible place, at the worst possible time.” (location 4406)

Things I looked up:

Rockford, MN (location 3488) - Rockford is a city in Wright and Hennepin counties in the U.S. state of Minnesota. The population was 4,500 at the 2020 census. While Rockford is mainly located within Wright County, a small part of the city extends into Hennepin County. It is part of the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metropolitan statistical area. (I legitimately thought the author was confused with Rockford, IL.)

When the duo reached the Mackinac Bridge just before dawn on November 11, Hillery saw something that made him grab his camera, jump out of the car, and start shooting: Truck driver Ivan Wilder and his eleven-year-old son had made it across three-quarters of the bridge when the wind picked up their trailer and smashed it down onto the trunk of a car driving alongside them. (location 4825) - I can't find this photo. Maybe it's better that way.

Hat mentions (why hats?):

In the 1800s, at the peak of the fur trade when beaver hats were all the rage in Europe, traders sold millions of beaver pelts every year, until the original beaver population, estimated between 200 and 400 million, was almost extinct. (location 581)

He didn’t have much need for a barber himself, with his receding hairline, but he’d tell his patrons not to wear hats or they’d go bald, too. (location 1767)

A few years ago, retired engineer John Hayes recalls, a couple twenty-somethings thought the request didn’t apply to them, and stubbornly kept their baseball hats on. (location 1800)

...rakish-looking man photographed in dirty overalls and a hat at a jaunty angle, with a cigarette in his hand and a sly grin suggesting pending mischief, “Handsome Ransom” spent three months working in the copper mines before escaping to a freighter. (location 2588)

Weiss wore a full beard, big brown sunglasses, and a white cowboy hat, thus earning him the nickname “Cowboy” Weiss—an unusual moniker for a Jewish kid from LA. (location 2936)

young man in a cowboy hat parked in a yellow muscle car (location 2950)

GLMA professor John Tanner spotted Weiss in his trademark cowboy hat standing on the side of the road in Acme, just outside of Traverse City, where M-31 meets M-72. (location 2981)

Dad got a big cowboy hat for himself—and he’s the one who always said, ’Don’t wear hats because they make you bald!’ (location 3492)

“Right before Dad got on the ship,” Marilynn says, “he gave his new cowboy hat to us and told us to keep it in good hands. And then we said goodbye.” (location 3514)

Church, fifty-five in 1975, wearing the hat, had left his job at Reserve Mining in Silver Bay just a few years earlier to pursue his dream of working as a porter—a very rare move. (location 5754)

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Have you heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald? When's the last time you were on a boat?