As early as 1888, the largest cargo on the Great Lakes shipping routes was Iron Ore. Great quantities of the stuff were brought up from mines in Minnesota and Michigan to be processed in iron works in Toledo, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan and other ports. A great fleet of freighters known as “lakers” provide the transportation.
In 2019, iron ore remained the third highest value metal mined in the US behind only gold and copper. Most of it is mined in the upper Midwest.
In the life insurance business, revenues are earned by assessing and properly pricing risk, and reinvesting those revenues into tangible assets. Small wonder then that the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company would be invested in iron ore.
In 1954, construction began on the St Lawrence Seaway, a system of locks, channels and canals linking Montreal Quebec to the Great Lakes, as far inland as Duluth Minnesota. Three years later, Northwestern Mutual commissioned the construction of the largest freighter of its time, designed to be “within a foot of the maximum length allowed” by the system of locks.
Measuring 729 feet long and weighing over 13,600 tons without cargo, she was the ‘Queen of the Great Lakes’. On June 8, 1958, the vessel was christened SS Edmund Fitzgerald, after the firm’s president.
A favorite of Great Lakes boating enthusiasts “the Big Fitz”, “the Mighty Fitz”, set out on her maiden voyage on September 24, 1958. For 17 years she plied the Great Lakes carrying taconite pellets, a form of iron ore.
According to NASA, major hurricanes form ‘the greatest storm on earth’, expending energy equivalent to 10,000 nuclear bombs over the life of the storm.
Every year around this time, violent weather systems rise up mid-continent when frigid air masses from the north collide with warmer fronts coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, resulting in inland weather systems equivalent to low-level hurricanes. These ‘mid-latitude cyclones’ are capable of producing sustained winds of 84 miles per hour and mountainous seas. To Great Lakes sailors, these late-season gales howling across the largest freshwater system on the planet, are the ‘Witch of November’.
‘The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
When the wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too
‘Twas the witch of November come stealin’’
The National Weather Service published an advisory on November 9, 1975, even as the Fitz was loading iron ore. With 26,116 tons in her holds and Captain Ernest McSorley in command, she set out at 2:30 that afternoon. McSorley was at the end of a long and successful career as a mariner. This was to be his last voyage.
The 647-ft freighter Arthur M. Anderson departed shortly after the Fitz, with Captain Jesse B. Cooper at the helm.
The storm gathered strength throughout that night and the following day. Throughout it all, the two vessels remained in radio contact, Anderson trailing by 10-15 miles.
With howling winds and towering seas, Captain Cooper inquired at 7:10pm on the 10th, about Fitzgerald and her crew. McSorley replied, “We are holding our own”. Ten minutes later, the Mighty Fitz disappeared.
‘Does anyone know where the love of God goes, when the winds turn the minutes to hours…‘
The search dragged on for four days, finding nothing more than debris and a few empty lifeboats. The wreck was discovered on November 14 by a US Navy Lockheed P-3 Orion turboprop aircraft using the same equipment submarines use to identify magnetic anomalies.
Edmund Fitzgerald lay 530 feet below the surface of the lake, 17 miles from the safety of Whitefish Bay.
‘In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed
In the maritime sailors’ cathedral
The church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald‘
Thirty years later, a computer simulation run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service estimated that wind gusts ran as high as 86 mph that night with waves up to 46 feet high.
The Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest vessel ever claimed by the Great Lakes, but not the greatest loss of life. That dubious honor goes to the SS Eastland which rolled over while tied to a pier in 1915, killing 844.
Today, the death of the 29 who served aboard the decks of that the greatest of all the lakers may be as unknown as any of the other 30,000 lost souls, save for the loved ones left behind and a few maritime historians. And a Canadian singer/songwriter, named Gordon Lightfoot.
‘The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early‘
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