[Radio chatter intro audio]
Taylor: Hello and welcome to Beyond the Breakers, a podcast about shipwrecks, loss, and lessons learned from maritime disasters. My name is Taylor and I’ll be one of your hosts today, and as always joining me is Tanner. Tanner, how ya doin’?
Tanner: I’m doin’ very well, I’m excited for our topic today…
Taylor: …it’s one we’ve been a little hesitant to do I would say. It’s, it’s a big one, but I think we’re ready. I think we’re ready to do it. Umm…
Tanner: I think it’s one that we’ve, we’ve probably at some point said we wouldn’t do this one…
Taylor: …right.
Tanner: … but I think we have discussed it somewhat in the past, how…how would we even go about doing it? And then we had a little helpful nudge from the Spooky Science Sisters podcast, so…
Taylor: …right.
Tanner: Uh, thanks to them. Also check out their podcast, it’s very cool.
Taylor: Yeah, it’s umm, you know it’s kinda like the, you figure like this is the TWA Flight 800 for Black Box Down or something. You know what I mean?
Tanner: Is that the Lockerbie one?
Taylor: No, that’s the one that crashed off of New York.
Tanner: Oh, okay.
Taylor: But uh, they were both 747s, so yeah, same plane.
Tanner: Oh, that was a Pan Am one at Lockerbie, right?
Taylor: Yes. Yeah.
Tanner: Okay.
Taylor: That would be the Titanic and then the TWA is the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Tanner: There’s my air incident knowledge coming in.
Taylor: [laughs] Uhh, but anyways. Whatcha’ been doin’? Whatcha been consuming, reading, watching, listening to?
Tanner: Uhh, in terms of reading, most of my reading the last two weeks has been for this podcast.
Taylor: Yeah, would you say you’ve been fully Fitzgerald-pilled at this point?
Tanner: Yeah, it’s been a lot of uh, I don’t know, I tried to get some good reading sessions in but uh, really it was all just happening in Fitz and starts…
Taylor: [laughs] I hate it.
Tanner: So yeah there’s a few books that I got my hands on for this, uhh Frederick Stonehouse’s book on it, you know, pretty standard fare for the topic. I think every shipwreck person has read that. Also, another one called Gales of November that I’ll be referencing later on as we talk about it…
Taylor: …is that the one by the other Michael Shumacher?
Tanner: No, his is called Mighty Fitz. That one I have not cracked open yet, although that’s like my dessert. I’ve loved his other books so much that I was gonna wait to read that one last. So yeah, aside from that, I’ve started reading the second in the Captain Alatriste novels…
Taylor: …nice.
Tanner: …by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. I like to read those in Spanish because it’s good practice. Um, it’s a historical topic, yeah they’re set during the Thirty Years’ War slash Eighty Years’ War and they follow this Spanish Captain Alatriste so it’s a historical topic that I know fairly well already. But then it gives me a chance to learn a lot of new vocabulary that I didn’t know before, and just good reading practice in a second language. So that’s a bit fun. Uh, last thing I’ll throw into my reading is that just today actually I started cracking open a book called Harp Song for a Radical by Marguerite Young. It’s a biography of Eugene Debs.
Taylor: Okay, cool.
Tanner: I’m excited to get more into that. How about you, what have you been up to?
Taylor: Umm, well, we have been super busy around here. Had a birthday party for my twins today, so the last few days have been kind of all set up around getting all of that situated and doin’ all that so it hasn’t left me a ton of time to do things. But um, I don’t know, I had a little time to crack open a new book. I started a book called The Indifferent Stars Above. It follows the Donner Party actually, it follows one member in particular, Sarah Graves, and kind of her experiences as a 21 year old in that environment and everything that they went through. You know, I just can’t get enough tragedy with shipwrecks that I have to…
Tanner: …move on land!
Taylor: They called them prairie schooners, so you know it’s basically the same thing…
Tanner: …that counts.
Taylor: Yeah it counts.
Tanner: Was that inspired by uh, American Hauntings?
Taylor: It was, I listened to the Donner Party episodes of American Hauntings and I highly recommend it because I think Troy Taylor may be one of the best like spoken-word narrative people out there doing it. It absolutely hooked me, and I had to consume more, so I’ve fully gone down the Donner Party rabbit hole now. I posted on Twitter about it actually. I can’t believe that like where it all happened, like literally where the cabin stood…
Tanner: [laughs] Yes, saw that…
Taylor: …there’s a Taco Bell and McDonalds now. And like I’m not saying it in like a “oh it’s a horrible thing”, like hey progress happens right? But like, just kind of the absurdity that there’s a Taco… I can get a Crunch Wrap and then go walk over and see where people starved. Like it’s pretty crazy.
Tanner: Eating a Zesty Cruncharito on top of where people ate each other.
Taylor: [laughs] I guess to be fair like you can do that anywhere in Europe too, or in a lot of places in North America, but it is just kind of funny to see like Donner Taco Bell. So yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing. Tragedy all around. [laughs]
Tanner: Cool!
Taylor: Are you ready to talk about today’s tragedy?
Tanner: I am. I saw a Twitter thread earlier about “do you like when podcasters talk for 15 minutes before the episode” um, so I don’t wanna get pulled into the discourse.
Taylor: [laughs] No, I’m good for about 5 minutes and then I’m ready to move.
Tanner: Alright.
Taylor: Alright, we’ll as I’m sure you’ve gathered from the title of this episode, we’re doing the thing! We are talkin’ about the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Tanner: Big Fitz!
Taylor: Yeah just to start, today’s episode will be a little different. We’re not going to focus on every intimate detail of the Edmund Fitzgerald and we’ve kinda decided to take a different angle. Honestly, we don’t feel like there’s much that we can add to the topic that’s been so thoroughly covered. However, we would like to, you know, definitely explore the human element. No other vessel has captured the public’s imagination on the Great Lakes quite like the Fitz. Uh, she’s been immortalized in song, print, and even it’s become something of a cottage industry around the Great Lakes. Take one look at any local bookstore, gift shop, there’s countless items that carry her name and image. Shot glasses, t-shirts, blankets and even a pretty tasty stout.
Tanner: [laughs]
Taylor: What makes her story so different from the thousands of wrecks that lie in the cold waters of the Lakes? I’m not sure that we can answer that in one podcast episode. You could write an entire doctoral thesis on this topic of how this became such a phenomenon. However, we can provide our thoughts as two people who have been profoundly influenced by this wreck and the cultural phenomena that it became. That’s something I’m sure we share with so many of you that are listening. For so many people this was kind of the gateway into shipwreck stuff, this and the Titanic, right? Like it’s…that’s what got us here. And kind of as a note this will be a two-part episode. We kinda want to use Part 1 to cover as much as possible in a coherent manner and then Part 2 we’re gonna mop up some of the important things we missed and then spend some time focusing on crew members and other stakeholders that are you know, around the story of the Fitzgerald.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think in terms of how we decided to cover the episode, one of our big reluctances about covering this was you know, how do you even cover it? There’s so much stuff to do on a podcast and I think that’s one of the important things with kind of just saying that we’re gonna cover this in two episodes because kind of the whole premise of the podcast is you know, we like to find stories and discuss things that we don’t know about and maybe our listeners don’t know about either and sort of elevate those and get those a little bit more visible where they may not be. I kind of felt like you know, if we made this a 5…6…7…10-part series it’s kind of just playing into that same imbalance that we’re sorta trying to address…
Taylor: …right.
Tanner: So yeah, it’d kinda just be, I don’t know, antithetical to the podcast.
Taylor: Yeah, but at the same time like we were saying before, um, kind of acknowledging it is different, it is a special wreck for so many people and I kinda wanted to see like, why? Why is that a thing? And we’ll get into that. Um, however, I think we do, for the benefit of those, especially those international listeners who may now know if you’re not from the Great Lakes region, uh we still wanna talk about the history and kind of give a run-down of the Fitzgerald and it’s story. So, with that, we’ll kind of roll into it. Let’s do this thing.
Tanner: Alright.
Taylor: So the Edmund Fitzgerald was launched on June 7th, 1958 at River Rouge, Michigan for the Northwestern Mutual life insurance company. That’s kind of weird, it’s owned by an insurance company. And she was actually named for the president of that company.
Tanner: We’ve talked about this on previous episodes but it’s always strange when these ships get so ingrained in the culture like the Edmund Fitzgerald, we know them as the ship and you totally forget that there’s a real person associated with this name that it’s actually named after…
Taylor: ..yeah, it is weird.
Tanner: So it’s always strange to me that detail of oh it’s just named after a big insurance guy.
Taylor: Mm-hmm. So Northwestern Mutual did not operate the vessel, however. She’s leased to the Columbia Transportation Division of Oglebay Norton Company based in Cleveland, Ohio. So a little bit of a weird arrangement, but really like Northwestern Mutual just sees this as a money making opportunity no different than investing in bonds or mutual funds or something like that. It’s just a money making venture, like they have a bunch of money laying around, “what do we do with it?”
Tanner: Yeah. I feel like that’s good cause insurance agents are notoriously bad at handling ships on the Great Lakes.
Taylor: [laughs] Right? So at the time of her launch she held the title Queen of the Lakes as the largest vessel sailing the waters. She was 729 feet long, 75 feet wide and had a 25-foot draft. The Fitzgerald was an extremely productive vessel during her career on the Lakes. She set a single-trip record hauling 27,402 tons of iron ore during the 1969 season and normally a trip from Superior, Wisconsin to Detroit, Michigan would take around 5 days. Her destinations would vary and sometimes change even en route, although Toledo, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan were among the most common along with Cleveland, Ohio. You know, it’s the typical trade that we see with these ore freighters, you take iron ore from the west and bring it to the east where all of the you know, steel plants are and stuff like that. It’s a pretty normal arrangement. All of this backstory brings us to a couple of the most famous days on the Lakes. That brings us to the afternoon of November 9th, 1975. Captained by Ernest M. McSorley, the Fitz leaves Superior bound for Zug Island near Detroit. Weather conditions were pleasant at the time of departure, although there was a storm predicted to pass south of the vessel’s intended track. Surely the crew’s aware, you know sailing on the Great Lakes in November is always a bit treacherous, even in the best of conditions that can quickly change. A few hours into her journey, the Fitzgerald is joined by another now legendary vessel - the Arthur M. Anderson. She would accompany the doomed freighter in her final hours. I would say no other freighter has had her legacy built up more by a shipwreck than the Arthur M. Anderson. I feel like she’s attracted kind of a cult following around the Great Lakes areas now.
Tanner: Right, she kind of plays the role that um, is it the Carpathia…?
Taylor: Yeah…
Tanner: …plays in the Titanic saga where kind of fame-by-association with this other ship. The Anderson is one that even for me before I was even reading about any of this shipwreck stuff before we started the show, the Arthur M. Anderson was still a ship that I knew because of this story.
Taylor: And yeah, like it’s a cool thing. I know from my fairly brief time living in Superior it was still cool to see her coming in and out of port and everything, like you felt like you were, you know, seeing a little bit of history and feeling a little connection to a story that you cared about.
So it’s worth noting that there’s another vessel loading in Superior, the Wilfred Sykes, and she departs about two hours after the Fitzgerald. However, its captain decided to take a more northerly protected route as he believes the storm will be directly in the path of the vessels. So you know, it’s one of those things where it's the captain's discretion, right? You know, one captain’s not afraid of the storm, the other guy’s like “hey, I’m gonna play it a little more cautiously.” If you’re the captain of the El Faro, you just ignore everything and sail right into it.
Tanner: [laughs] And a little bit about that route choice I was reading about. I don’t know if we address this later in the notes, but yeah, talking about that northerly route, you know along the Canadian shore being the more protected route. It’s not the most direct if you’re going from Duluth to Sault Ste. Marie, but because of the way the weather comes down from Canada, um, if you’re on that northern shore you’re obviously most protected, whereas if you’re on the southern shore, the Michigan shore, the weather and those waves have the entire lake to build up…
Taylor: ...right.
Tanner: …and basically smash you against the Upper Peninsula. I was kind of interested in learning about that, you know the different routes that people are taking and the different reasons why.
Taylor: Yeah, that’s super interesting and just seeing the, kind of the mental calculus that goes into that and the decision making. Um, so the crew of the Sykes would be able to listen to the radio traffic between the Fitzgerald and the Anderson as the hours rolled by that night. So, they’re kind of a, you know, observer of this whole thing.
Conditions would continue to worsen as the morning of November 10th rolled around. Forecasts were now predicting winds between 40 and 58 miles per hour and worsening sea conditions. By the afternoon of the 10th, the Anderson was recording sustained wind speeds of 58 miles an hour and beginning to experience snow and reduced visibility. This actually caused the Anderson to lose sight of the Fitzgerald which was around 16 miles ahead of them. The vessels would remain in radio contact with McSorley of the Fitzgerald stating at 3:30 that he had developed a list and lost 2 vent covers along with some fence railing. So you know, he’s taking damage at this point essentially. It’s not great, you know what I mean, but it’s also things that happen in these conditions, so it’s something worth noting, but not something worth necessarily declaring an emergency over.
Tanner: Right.
Taylor: As the day progressed, the Fitzgerald and Anderson attempted to reach Whitefish Bay and the relative shelter that it would provide. However, the situation on the Fitzgerald had grown even more perilous. And if you think about it, this is very similar to the story of the Myron. This is happening in almost the same place and they’re trying to do the same thing. They’re trying to get to that shelter of Whitefish Bay and get out of the worst of this storm.
Next, McSorley reported that he had a bad list and neither one of his radars were functioning. And then he says something that I think is pretty chilling actually, considering how experienced a captain he is. He says: “Am taking heavy seas over the deck in one of the worst seas I’ve ever been in.” Most captains, and mariners in general, you know they don’t wanna seem scared of the sea or the weather, and especially a ship’s captain, right? He’s not gonna wanna broadcast that “this is something that I haven’t experienced” or “I’m afraid of this” so for a man who’s as experienced as himself to be saying this over the radio, it had to be truly terrifying.
Tanner: Yeah, and we’ll talk more about McSorley himself in Part 2 when we get more into the, you know, personal details and stuff. But I think he had been a captain for something like 40 years? Or, not a captain, but sailing on the Lakes for something like 40 years, and yeah, for someone with that much experience to say that “this is the worst I’ve ever seen,” that’s quite something.
Taylor: Yeah, that means something. [laughs] Around this time, the Anderson reports winds of 67 miles an hour gusting up to 86. So essentially, like, hurricane-force winds, like this is a bad storm. Along with seas of 25 feet and some rogue waves up to 35 feet high…
Tanner: …35 feet.
Taylor: …just massive seas. Around 7:10pm, the Anderson would check in with the Fitzgerald for the last time, and when asked how his ship was faring, McSorley would utter some of the most famous words in Great Lakes history: “We are holding our own.” This would be the final communication from the vessel. Around 10 minutes later the Arthur M. Anderson was no longer able to track the Fitzgerald on her radar. In the time since that last communication, Captain Jesse Cooper of the Arthur M. Anderson along with First Mate Morgan Clark had been attempting to reestablish contact and identify the location of the Fitz with no success. Considering the possibility that their own radio was malfunctioning, the Anderson attempted to contact other vessels in the area, one of which was the William C. Ford anchored in Whitefish Bay. The Ford responded that they could hear the Anderson loud and clear. The Ford also confirmed that the Fitzgerald was nowhere to be seen on their radar. First Mate Clark adjusted the radar while Captain Cooper continued on the radio, speaking with Captain Albert Jacovetti of the Swedish ship Nanfri. The Fitzgerald wasn’t showing up on the Nanfri’s radar either, though the captain reported he was struggling to identify anything due to the high levels of sea return. Sea return is what happens when high waves interfere with the travel of radar waves to prevent images from being clearly obtained, so that tells you how high these seas are. You can’t even use your instruments in these seas.
Tanner: Yeah that was something I was interested to read about because I guess I wasn’t aware that that could happen?
Taylor: Right, yeah, I mean it’s not something you think about, like how big are these waves?
Tanner: Actually, this also answers a question from a long time ago when we watched Poseidon Adventure and I asked if a wave would even show up on radar, and I guess the answer is kinda yes, yes it would.
Taylor: Yes! It definitely will. [laughs] Quoting from First Mate Morgan Clark describing these first minutes of the search: “It was the strangest feeling I’ve ever had. Everything told us Fitz had gone down. The radar couldn’t pick her up, there was no answer when we called her on the radio, and no matter how hard we looked, we could not spot her lights.Yet we couldn’t believe it. She couldn’t be gone.”
Around 7:39pm, Captain Cooper radios the Coast Guard but was asked to call back on a different channel. At 7:54, he successfully reconnected with the Coast Guard and expressed his concern for the Fitzgerald, but his concerns were largely brushed aside. He was instead asked to keep an eye out for a small 16-foot craft that had gone missing in the area. I can’t imagine being in a 16-foot craft in those seas.
Tanner: Yeah, I would definitely be hoping that someone was looking for me. [laughs]
Taylor: If I was Captain Cooper, I’d be like “yeah, they’re gone”.
[pause]
About halfway through the 8:00 hour, Cooper radioed the Soo Control again saying: “I am very concerned with the welfare of the steamer Edmund Fitzgerald. He was right in front of us experiencing a little difficulty. He was taking on a small amount of water and none of the upbound ships have passed him. I can see no lights as before, and I don’t have him on radar. I just hope he didn’t take a nosedive.” That’s pretty chilling. Like imagine trying to convince the authorities like “no no, you need to care about this.”
Tanner: WelI I think you chose a good word with “chilling”. First of all, it’s so rare for you know, these situations for these captains, these officers, to express such direct concern about this. Also, just to have an utterance that’s this long for this purpose is pretty out of the ordinary just based on the stuff that we’ve read. We’ve read quite a few of things like this for the show and yeah, the amount of detail, just the length of time he spends talking about this to really convey like, there is a problem here for sure.
Taylor: Mm-hmm, right. At about 10:30, the Coast Guard requested for other ships in the area to assist in searching for the Fitzgerald. So at this point finally we’re getting some commitment to say that yeah, something is wrong, we need to find it. The Arthur M. Anderson continued in her efforts to locate the Fitzgerald and was soon joined in the search by the William Clay Ford. The upbound vessels who had passed the area declined to turn around out of concern for their own safety. So, that’s kind of our brief synopsis of what happened. If you want more detail, there’s ample sources out there. You know, I don't want to spend the entire hour long show reading from a book. That’s boring, you can do that on your own or there’s plenty of other resources out there for you. But yeah, that’s kind of the story of what happened and I think we’ll expand on some theories, potential explanations, and then kind of get into some talk about the cultural phenomenon that is the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Tanner: And in the, in Part 2, there are a couple things about the search and the discovery of the wreck that we’ll get into, but uh, yeah, this is one of those stories where kind of the final result isn’t the interesting part because that’s kind of very well known. Arguably the most captivating element of the story is the mystery of what exactly happened.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: A lot of the stories that we cover on the show, you know they’re from the 1800s, the early 1900s, before the advent of communication and tracking systems that are really integral to the modern shipping industry. When we talk about stories from 1850 or 1900 it’s a lot more plausible that a ship can just disappear.
Taylor: Yeah, it still kind of has that age of like mystery around it that kinda, I could call it like the Golden Age of Shipwrecks, right? It’s still, it’s a very manual job. It’s wooden vessels and not being able to track storms…
Tanner: …it’s kind of an accepted risk of the trade of hey, you know sometimes people just sail off into the Atlantic and disappear. Never see them again.
Taylor: Yeah, I think that’s a good way of putting it that like, in the 1800s, I think most sailors are aware that like “I may not come back from this” and I don’t think that’s the case, I think most people today expect to come home when they go out on a voyage.
Tanner: Right. So yeah, it kinda brings us to our story here, you know in 1975 you’ve got radar, you’ve got radio and to top it off, these are ships that are in pretty close proximity to each other.
Taylor: Right, yeah they’re not like isolated out in the middle of the ocean.
Tanner: Yeah, this is a heavily trafficked area with tons of ships all with this you know, modern technology. How does a ship like the Fitzgerald just vanish from the surface of the lake? It’s the truly enduring mystery of this.
So a couple of the things that come up when you read about this, obviously there’s a lengthy Coast Guard report about this, a Marine Casualty Report, and the conclusion arrived at by the Coast Guard in that official report is as follows:
“The most probable cause of the sinking of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald was the loss of buoyancy and stability which resulted from massive flooding of the cargo hold. The flooding of the cargo hold took place through ineffective hatch closures as boarding seas rolled along the spar deck. The flooding, which began early on the 10th of November, progressed during the worsening weather and sea conditions and increased in volume as the vessel lost effective freeboard, finally resulting in such a loss of buoyancy and stability that the vessel plunged in the heavy seas.”
Reading that, I think the use of the word “ineffective” is interesting in discussing the hatch covers because there’s 2 main reasons a hatch closure might be ineffective. One of those is just a loss of watertightness due to either damage or just a, you know, lack of routine maintenance. Um, we’ve talked about it before with these bulk carriers how those hatch covers and the areas around them pretty often get damaged in the loading process. We actually talked about that a lot with the whalebacks, with them getting damaged by the cranes leading to some of these hatch issues. You know, the report from the Coast Guard notes the required maintenance was not being regularly performed, and it goes on to note that the Fitzgerald was scheduled for repairs to her hatch covers and coamings during her upcoming winter layup. So it was something that they were in the process of getting on top of, but obviously never got the chance.
Taylor: Yeah, I mean I think it’s impossible to ignore the hatch covers in this story. They leak. Like, it’s what hatch covers do. You know, water finds a way. So many other stories have this as the cause of a loss for one of these bulk carriers that, just because the story is so well known doesn’t mean it’s any different. I just, I don’t know. To me this is the one that makes the most sense.
Tanner: So we talked about the you know, possible mechanical issues, but there’s also another reason that hatch covers might not be effective. Quoting here from pages 93 and 94 of the Coast Guard report:
“Whether all the cargo hatch clamps were properly fastened cannot be determined. In the opinion of the Marine Board, if the clamps had been properly fastened, any damage, disruption, or dislocation of the hatch covers would have resulted in damage to or distortion of the clamps, but the underwater survey showed that only a few of the clamps were damaged. It’s concluded that these clamps were the only ones of those seen which were properly fastened to the covers and that there were too few of these and too many unfastened or loosely fastened clamps to provide an effective closure of the hatches.”
Tanner: So this brings us to the worst part of any of these types of podcasts [about] shipwrecks, plane crashes and that’s the possibility of human error contributing to an accident.
Taylor: Right, yeah that’s, you never wanna sit there and blame the people who were killed in an accident, saying “well you did that wrong, there’s your problem.” But it’s also like, it’s something you have to look at in these reports, and when you’re doing these kinds of things it’s that human error is so often involved in this.
Tanner: Yeah, so those are kind of the two possibilities there. Either way, regardless of why those hatch covers are not keeping the water out, water getting into the cargo hold of a ship like the Fitzgerald is gonna have pretty catastrophic consequences.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: The cargo holds on board the Fitzgerald you know, they’re not separated by any sort of watertight bulkhead, none of this flooding is going to be localized if it happens. In Stonehouse’s book he describes it really well, talking about the cargo hold as essentially just a big open expanse like a warehouse. It is divided up by things kind of like bulkheads, but it’s more like mesh than a watertight seal, because they want the water to be able to move back and forth in order to pump it out. So yeah, if you start taking water, you’re taking water you know, all the way up and down this vessel.
Taylor: And then our good friend the free surface effect becomes a thing.
Tanner: Does it count as free surface effect if it’s going through a bunch of iron ore?
Taylor: Uhh, I would say so.
Tanner: Semi-free surface effect?
Taylor: I would say, I mean, anytime a sloshing back and forth, right, you’re basically getting the same forces.
Tanner: A physics person can maybe tell us more about that.
Taylor: Yeah that’s true, we are not physics people.
Tanner: Also, with these cargo holds, there’s no system here for monitoring flooding in the cargo hold. Which again, this is in the ‘70s but we talked about issues like this in even El Faro, having issues with not having monitors for these things. So only a visual check would have revealed any flooding of the cargo hold. And that wouldn’t really have been possible in a freighter that’s fully loaded until the water was above the level of the cargo…
Taylor: [laughs] That’s not good…
Tanner: …at which point if the water gets that high, it probably doesn’t matter because you’re already doomed. That’s not even gonna be helpful at that point. So obviously anytime we have these stories where there’s a plausible chance of human error, you know those who were in close proximity to the case often search for other possibilities, you know, that could have brought down the ship. And not just in cases of possible human error, I think any good investigation pursues all possible angles just so that in the future nothing’s overlooked.
A great example that we’ve covered on the show, an episode that you did, was the Derbyshire in episode 40 where the original blame, you know from the company essentially is “well, forgot to close the hatches, forgot to secure the ship in this typhoon and uh, it sank”. And it was really just through that really persistent pressure from the family association that later investigations were done when the ship was found in 1994. The ultimate conclusion was structural failure involving a ventilation pipe cover at the bow. This, you know, cleared the crew of any fault in the sinking. I mean it’s good to pursue those other possibilities, cause you don’t wanna put the blame somewhere that it shouldn’t be going.
So yeah, with the Fitzgerald obviously there’s other theories for her sinking as well. The theory that kind of has the, that’s kind of in second place in terms of how much hold it has in the shipwreck community I guess, is that of shoaling. So this is the theory that was advanced by the Lake Carriers Association as kind of a riposte to the Coast Guard’s theory involving the hatch covers. So the idea here is that Fitzgerald struck a shoal without realizing it and opened up a hole in her keel leading to the flooding of the cargo hold. Kind of the same result but in a different way. Either way you’ve got the cargo hold taking on water and sinking the ship, how it got there is really the thing that’s in dispute. These two are interesting. Frederick Stonehouse in his book on the topic, he kind of discusses both theories and you know, he doesn’t reject the shoaling idea, he says it’s a perfectly valid, perfectly possible thing, but there’s just no reason to favor it over something that we know is an issue. It has been an issue on ships before as the Coast Guard points out with the maintenance, we know that it wasn’t up to where it potentially could have been. There’s no reason basically to complicate this with an additional theory if there’s just no direct evidence for it.
Taylor: Right, and that’s how I feel, too. Is shoaling a possible, valid theory? Sure. I don’t think it happened. We know the hatch covers are an issue, it’s just the thing that makes the most sense, right? It’s the simplest explanation. I think you also have to look at who’s putting forward that theory, I mean everyone for the most part has you know, their own motivations, and the Lake Carriers Association doesn’t want to say “well, the crew didn’t do their job.” You know, they have motivation for that to… they want to promote safety on the Lakes and say how safe the industry is. It’s sort of you know, well looking at like the Marine Electric where the company says “well, maybe she shoaled” and you know…
Tanner: …right, that’s a connection I hadn’t made, but yeah, we’ve kind of been in a situation like this before.
Taylor: Yeah, and not to say that the Lake Carriers Association is acting in the same way the company was, the company was trying to get out of you know, blame for shoddy maintenance. But the Lake Carriers Association does have some drive to want to say that, you know, “it wasn’t the crew’s fault, it’s safe on the Lakes.”
Tanner: I want to say this was also Stonehouse, it may have been someone else, pointing out that in a way it sort of lends credence to the Coast Guard theory in that if they’re blaming this potentially on you know, a lack of maintenance and inspection, it almost makes them look worse?
Taylor: Right! Because what are they doing?
Tanner: What does the Coast Guard stand to gain by saying that this ship wasn’t being inspected?
Taylor: And I mean, we saw that again with the Marine Electric, that you know, how many processes the Coast Guard had that were deficient that allowed that incident to happen. And possibly sort of the same thing here, you know, like the Fitzgerald wasn’t an old vessel yet, especially not by Great Lakes standards, but you still have regular maintenance. These vessels go through a lot of strain and stress in what they do, like, years and years of wear and tear still have to be cared for on the Lakes.
Tanner: Another thing in terms of her maintenance and upkeep, um, like you said, she was still relatively young for a Great Lakes ship. One of the things that interested me that I hadn’t been aware of before, and I think with more specifics [we] can also go into this in the second episode, but um, was about her load lines being changed throughout her career, being raised so that she could take on more cargo. I think it was something like 4 or 5 times that it happened? You know, with no major changes to her design, so essentially just changing how much she can carry without significantly changing her from when she was built. So that obviously lowers your freeboard and then if you know, heavy seas and potentially faulty hatch covers are a problem that sets you up for failure.
Taylor: Absolutely.
Tanner: There’s a couple other theories that came up, obviously if you’ve listened to the Gordon Lightfoot song where he lists out some of those, he says uh “she might have broke up [sic], she might have capsized, she may have broke deep into water” and so the idea of her breaking up on the surface is one that, you know, was put forth. I mean she is in 2 pieces at the bottom of Lake Superior, but that doesn’t really fit with the way that things happened with her sinking. I think you had some more detail about that, if I’m not mistaken?
Taylor: My only thought was breaking up on the surface um, you would think there would have been some sort of a distress call? At that point? It’s like the theory that gives it a little more time, and honestly the same thing with the shoaling, unless you know, it’s just that slow trickle until it loses positive buoyancy and just goes down. But breaking up on the surface in particular, to me I just don’t find it likely because there would have been a distress call. You know, we often see vessels that are splitting up and you know, they’re able to make a call. Particularly if in this bad weather, you would have someone ready to do that you would think.
Tanner: Yeah, so there’s that idea and also that kind of connects with some what would have been relatively recent wrecks at the time with the Bradley, the Daniel J. Morrell, ships that did essentially snap in half at the surface and go down that way. But yeah, there’s not really any support for that idea. Yeah, there’s another theory put forward called the Burgner theory and it involves the ship having a faulty keel, just you know, from an engineering standpoint, again, doesn’t seem to be super well-supported. So all in all, most of the evidence lies with the hatch covers. The wreck itself is pretty well-embedded in the mud, you know, very hard to access and really see a lot of the stuff, but um, yeah, that’s kind of I guess where we are in terms of theories for why this happened.
Taylor: So, kind of shifting gears a little bit, let’s move into the next phase here.
Tanner: I do just want to say that it’s storming pretty decently here and we just had some good peals of thunder.
Taylor: Ah, so you’re kind of like, in the mood for this story? [laughs]
Tanner: It’s appropriate. I think the old cook just came on deck and said “fellas, it’s too rough to feed me.”
Taylor: Peluche [Tanner’s cat] says “feed me.” [laughs] So let’s kind of shift gears here a little bit and talk about the next thing, kinda like why we’re doing this episode. Because honestly up until this point, it’s been kinda boilerplate stuff that you would get in anything Edmund Fitzgerald.
Tanner: Right.
Taylor: Let’s talk about the commercialization and legacy of the Edmund Fitzgerald in pop culture. First and foremost, I think we could both agree, we’d be remiss to not acknowledge that we are a podcast that talks about tragedies and shipwrecks weekly and we have a Patreon where we ask for money. So, although we have fun with these topics, you know, we do attempt to bring a certain amount of decorum and respect to the human side of these stories. Do you have any thoughts there? Anything you wanted to add, kind of where you lie with that?
Tanner: Yeah I mean it is one of those things where it um, I think that on that topic we do try to bring out some positives as much as possible from all of them. I think that one of the things that we strive for, is you know, what does this story tell us? And that’s one of those things with every shipwreck [being] different, they all tell a different story and I think that’s one of the reasons that we tend to focus on the personal side of things when we can. You know, we like to cover the history, the context around these wrecks before we talk about them, because yeah, there’s always more to the story than just cut and dry mechanical, you know, what went wrong? There’s usually human elements involved. There’s business elements involved.
Taylor: I guess my question for you is, how do we avoid, and especially in one like the Edmund Fitzgerald, how do we avoid kind of that obscene True Crime podcast trap? True Crime is a podcast genre that, I mean honestly it’s kind of made the podcast field what it is due to its popularity, but also it’s one of the just absolutely worst genres of podcast. Just, some like truly gross things happen in some of these True Crime podcasts.
Tanner: Yeah, I guess I would say that… I don’t listen to a ton of True Crime, I guess I would say that like yes, there are great, well done True Crime podcasts, but it’s, I don’t know, it’s probably the genre that has the most bad stuff in it? And yeah, I guess putting it in that context it kinda does help to sort of frame what we try to do here, and yeah, for me I feel like we try not to focus too much on the gruesomeness of it, cause despite the sort of romantic aspect with which shipwrecks are portrayed, there’s pretty horrendous things happening…
Taylor: …right.
Tanner: …it’s not a noble way to die, you know, anymore so than anything else, and it’s pretty horrifying. So I think one of those elements is we try not to emphasize the goriness too much.
Taylor: Yeah, I think anytime you start getting into that stuff, anytime you start leaning into exploitation versus documentation, I think you run into an issue.
Tanner: Yeah, and I think it really does come down to like, why do we do this? What do we want to get out of it? What do we want to share with people? And it is those human stories that are I think of the most interest to us, and hopefully also to the listeners. It’s one thing that we can provide. I mean we’re not engineers, but we are humans and so we can talk about some of those aspects of it.
Taylor: Yeah. Um, so digging a little deeper into the Fitzgerald, let’s talk about some of these factors that go into why the Fitzgerald you know, kind of has that legendary status that it is today. Why is it on fridge magnets and Christmas ornaments and shot glasses…
Tanner: …and afghans.
Taylor: And afghans, which I think I still have?...
Tanner: ….you have that somewhere, I think…
Taylor: I think I do. I have a Christmas ornament. So I mean, I’m as guilty as anyone as being part of the big Edmund Fitzgerald industrial complex.
Tanner: Big Fitz, they call it.
Taylor: Big Fitz. So you know, I think part of it is, she’s still a young, modern vessel when she goes down, uh, she sinks at a time when shipwrecks aren’t common. You kind of touched on some of them a minute ago, the Daniel J. Morrell sank in ‘66, breaking in half on the surface and leaving only one survivor, and the previous year the Cedarville had sunk after a collision in the Mackinac Straits.
Tanner: We did cover the Cedarville, and that one’s almost like an outlier because you can’t really blame the ship for that one, you kind of do have to blame the captain.
Taylor: [laughs] Yeah, that is true. And then the Carl D. Bradley had sunk in 1958 under similar circumstances to the Morrell. So, you know, there’s some shipwrecks around this time, but it’s not commonplace, it’s not 1890, 1900 on the Great Lakes where “hey, another body washed up this week, I wonder what ship he’s from”. It’s different than that. It’s something that is notable in the sense that it doesn’t happen very often, instead of being notable because “oh, we have to go look for some people again”. Also, kinda the elephant in the room, it’s impossible to ignore the role the Gordon Lightfoot song ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ had on the legacy of the vessel. Like so many of you that are listening to this podcast right now, listening to that song had a huge role in shaping my interest in shipwrecks. I can still remember the first time I heard it, I was probably 8ish years old, sitting in the parking lot of a stripmall in West Chester, Ohio while my mom ran an errand and I was in the car with you and our dad. And I remember it being on the radio, and I remember him saying “oh this is a song about a shipwreck” and I was hooked, just absolutely hooked. So that song is released in 1976 and Lightfoot was inspired to write the song after reading an article about the vessel’s loss in Newsweek magazine. Um, did you have a little bit more to add about that?
Tanner: Well, more of a question. I’ve heard the detail that he was prompted to do it because he read that article and the name of the ship was spelled wrong.
Taylor: Huh, I actually didn’t know that…
Tanner: ….and I don’t know if that’s accurate, but at least what I remember hearing was that he kinda saw that and he felt that it was, it just wasn’t right for these you know, 29 men and their ship to be sort of misremembered, you know even in a relatively small way, but saying we can at least put through the effort to spell the ship right. And it kind of got him thinking about it and wanting to share the story more, and we would certainly say that he was successful in doing that.
Taylor: Yes he was. [laughs] So that song would reach number 2 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart, and it’s truly odd to think that a 6-minute folk song could be such a smash hit on the radio, even kind of during the time when folk music is a little more popular than it even is now. The song doesn’t even have a chorus, like there’s no chorus in that song. Just a guitar riff.
Tanner: Yeah, like nothing about that song tells you this is a radio hit.
Taylor: Right, and just even the length. Like, you know, radio stations don’t like to play 6-minute songs, there’s a reason every popular song is 2 and a half minutes. So, yeah just the fact that this had such an impact. There’s no songs written about El Faro. Doja Cat hasn’t done that yet.
Tanner: Yeah and the fact that it still has this hold on people, it’s one of those songs that I feel like the first time you hear it, like you just described, it really does grab you.
Taylor: Yeah it has that you know, kind of that Scottish or Irish lament kind of feel to it. It just immediately feels kind of like a funeral song or something. Like you just know it’s sad even just hearing the music. But it’s also kind of captivating, it kind of invites you in to come hear this story and I mean, not to mention he’s one of the greatest storytellers through music that’s ever lived. Listen to any of his other work and you’ll know that it wasn’t by chance that he wrote this song…
Tanner: …right…
Taylor: …he’s very talented. We’re both actually fortunate enough to see him play live at one point and that, it’s truly a cool experience.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. Which honestly we kind of thought would be like one of his tours as he was kind of winding down his performing career, but that was like, that was over 10 years ago, wasn’t it?
Taylor: I think it was 2007. So yeah, fortunately he is still going strong. [laughs] But you know, it still does hold sway over people today, even people like ourselves who weren’t born when the song came out, even people younger than us. It’s cool to see you know, 20-somethings we interact with via social media that are into shipwrecks and that song still, it’s a captivating thing. It’s an eerie, captivating song, it just perfectly captures those emotions of a shipwreck story. Especially told from you know, kind of a funeral point of view, a sad point of view. It’s different from some of the Stan Rogers songs where it’s a little bit more of like, you know “I’m a sailor and I know that’s part of the job”. This is more of like the “look at this tragedy that happened and isn’t it sad?”
Tanner: Yeah, it’s a song that really grips you, um it challenges you to skip it if you dare, and yeah…
Taylor: [laughs] it’s one of those, thanks to my Spotify algorithm it will pop up from time to time and even if it’s not a genre that I’ve been listening to it’s like, well I know what I’m doing for 6 minutes now.
Tanner: Yeah, you sit down and listen when that song comes on.
Taylor: Right. Um, I think another interesting thing about it, it actually inspires another song, the song ‘Back Home in Derry’. It’s written by Irish freedom fighter and Member of Parliament Bobby Sands, while he was in prison in The Maze. So the song’s actually recorded by artist Christy Moore and the melody is inspired by ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’. So just in case ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ wasn’t sad enough for you, there’s another sad song. It touches on the idea of transportation to Australia by the British over the Irish and everything, it kinda, the prison ships and things like that…
Tanner: … yeah, which we do have Bonus Episodes about if you check out our Patreon.
Taylor: [Laughs] So yeah I just think that’s interesting too, that this song is powerful enough and even just kind of the melody is strong enough that you know, someone can hear that and think “I want to create something with that too”.
Tanner: Mm-hmm, yeah, the Christy Moore song is very good. He’s another excellent musical storyteller.
Taylor: So yeah, I think where does that leave us with the Edmund Fitzgerald? Like what do you think as far as today in popular culture, where does that sit?
Tanner: I mean, I did wanna also talk about you know, the song obviously dominates the cultural space of the Edmund Fitzgerald but there was a play also called Ten November written by Steven Dietz I think is his name. I don’t know that much about theater stuff, but I checked out some of the music, it was made into kind of like a soundtrack called Gales of November. I was checking out some of those, some pretty good music inspired by the Edmund Fitzgerald and kinda just the Lakes in general, and I was reading an article about it called “Steven Dietz: A Playwright, Sink or Swim : His Ten November centers on 1975 ship disappearance”. This is an article from 1989 [from the LA Times] and I wanted to point this out because he’s kind of commenting on some of the things that are I think still part of the appeal of the story. We talked about this at a time when we don’t think of shipwrecks happening in the ‘70s even though they happen to this day. I mean, over the last few months there’ve been several quite large ships that have sunk with casualties. There was that Spanish one out in the Atlantic that sank with quite a few. They still are very much a part of the modern world, but they’re somewhat overlooked. We think of them as being older than they are, and in this there’s a couple of interesting things in this article. Dietz is talking here, saying: “In the history of Lake Superior, no body has ever washed up on its shores.” Which is not true, um first of all. [laughs] But what it does is it kind of shows how much weight people put in this song. The song is by and large an accurate telling of the story, but people kind of take everything in it sometimes at face value and you know, the lake it is said “never gives up her dead” and it’s like, while that is an overall truth about Lake Superior, it’s not a 100% truth…
Taylor: …right.
Tanner: So it’s interesting, you know, the amount of authority given to this song. And then later he talks about uh, kind of the timing of this, he says “when Dietz had first heard the Gordon Lightfoot song, he thought it referred to some ancient maritime disaster.” Quote “to realize it happened the week Squeaky Fromme shot at Gerald Ford and when pet rocks were out, placed it in an amazing context.
Taylor: Yeah, that is kind of crazy.
Taylor: Yeah, like I think he says something very interesting there. You think about what other things are going on in the world at this time, it does seem a little bit anachronistic to… we’ll call them the “lay person”... who doesn’t read about shipwrecks. Yeah, it seems like he said, you know this seems like an ancient story. [laughs] But it isn’t, it’s a timeless story that you know, continues to happen but it takes a true artist like a Gordon Lightfoot to do something that really sticks with people like that, and I think that’s one of the real cool things about art, is that it has the power to take something beyond whatever legs it might have in culture and really just super charge it and keep it going with other generations.
Taylor: I think…
Tanner: …you know, why are people talking about this on a podcast, what like 50 years after it happened? There’s so many other wrecks, ones that we’ve talked about with a lot more casualties or bigger vessels or vessels that cost more money. Why is this the one that we continue to talk about?
Taylor: The thing I’m kinda, I hadn’t thought about this until you were kinda saying that stuff, it’s almost the Hamilton-ification of a historical object. Why is Alexander Hamilton any more noteworthy than any of the other Founding Fathers currently? Because Hamilton the musical, which by and large is a fairly accurate telling of most of the events that went on, you know, because it became a cultural phenomenon and all of a sudden people cared about learning about the Founding Fathers and Alexander Hamilton’s role in that may be a little inflated only because that’s the entry point that so many have. And that’s sort of the same thing we have here, is so many peoples’ entry point into shipwrecks is either the Titanic or the Edmund Fitzgerald. Those two shipwrecks get elevated so much when you know, they’re really no different than any other shipwreck, especially in the Fitzgerald’s case.
Tanner: Mm-hmm. Unfortunately, I just had the mental image of Lin-Manuel Miranda singing “I’m carryin’ this ore but the conditions are poor…”
Taylor: [laughs] Let’s not give him any ideas.
Tanner: I’m gonna work on that I think!
Taylor: [laughs] Oh no.
Tanner: Uh, but yeah that’s a good point, it’s a good parallel to draw, very different pieces of art but having kinda the same effect. If it gets a story out and it gets someone reading more about something, you could say it’s a successful piece of historically-themed art. Which is a good thing. I think it’s so tempting to want to, a little bit of like knee-jerk gatekeeping like “oh, you learned about this from the song, didn’t you?” It’s like, well most people learned about it from the song!
Taylor: Mm-hmm.
Tanner: And then you know, subsequently if it interested them, learned about more stuff. Like me, I mean the Edmund Fitzgerald was one of the only shipwrecks I knew about before we started this podcast, and now it’s one of my favorite things to read about.
Taylor: Yeah I think that’s a pretty good way to kinda cap it off, is honestly just kind of with that idea that um, like you said, art can spark that interest in history, you know? I think anytime there’s a lot of human suffering and you know, stories to tell, art has a way of filling in some of those gaps and maybe providing some meaning to that story that isn’t otherwise there. No matter if it was faulty hatch covers or a crew error, that story has meaning now because of Gordon Lightfoot and his work, and that’s built this whole industry around it that you know, people wanna be a part of that story, people wanna know that story. And it has, it’s spawned this whole industry. So yeah, I feel it’s a great point that art and honestly the best thing about art is that it can do things like that.
Tanner: I was just thinking here you know, sitting here with this crew list here, and you know thinking about how strange it is a little bit, you know why are we talking about, why do we know Eugene O’Brien from Toledo? Why do we know Ernest McSorley? Why do we know Frederick Beetcher from Superior, Wisconsin? And without this work that Gordon Lightfoot did to make this song and make it a piece of pop culture that probably doesn’t happen. We’re probably not talking about this ship, I mean maybe we are, it’s a shipwreck podcast, maybe it’s one that we dig up somewhere from in our research, but it isn’t the cultural phenomenon that it’s become.
Taylor: Right.
Tanner: So yeah, I mean I guess overall we talked about sort of the commercialization of it and yeah there’s parts of it that seem over-the-top, but at the same time people know it, and stories like that should be told. And yeah, it keeps it alive. I would be on the side of it being a good thing.
Tanner: Yeah, yeah, same here. You know I think you’re always gonna have people that look to exploit tragedy and stories, no different than anything else, and those people aren’t great, but they exist. But like you said, overall I would consider it a net-positive as well that you know, it gives people a community to be a part of and talk about and you know, there’s people that genuinely care and are interested in learning these things and I think that’s awesome.
So yeah, I think that’s what we’ve got for this one. We’ll have a lot more in the 2nd episode. We’re gonna, like we said, fill in some holes that we may have here, anything else we find that’s interesting, and then just spend some time kind of humanizing it and giving a little agency to some of these people who were involved that I think sometimes don’t have that. I think that’ll be great, I’m excited for it.
Tanner: Yeah, me too. I’m very excited about that. So yes, with that note, if we missed something, if we didn’t talk about something here that you were hoping to hear about, don’t freak out just yet, wait to send that email, wait to leave that angry comment or 1-star review, wait ‘til next week and then do all those things.
[background audio of waves on shore]
Tanner: Thanks for listening to another episode of Beyond the Breakers. We love hearing from listeners, and if you’d like to get in touch with us, there’s a couple of ways you can do that:
We’re on Twitter at Beyond_Breakers
We’re on Instagram @Beyondthebreakerspodcast
Our email is beyondthebreakerspod@gmail.com
We do also have a Patreon set up for the show. That’s patreon.com/beyondthebreakers.
Money from the Patreon just goes back into making the show, and covers things like web hosting fees, research materials, and the occasional hardware upgrade to keep the show sounding as good as possible. We appreciate all of the support in any way it comes. The simplest way to support the show is just to listen and share it with your friends. Other ways to support the show include leaving ratings and reviews. Ratings and reviewing really help us, they help the show stay visible, they help more people find the show, and they make us feel good! So any of those ways you can support the show is greatly appreciated. Until next time, take care everyone.