Liveright, 464 pages, $35
As the Edmund Fitzgerald loaded its cargo hold on a Sunday afternoon in the fall, the Wisconsin shore of Lake Superior was unseasonably warm. About 30 hours later, near Michigan's Whitefish Point and during a violent storm on Nov. 10, 1975, the big ship broke apart and sank with its 29 men. Half a century later, they still sit at a depth of 530 feet, on the cold and dark floor of the world's largest freshwater lake.
"We will never have the whole story of the Edmund Fitzgerald's final day," writes John U. Bacon in "The Gales of November." His book takes its title from the lyrics of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," the 1976 folk-rock song that romanticized and immortalized the disaster. This renders Mr. Bacon's subtitle inapt: "The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald" has been told and retold by authors and bards. But never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful and compelling book.
Mr. Bacon is an accomplished sportswriter who has written extensively about the Michigan Wolverines. This is his second book on a maritime calamity, following "The Great Halifax Explosion" (2017), about a deadly incident during World War I. In "The Gales of November," he blends the talents of a narrative historian with the skills of a journalist, in an account that covers the economics of the Great Lakes, the evolution of mining technology and the mechanics of canal locks. It also touches on poignant personal details about the crewmen of the Edmund Fitzgerald and their families. He even takes readers behind the music, describing how and why Lightfoot came to record his song.
Launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald took its name from the president of Northwestern Mutual, which commissioned the ship. The Fitz and its fellow lakers were impressive products of nautical engineering.
They had hulls long enough to carry enormous amounts of material to steel mills in Detroit and Toledo, Ohio, but also narrow enough to squeeze through the Soo Locks that connect Lake Superior and Lake Huron. At 729 feet long and 75 feet wide, the Fitz had about the same proportions "as an old wooden ruler," Mr. Bacon writes.
"She was as long as a seventy-three-story skyscraper on its side." And the ship was only a little wider than the distance from a pitcher's mound to home plate.
The Fitz was also built to bend. Two tunnels ran from fore to aft, right beneath the deck. When traveling on waves of merely 5 feet, according to Tom Walton, who worked as a porter on the ship in 1963, "a couple of lamps at the far end of the tunnel would actually disappear from view laterally for a few seconds." The ship's veterans assured Mr. Walton that this was normal. "I accepted the explanation, but years later, I wondered if it was supposed to bend that much," he told Mr. Bacon.
As the Fitz bent, it also broke records, setting marks for total annual tonnage as well as the biggest individual cargoes on the Great Lakes. "When the Fitz was at her best, no ship was better," Mr. Bacon writes. Across 18 years, the vessel "logged more than a million miles, the equivalent of forty-four trips around the world." Joined by some 300 other lakers during their 20th-century heyday, the Fitz was part of a team that fueled factories with iron and made the Midwest an industrial powerhouse.
Its crew was well compensated: Deckhands earned as much at $175,000 in today's dollars before bonuses. Officers, oilers and others made more. Yet they paid a price. Some saw their families for only about 10 weeks during winter, when the lakes froze and transport became impossible.
It was hard enough the rest of the year: "The Great Lakes can be more treacherous than the oceans," according to the author. Without salt to hold them down, freshwater waves "rise more sharply and travel closer together, like jagged mountains of water coming at you in rapid succession," Mr. Bacon writes. "These waves don't roll; they peak, crest, and then crash down on whatever is unlucky enough to lie below them." Despite their name, the Great Lakes are best understood as seas. They have claimed at least 30,000 lives since 1875. Lake Superior's first known commercial casualty, in 1816, was a schooner with a name that suggests hubris: the Invincible.
A strength of "The Gales of November" is the way Mr. Bacon weaves in the stories of the crewmen who perished when the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. Dead men tell no tales, but their loved ones do. Mr. Bacon tracked them down and listened.
First assistant engineer Eddie Bindon, during his last day on shore, bought a diamond ring for his wife to celebrate their 25th anniversary. "But instead of packing it away in his duffel bag so he could give it to her in person . . . he gave it to a friend and asked him to make sure Helen got it," Mr. Bacon writes. Did he have a premonition? "Only Eddie Bindon knows." The ring arrived by mail days after the Fitz sank. Helen wore it for "the rest of her life."
Bruce Hudson, a 22-year-old deckhand from Ohio, was an only child. When he died, his mother Ruth "had no reason to believe Bruce had left her anything but a few mementos, a shiny new car, a beautiful dog, and an irreparable hole in her heart." Months later, Bruce's girlfriend gave birth, after hiding her pregnancy. Bruce was gone, but he had given his mother a granddaughter.
The captain of the Edmund Fitzgerald was 63-year-old Ernest McSorley. He was one of about a half dozen crewmen who planned to retire upon their ship's arrival in Toledo, where it was to undergo scheduled repairs. McSorley was one of the most aggressive captains on the lakes, Mr. Bacon writes -- and, ironically, if he had stayed aggressive during his final voyage, he and the Fitz might have made it safely to port.
As the Edmund Fitzgerald headed into Lake Superior, McSorley received reports of worsening weather. Instead of sprinting for the Soo Locks in a race to beat the storm, he became cautious, trying to avoid the brunt of it by taking a longer northerly course.
When he finally turned south, however, he met what may have been the fiercest tempest on Lake Superior in more than 60 years. The wind reached 100 miles an hour, the waves rose to 50 feet, and the ice that encrusted the deck must have weighed tons. David Schwab, an oceanographer who developed a computer model of the conditions, said the ship "got to the worst possible place, at the worst possible time."
So the mystery of what happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald is really no mystery at all. As one of Mr. Bacon's interviewees puts it: "At the very end of McSorley's career, he gets the worst storm he's ever seen."
A nearby laker survived the ordeal, and many have speculated about precisely what caused the Edmund Fitzgerald to sink. Previous books have explored the theories in exhaustive detail. Mr. Bacon takes a lighter touch that will satisfy general readers. The ship may have been overloaded with pellets of taconite (a type of iron ore). McSorley, who had been awake for 24 hours, must have been tired and may have suffered from "motion fatigue," which can cause confusion even in experienced sailors. A report by the Coast Guard pointed to the possibility of unsecured or damaged cargo hatches.
Mr. Bacon seems most sympathetic to the idea of a navigational error that caused the ship to scrape its bottom and suffer structural damage on a shoal near Caribou Island, along the underwater border between the U.S. and Canada. Because of the chaos outside, the crew may not have noticed holes in their hull. The author also describes new evidence, based on recent videography from the site of the wreck, that the men knew their ship was cracking apart. In their final, harrowing moments, they may have tried to pull it together with cables.
The end probably came "with alarming speed," Mr. Bacon writes. McSorley never sent a distress signal. His last known words, picked up by another laker, were: "We are holding our own."
When morning dawned on Tuesday, McSorley and his crew rested in their watery tomb. The surface of Lake Superior, Mr. Bacon writes, "spread out smooth as glass, as if nothing had happened the day before."
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Mr. Miller is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College.” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: In Peril On an Inland Sea. Miller, John J. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 04 Oct 2025: C7.
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