SS Edmund Fitzgerald
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a ship that sank in a storm on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975 17 miles from the entrance to Whitefish Bay. All 29 crew on board were killed and this was the last major ship lost on the Great Lakes.The Fitz was a 729-foot-long ore freighter with a capacity for over 25,000 tons of ore. When it was built in 1958, the Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, though ships are now 1,000 by 105-feet with twice the Fitz's cargo capacity. It was used to carry taconite to iron works in Detroit, Toledo and other ports. The ship went down with all 29 hands on the last trip before winter layup. The Fitzgerald had been traveling to the shelter of Whitefish Bay during an unusually strong storm. The next year a U.S. Navy submersible found the ship lying in two large pieces. An inquiry determined that the storm damaged hatches on the deck and flooded the ship; however, some doubt still surrounds this explanation.
The ship's bell was recovered from the wreck and is now in the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point near Paradise, Michigan. An anchor from the ship lost on an earlier trip was recovered from the Detroit River and is on display at the Dossin Great Lakes Museum in Detroit.
Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" is a song about the tragedy. It proved to be a hit which made the incident the most famous marine disaster in the history of Great Lakes shipping.
Although the last ship lost, and the largest, the Fitzgerald is not alone on the bottom. All the lakes have a history of nautical disaster. There is no agreement on how many ships have been wrecked or sunk, but they number in the thousands. Between the years 1878 and 1898 there were 5999 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. About a quarter of that number were listed as total losses. Some ships and crews simply vanished in storms. A number of marine preserves have been set up in divable areas that have high numbers of sunken ships.
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