Michael Schumacher - Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Michael Schumacher is the author of six books, including biographies of Allen Ginsberg {Dharma Lion), Eric Clapton {Crossroads), Phil Ochs {There but forFortune), and Francis Ford Coppola {Francis Ford Coppola). He edited the selected correspondence of Allen and Louis Ginsberg and has written scripts for twenty-five documentaries about Great Lakes shipwrecks. He lives in Wisconsin.

MIGHTY FITZ

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Reasons to Believe: New Voices in American Fiction

Creative Conversations: The Writer's Complete Guide toConducting Interviews

Dharma Lion: A Biography of Allen Ginsberg

Crossroads: The Life and Music of Eric Clapton

There but for Fortune: The Life of Phil Ochs

Francis Ford Coppola: A Filmmaker's Life

MIGHTY FITZ

THE SINKING OF THE EDMUND FITZGERALD

MICHAEL SCHUMACHER

BLOOMSBURY

Copyright 2005 by Michael Schumacher

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

Distributed to the trade by Holtzbrinck Publishers

Title page painting by Doris Sampson (dorissampsonartist@hotmail.com), reprinted by permission.

Map by Patrick McDonald

All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition of this book as follows:

Schumacher, Michael.

Mighty fitz : the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald IMichael Schumacher.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

eISBN: 978-1-59691-167-3

1. Edmund Fitzgerald (Ship). 2. ShipwrecksSuperior, Lake. I. Title.

G530. E26S38 2005

917.74'90443dc22

2005009768

First published in the United States by Bloomsbury in 2005

This paperback edition published in 2006

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Westchester Book Group

Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

To the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald

and

to Gordon Lightfoot

for giving us a song to remember them by

CONTENTS

PREFACE

THE LIGHT FROM THE SURFACE OF LAKE SUPERIOR FADED SLOWLY, UNTIL the water was as black as night.

Bruce Fuoco drifted downward through the frigid water, suspended by a harness connected to a ship on the surface, and protected from the icy cold by a diving suit that looked as if it had been made for Star Wars. Hundreds of feet below him, broken in two sections and resting exactly where it had fallen nearly two decades earlier, was the object of Fuoco's mission: the wreckage of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.

The Fitzgerald, often called the Titanic of the Great Lakes, was not only the most famous freshwater shipwreck; it was also the biggest mystery in Great Lakes history. The ship had captured national headlines when it sank without warning in the teeth of a terrible storm in the early evening hours of November 10, 1975. No Mayday had been transmitted, no lifeboats launched. The Fitzgerald simply plunged to the bottom of the lake and disappeared from radar. There had been no survivors. Twenty-nine men lost their lives, leaving behind grieving widows, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, extended families, friends, and members of a stunned shipping community struggling to understand how such a thing could have happened.

With no eyewitnesses or survivors, there could never be a final answer.

Like the Titanic, the Fitzgerald was supposedly unsinkable. At the time of its loss, the ship was less than twenty years old; it was equipped with state-of-the-art technology and boasted an experienced crew as good as any in the business. It had been in regular contact with a ship trailing it through the storm, and no one had given the slightest indication that the Fitzgerald was in serious trouble. When it disappeared, the reaction was almost universal: utter disbelief.

Investigations into the tragedy yielded only more questions. The Fitzgerald's wreckage had been located a few days after the ship's demise, and the following spring an underwater research vehicle, equipped with television and still cameras, had been lowered to the site. The footage and images spoke of a sad, violent ending. The ship's bow section had struck the lake floor with tremendous force, plowing through mud and silt until it finally came to a halt, much of its bow buried in the muck. The stern portion, twisted by almost unimaginable torque, had torn away from the front of the ship, coming to rest in an inverted position, its propeller pointed toward the surface. The white lettering on the stern, spelling out EDMUND FITZGERALD upside down, provided stark, grim identification in the silent depths.

That same year, Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot recorded "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," a ballad recalling the ship's last voyage and the perils of sailing on the Great Lakes in November, when gale-force winds and high seas could "turn minutes to hours" for anyone defying the power of nature. The song shot up the sales charts, and people who had never dipped a toe into the waters along Lake Superior's shoreline suddenly knew the name and story of the lake's latest victim.

A hotly disputed Coast Guard report, released after an extensive investigation into the accident, added to the Fitzgerald's growing legend. According to the report, the freighter had gradually lost buoyancy over a substantial period of many hours, most likely as the result of taking on great volumes of water through defective or poorly fastened hatch covers. The ship probably took a nosedive after one or more large waves overwhelmed it and dropped its bow below the surface. Skeptics disputed the theory, claiming that it was more likely that the Fitzgerald had bottomed out in shallow water, probably somewhere around the Six Fathom Shoal, in the eastern part of the lake. The Fitz, they argued, had sustained damage below the waterlinefatal damage of which the captain and crew might have been unawarethat led to the loss of freeboard and the ship's subsequent plunge to the bottom of the lake. Still others believed that the Fitzgerald had broken apart in the violent storm, much as the ore carriers CarlD. Bradley and Daniel f. Morrell had split apart on the surface in recent Great Lakes storms.

Since there had been no survivors from the Edmund Fitzgerald, there were no definitive answers. The tantalizing mystery invited further debate and exploration, including a highly publicized dive to the wreckage by the crew of Jacques Cousteau's Calypso. Other visits to the wreckage followed. Dr. Joseph Maclnnis, an underwater explorer who had visited the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic in 1991, studied the Fitzgerald in 1994 as part of a government-sponsored project examining the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. "Of all the dives, the most riveting were the ones we made to the