Twenty-nine men died in the Great Lakes’ most famous shipwreck. The Edmund Fitzgerald’s legacy endures for many reasons.
Edmund Fitzgerald sinking 50 years later and Milwaukee connection
Fifty years after its sinking in Lake Superior, the Edmund Fitzgerald still has stories to tell in Milwaukee.
Captain Ernest McSorley and his crew were fighting for their lives in a battle against the “Witch of November” when his final words went out over the radio.
“We are holding our own.”
Less than 15 minutes later, the 35-foot waves on Lake Superior and a blinding snowstorm overcame the mighty Edmund Fitzgerald ship and its 29 crew. There was no distress signal.
November 10 marks 50 years since the sinking of the Fitzgerald. Its crew still rests 500 feet below the surface of Lake Superior in Canadian waters near Whitefish Bay, according to the Detroit Historical Society.
But their memory lives on in legend, song and tradition.
Despite extensive investigations, authorities still aren’t exactly sure what happened in the moments after McSorley radioed, although they have some theories about how the storm overcame the ship.
The tragedy was etched into popular culture by Gordon Lightfoot’s haunting folk ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which spent 21 weeks on the Billboard charts. Lightfoot, who died in 2023, called the song his finest work.
A yearly ceremony, to be held yet again on Monday, Nov. 10, rings a bell to keep the memory of the lost sailors alive.
The Fitzgerald’s bell, which once sat beneath the icy waters of Lake Superior rings out 30 times every year.
Twenty-nine rings for the Fitzgerald’s lost souls. Once for the estimated 30,000 other sailors who lost their lives to the Great Lakes.
Family members requested the bell be recovered from the wreck, and it was in 1995. The original bell was replaced on the underwater ship with a replica, engraved with the 29 sailors’ names on it.
In a sense, it is their grave marker.
The Fitzgerald’s legacy endures
A half century after the Great Lakes’ most famous shipwreck, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald’s grip on the public imagination has waned little.
It sank on the second day of its final voyage of the season, in the early evening of Nov. 10, 1975, about 17 miles northwest of Whitefish Point, Michigan.
The Fitzgerald’s legacy endures for many reasons.
Launched in 1958, it was the largest ship on the Great Lakes for its first 13 years. When it passed through the Soo Locks in northern Michigan, crowds gathered to watch and cheer.
The Fitzgerald was also the last commercial ship to sink on the Great Lakes.
Much about the tragedy remains unknown, its story buried in the lakebed.
Remembering the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: 50 years later
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald, once the largest ship on North America’s Great Lakes, tragically sank during a fierce storm on Lake Superior in November 1975. This video explores the ship’s impressive history, details of its fateful final voyage and the legendary wreck, as well as how the world commemorates the 50th anniversary of one of maritime’s most haunting disasters in 2025.
Why did it sink?
The storm caused the wreck, but the exact circumstances of what happened remain uncertain. What caused the Edmund Fitzgerald to sink remains a point of debate and mystery a half-century later.
Theories range from the Edmund Fitzgerald striking a shoal and suffering bottom damage to flooding through the freighter’s hatch covers, which filled the ship with water and sank it, to rogue waves, to structural flaws in the ship that the 1975 storm made deadly.
Two major federal investigations were conducted after the Fitzgerald’s 1975 sinking: the U.S. Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, which released its report in July 1977; and the National Transportation Safety Board, whose findings and recommendations were released in May 1978.
The Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation, in its conclusions, noted that the lack of survivors and witnesses, and the incomplete information on all that the Edmund Fitzgerald was facing on Lake Superior that day and evening, meant “the proximate cause of the loss of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald cannot be determined.”
But the board goes on to list a suspected cause: flooding through the ship’s topside hatches.
The NTSB report agreed, noting that “the probable cause of this accident was the sudden massive flooding of the cargo hold due to the collapse of one or more hatch covers.”
Lives lost
When the 729-foot-long SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Lake Superior in 1975, it took its entire 29-member crew with it.
The men – sons, brothers, fathers, husbands and friends – were connected to dozens of families and a number of comrades in the shipping and freight industry.
“Everyone who was on the ship had loved ones at home. When that ship sank, like so many others across the Great Lakes, you had this impact across the community. You had fatherless children, widows, people’s lives were turned upside down,” Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum Executive Director Bruce Lynn said.
Such a voyage unlikely today
So long as bulk carrier freighters move goods through the Great Lakes – and through the severe storms that can pop up in November and other months – the risk of an Edmund Fitzgerald-type disaster is never zero. But improvements in weather forecasting, Great Lakes bottom mapping and other safety technology make such a disaster far less likely, experts said.
In the 1970s, Great Lakes freighters primarily received weather information through voice radio broadcasts from the U.S. Coast Guard and other marine reports by radio. Mariners would use this information to manually create their own weather charts. Observation technology at the time was much less sophisticated than it is today, relying on reports from shore stations and other vessels.
With the weather forecasting capabilities of today, the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald may not have even embarked from port in Superior, Wisconsin, on the far western shore of Lake Superior, as they did on Nov. 9, 1975, said Thomas Hultquist, technical program lead for the analysis and forecast branch for the National Weather Service in Minneapolis.
“The biggest difference now is even before leaving Superior, they would have had a pretty good forecast a good 24 hours before even their planned departure,” he said.
‘This is a grave’
Terrence Tysall was carrying everything he needed to stay alive on his back one September day in 1995 as he jumped into Lake Superior and started his death-defying descent, traveling more than 500 feet through dark, 34-degree water to the bottom.
When Tysall and his diving partner, Mike Zlatopolsky, made it to the clay floor of Lake Superior, their high-powered, cave-diving lights illuminated the port side – the left side of the ship facing the front – of the wreckage that was once the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.
Once he reached the wreckage, Tysall swam around the ship and suddenly did something perplexing, even to himself.
“I just reached out with both of my gloved hands and I gripped the rim,” he said. “I’m a touching-learning kind of guy, so with me grabbing that rail, it made it so real to me that, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m the first living hand to touch this rail since she sank.’ It was a very special moment. That’s when it stopped being a logistical endeavor. This is a grave, and this is a privilege to be here.”
Privilege, indeed, for Tysall and Zlatopolsky, because they are the only two people to ever scuba dive to the wreck. Before them, only a handful of people had gone down to the Edmund Fitzgerald, and they did it in submersibles – underwater vehicles, manned or unmanned, that require a support ship as opposed to self-sufficient submarines.
Diving to the Edmund Fitzgerald is now illegal without government permission. The Canadian government, at the request of the victims’ families, declared it a protected site in 2006.
It is protected by the Ontario Heritage Act, which has been amended to specifically protect the wreck site as a marine archaeological site and designated grave site.
In 2006, in order to further protect the wreck site, the Canadian government amended the Ontario Heritage Act to extend the perimeter around the Edmund Fitzgerald to 500 meters so that anyone diving without a permit could face a $1 million (Canadian) fine, according to the Detroit Historical Society.
