It was a shipwreck so notorious, it inspired what many critics and listeners agree is one of the greatest songs of all time - a song that helped solidify its legend. Fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank during a brutal storm on Lake Superior while sailing from Superior, Wisc., to Detroit. The entire crew of 29 men died in the Canadian waters.A year later, the disaster was immortalized by Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot when he released "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which became an unlikely hit single in 1976 and remains popular to this day as both a totem of culture in Canada and the source of online memes."There were about 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the Great Lakes between 1825 and 1975. Everybody knows one, and it's because of the song," said John U. Bacon, author of the new book The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Story continues below advertisement 'The gales of November' The scale of the wreck itself also makes it stand out, historians say.
The Edmund Fitzgerald remains the largest ship ever to sink in the Great Lakes, which was a particularly booming industrial region in the mid-20th century following the Second World War, when hundreds of commercial vessels ferried raw materials in-between booming port cities on both sides of the border every year.
Before it sank, the over-200-metre-long freighter spent 17 years carrying taconite ore, a low-grade iron, from Minnesota mines to steel mills in Detroit, Toledo and other ports. View image in full screen FILE - The Edmund Fitzgerald in a 1959 file photo, with a crew of 28 to 30 men, was carrying a load of 26,216 tons of taconite pellets. (AP Photo, file). Sailors on the Great Lakes have regularly had to contend with fierce weather, something with which residents in those cities are all too familiar. As Lightfoot's song underscores with its repeated references to "the gales of November," the month brings particularly strong storms. Story continues below advertisement "The Great Lakes are more dangerous than the Atlantic Ocean, and it's not even close," said Bacon, who talked to former Fitzgerald crew members as well as the families of over a dozen of the shipwreck's victims for his book. "Those guys (former sailors) told me that again and again and again." Get breaking National news For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen. Sign up for breaking National newsletter Sign Up By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. Part of the reason is the combustible mix of incoming Arctic air with still-warm lake water and humidity left over from the summer months, experts say, as the seasons shift."It's that clash in temperature that creates these strong Great Lakes storms," Global News chief meteorologist Anthony Farnell said."These storms cut from the Gulf of Mexico in the south right up into the Great Lakes, and that can lead to a very low barometric pressure and rather intense winds and waves in November."The 1975 storm that sank the Edmund was particularly intense, Farnell noted, with near-hurricane force winds of over 100 km/h and waves as high as 11 metres."It's been a while since we've had one at at that level," he said. View image in full screen FILE - Two U.S. Coast Guardsmen move a life raft from the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald across the dock in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich. Nov. 11, 1975, after the raft was plucked from Whitefish Bay by the freighter Roger Blough, a ship assisting in the search for the missing Edmund Fitzgerald, which sunk on Nov. 10, 1975, in Lake Superior. (AP photo/JCH, file). That shared experience of intense weather is part of what has bound people together on both the Canadian and American sides of the lakes, said Dan Rose, the collections coordinator at the Great Lakes Museum in Kingston, Ont. Story continues below advertisement He specifically pointed to the so-called White Hurricane of 1913, which struck around the exact same time of early November and hit the region with powerful blizzards, killing more than 250 people and blanketing cities from Toronto to Cleveland with snow."I think there's just something that is so unifying about enduring conditions that are that treacherous and that trying, and being able to look across the water at our neighbours and say, 'Geez, isn't it great that we were able to bear down and endure these trials and tribulations?" he said."It really drives home how unifying it is to just face things head on and work together to solve a problem."That bond was only reinforced by the Edmund Fitzgerald disaster and the shared love of Lightfoot's song, Rose and other historians said.
The Edmund Fitzgerald's legacy also endures with the improvements to shipping safety and weather tracking on the Great Lakes spurred by the investigations into the sinking.
That's also partially due to Lightfoot