The Gales of November by John U. Bacon

This is when the Fitzgerald's unique characteristics--the modular construction, the use of welds over rivets, the extraordinary flexibility of the hull, the lowering of the Plimsoll Line, and whatever damage she might have suffered over Six Fathom Shoal--would all be tested by the once-in-a-lifetime conditions on Lake superior. The fully loaded Fitzgerald had only 11.5 feet of freeboard on a good day, and this was not a good day. The question lo longer was whether the Fitzgerald could withstand such relentless punishment, but how long before she succumbed.

The first few times I heard Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," I'm pretty sure I thought it was about some late 19th or early 20th century shipwreck. I had no idea that it was about a ship that sank in 1975, just a few months before the song was released. Is it the song, or something else, that gives the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald the air of an old myth? Certainly, what captured Gordon Lightfoot's attention--the struggle of human courage against the merciless lake, the ship's status as the largest and most famous on Superior, the way it vanished without a trace, the phrase "storm of the century," the heart-rending detail of the bell ringing 29 times at the Maritime Sailors' Cathedral--are the elements that still make the story such an enduring one, on the Great Lakes and beyond.

John U. Bacon's book about the Edmund Fitzgerald is pure dadslop (complimentary). It's the kind of book you give an uncle for Christmas. But it also tackles a pretty serious challenge, which is that, because there were no survivors, the story of the Fitzgerald's wreck is actually a difficult one to tell. Bacon solves this problem partially by padding the book in several predictable ways: extensive prefatory chapters about the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, other shipwrecks, and lengthy profiles of a dozen or so of the sailors who went down on the Fitzgerald--lengthy, if you'll forgive me saying so, even for the human face they provide to the tragedy.

Once the ship leaves on its fateful final trip, though, I found the book gripping. Bacon does an excellent job dissecting the evidence in order to present and evaluate the theories about what happened to the Fitzgerald, and the ultimate impression is of a ship caught in a series of compounding difficulties, some preventable and some not. No one could have stopped the warm front moving up from the West Coast that created a "perfect storm" and fifty-foot waves, but it seems clear that the Fitzgerald was shipping with too much weight, pushing for one last run in a season when storms become too strong for most shipping. Decisions which must have made sense in the moment likely doomed the Fitzgerald: trying to avoid the storm by taking an unfamiliar northern route, which drove it over a poorly-charted shoal, slowing the ship down, which gave it more maneuverability in unpredictable conditions--but which also gave water more time to poor through open hatches or a rent in the hull. The perfect storm, it seems, includes not only the atmospheric conditions but the profit motive that drives recklessness. Ernest McSorley, the captain of the Fitzgerald, is described by Bacon as the most trusted and reliable on the Great Lakes--but it wasn't enough.

Mostly, the book made me deeply sad. A hundred things had to go wrong for the 29 people on board the Fitzgerald to lose their lives; if any one of them had gone right instead, many of them would still be alive today. Bacon notes that shipping practices today are more heavily regulated, weather forecasting and communication with ships is much improved. God willing, that means that the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald will stay what it is--a legend and a warning.