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On Nov. 10, 1975, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior, killing its entire crew of 29 and becoming the largest shipwreck in the Great Lakes. The tragedy was immortalized in a Gordon Lightfoot ballad, and in the decades since a number of theories have been put forth about what caused the ship to sink. In his new book Wrecked: The Edmund Fitzgerald and the Sinking of the American Economy (Michigan University Press, 2025), Thomas Nelson (with Jerald Podair) argues it was the decline of Midwest industry that led to the ship’s demise. The following excerpt is published with permission.
It was Thomas Wolfe who told us, “You can’t go home again.” And so it was with the Edmund Fitzgerald. Only on rare occasions did this storied Great Lakes ore ship ever return home. Instead, the Mighty Fitz — as she was affectionately known — overnighted in Silver Bay, Minnesota, when she was upbound on the Great Lakes and in Toledo, Ohio, when she was downbound, resting along the docks of Lake Erie.
On the rare occasion she made it back home to Milwaukee, the Edmund Fitzgerald sat a few blocks from the headquarters of her owner, Northwestern Mutual. The insurance giant has stood tall along the skyline of Wisconsin’s largest city just as it dominated competitors in the life insurance market for years. So it’s not surprising that when Northwestern Mutual paid the Great Lakes Engineering Works of Detroit to build the Fitzgerald, they had just one requirement: make her the biggest ship to ever sail the Lakes.
The ship’s namesake was the CEO of the company. Edmund Fitzgerald did not come from modest means. His father was a renowned shipbuilder; his maternal grandfather was a respected manufacturer and industrial leader in Milwaukee who served in the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration; and his paternal grandfather was a ship captain. Nevertheless, unlike today’s scions of rich parents, Fitzgerald’s father would make sure his son earned his keep. Thus began a career-long climb to the C-suite of one of the country’s largest insurance companies and one of the Dairy State’s biggest employers.
Despite getting out of the family business, Fitzgerald never lost the sailing bug. And he wanted to do right by the family, not just carrying on the family name but immortalizing their name in a great iron ore ship. Fitzerald wanted to make sure it was not only the largest ship but also a well-built and safe ship for its crew. Alas, you cannot have small budgets that cut corners and a high-quality product; it must be one or the other. It was tradition for ships to be named after the owning company’s CEO or president. The Arthur M. Anderson, was named after the CEO of U.S. Steel. The William Clay Ford, built six years before the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1952, was named after Henry Ford’s grandson and member of the Ford Motor Company’s board of directors. But despite all of these male namesakes, ships like the Fitzgerald are referred to as “she” or “her,” as sailors have been wont to do over the course of history.
After loading up taconite ore in Silver Bay, the Queen of the Lakes, as the Fitzgerald was also referred to, would travel across Superior, through Huron and into Erie, where her cargo would be unloaded in Toledo, Ohio. From there, the ore would be hauled by rail car to steel plants in Ohio and Kentucky. Then, she would return to Silver Bay for another run. And another. And another. She repeated the journey seven or even eight months out of the year. The Fitzgerald’s role was the third stage of the steel-making process. Pure iron ore had long since been extracted from the open pit mines of northern Minnesota and Ontario, Canada, in the 1950s, shortly after the ship- and plane-building demands of World War II had drained the mines dry. Companies were now mining taconite, which contained only 25 to 30 percent pure iron. Nevertheless, it would still get the job done by feeding the hungry forges of Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and throughout Kentucky.
***
On a beautiful June morning in Superior, Wisconsin, in 2023, almost forty-eight years since the Edmund Fitzgerald sank, Bob Hom, a former sailor of the Great Lakes, offered me a chair on his freshly laid asphalt driveway. The sun was brilliant, and the black driveway radiated its warmth. He could remember vividly the day and moment the Fitzgerald left the port of Superior for the last time. Hom would have been one of the last people on land who saw the ship before it sank.
“My wife and I drove over the bridge to go to Fairlawn Museum in Superior and we could see the Fitzgerald leaving out of the Superior port. It was a beautiful day like this. A gorgeous day,” Hom told me. On November 9, 1975, Bob and his wife, Peg, were going to meet up with Fitzgerald Wheelsman Eugene “Red” O’Brien, a good friend of the couple. Bob had sailed with Red as well as other Fitzgerald crew members on other boats. Red would have to take a rain check on dinner because the Fitzgerald was departing early. A storm had been building over the Oklahoma panhandle the day before. The system was estimated to hit just south of Lake Superior by the early evening of the following day. Best to get ahead of the storm.
Hom recalled his phone call with Red like it was yesterday: “[Red] called and I said, ‘Where are you?’ ‘Well, I’m in Superior,’ he said. ‘So, I’ll come see you,’ I said. ‘No, we’re just about ready to leave. This is our last trip and when I get done, I’m going to go up to Minneapolis and spend a week with my sister. And then I’m going to come and spend a week with you and Peg in Duluth.’ ‘Okay, I’ll see you in two or three weeks.’ And that was it.”
Bob hasn’t had much chance to talk about the Fitzgerald. It was a long time ago and “most of [his] friends and sailors are gone.” “I still get a little misty eyed. I’m sorry. It’s only been what, fifty years,” Hom deadpanned as a tear or two welled up in his eyelids. “I don’t talk about it very often. I don’t know anybody else you could talk about it with.” Peg, tending to flowers along the house, looks back to check on her husband to make sure he’s okay. She knows how he feels. Red was her friend, too.
While a severe storm was gathering in the southwest on November 9, 1975, it was certainly not unusual for that time of the year. The Edmund Fitzgerald had handled plenty of storm systems from the south where the winds and warm fronts made weather more hazardous. Not as bad as a nor’easter, but trouble enough.
Fitzgerald captain Ernest M. McSorley had a well-established reputation as a rough-weather captain who never blinked at going into a punishing storm. He had a job to do, and he took it quite seriously. “You don’t make money sitting in port,” McSorley, the quintessential company man, would say. Decades at the helm of the Fitzgerald and nine other ships showed on his face. Weather-beaten and serious, a smile that betrayed a total unwillingness of suffering fools. Certain legions of sailors and first mates learned that lesson the hard way.
Third Mate Michael Armagost was accustomed to shipping out of Silver Bay, Minnesota, which was about a two-hour drive from his home in Iron River, Wisconsin. By comparison, Iron River felt like an outer-ring suburb of Superior. Armagost felt bad leaving First Mate Jack McCarthy at the dock to handle the loading, which would take most of the morning, but family was family. He had a wife, Janice, and two young children, Michele and Christopher, and valued his time with them.
After dropping Mike off at the dock, Janice took the kids for burgers. While finishing up their late lunch, they watched the Fitzgerald sail off in the distance. The three of them waved goodbye to their dad and husband, sad to see him go but anxious for the coming off-season when they could celebrate Christopher’s third birthday and enjoy Thanksgiving dinner together.
Armagost felt bad leaving McCarthy in part because Captain McSorley didn’t like to spend any more money than he had to on these trips, and he leaned heavily on his fellow sailors to prep the ship for them. Having his mates aboard to ready the ship for sail meant he didn’t have to pay deckhands double time because it was a Sunday.
McSorley ran a tight ship, and his wife enjoyed the bonuses for making more runs with heavier payloads beyond his quota. McSorley was good at running the ship, and his wife Nellie proved it. “I always remember my aunt Nellie walking in with her big fur coat [at Thanksgiving or Christmas],” McSorley’s niece Kay McSorley recalled to me. “Just glamorous . . . I always was amazed by the fur coat.”
Watchman Ransom “Ray” Cundy of Superior may have been slipping out of the local bar. “Ransom tended to drink his paychecks,” Superior attorney Toby Marcovich told me, although he never failed to pay his lawyers’ fees. Toby used Cundy’s fee payments as a mnemonic device to forever remember his name. “Ransom, as in money,” he told me. It’s one reason the seasoned small-town jack-of-all-trades (and master of all of them) lawyer would accept Doreen Cundy’s case against Oglebay Norton Corporation, the shipping company that ran the Edmund Fitzgerald. She would be lucky to work with him; Toby had won million-dollar settlements, gotten someone off a murder rap, and labored through the occasional probate estate cases.
The description of Cundy was not necessarily inaccurate, but it wasn’t exactly fair either. The year before in 1974, Cundy’s daughter was shot to death by her husband in a horrific murder-suicide. He was once the life of the party — or in this the case the ship — but the tragedy weighed heavy on him. He never regained the spark in his step nor his wry, trademark sense of humor. Nonetheless, his daughter, Cheryl Rozman, remembered him fondly as a devoted father with a “tender heart” and one who worked hard, made friends quickly, and always kept those friends close.
But because of his drinking, Cundy’s wife couldn’t rely on him for a steady income. She took up work waiting tables at Louis’s Diner, which Toby frequented. Louis’s was the beating heart of downtown Superior, where people of all walks of life gathered — sailors, lawyers, doctors, farmers, longshoremen. This was where Toby met Doreen. The relationship ensured Doreen had a good lawyer on hand, in case she ever needed one.
***
As the Edmund Fitzgerald steamed out of the port on November 9, 1975, Bob and Peg Hom, just like Janice and her children, waved farewell from far off in the distance. The Fitzgerald’s final voyage had begun.
Armagost, Cundy, McSorley and the rest of the crew were hoping this would be the last trip of the season. But if the weather was any indication, they could be going into December, because it felt like an Indian summer. One of the boat loaders, Clarence Dennis, would have agreed with Bob Hom about the day. “It was a nice day. It could have been a little cloudy, but it was not a stormy day,” Dennis said. Winds were picking up and there could be some storms in the offing, but that was nothing unusual. “We were indicating a general increase in winds and an increase in the waves,” according to Raymond Waldman of the National Weather Service. Forecasts would change in the coming hours, but for now, all was quiet.
Although in 1975 meteorological equipment and techniques were not archaic, ore freighters like the Fitzgerald were woefully underequipped, and there were no dedicated fixed entities along the way to collect data and make weather observations. Crews relied on ships ahead of the weather to gather data and report back. It was a less-than-ideal system, and the National Weather Service would agree. “We have very few places from which we get weather information from a fixed point on a continuous basis, so we have an urgent need for that kind of information,” Raymond Waldman of the National Weather Service in Chicago said. The truth was that the union had fought tooth and nail for these and other workplace safety improvements. Employers were either too cheap or too oblivious to find ways to improve travel efficiency, protect workers, safeguard expensive cargo, and save money — or all four.
Workplace safety had not been taken as seriously then as it would be later. The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA) had recently been adopted (1970). Automation and mechanization not only led to job loss but also sped up production processes that “increased dangers” for workers toiling alongside assembly lines. The proof was in the pudding: occupational injury incident rates were a staggering threefold greater in 1975 (9.1) than in 2018 (2.8).
Charts proved useless, but not because they weren’t good sources of information. Ship captains were not unlike dads who refuse to use road maps to make their way around the country on family vacations. “I had captains yell at me for using radar, search lights, and looking at charts,” former Great Lakes sailor (1976–87) and Green Bay, Wisconsin, attorney Tim Nixon told me; although in this instance it would not matter because the chart available on the Edmund Fitzgerald was fifty-three years old.
The reason for the captains’ unwillingness? “According to the captains, you didn’t need it. Didn’t like you talking on the radio; didn’t like you telling anybody anything,” Nixon said. Rand McNally doesn’t tell dad how to drive the family minivan, either.
***
The Edmund Fitzgerald was heading to Detroit rather than her usual lower lake destination of Toledo, Ohio, because that day she was sailing for National Steel and not Oglebay Norton Corporation. Ship companies had mutual aid agreements. If one needed a load of taconite at a particular time but did not have the capacity to fill the order, they could tap the resources of another company. It wasn’t too common, but it did happen. In 1975, the Fitz loaded up at the Superior ore docks on four instances, or approximately 10 percent of the time. The Fitzgerald made on average forty-four round trips each season. In this instance, National Steel needed a load of taconite for its steel mill in Detroit but didn’t have a ship in the upper lake.
Oglebay Norton Corporation got them out of their pinch. Yes, they were competitors, but they were in the same league, if not on the same team. Foreign competition was crushing the steel industry, and it was gobbling up more and more of the U.S. domestic car market. Collectively, steel companies had an incentive to cut costs as much as possible to remain competitive with the steel giants overseas such as Japan and South Korea. From 1950 to 1976, U.S. steel production fell by over one-half — from 50 percent to 20 percent of world production. By the 1970s the “only positive export trend . . . material dominance which underlay international economic strategy vanished.” This is to say nothing of a comprehensive, economic-wide industrial strategy. Worse, when elected officials had a good idea or two to shore up industry and jobs, the country’s editorial pages and elite were assailing “protectionism” though “ignoring the foreign subsidies or government ownership” that created industry’s problem in the first place. Trade policies were also “dominated by strategic political considerations” as opposed to serious domestic, economic concerns typically in an effort to bolster counter weights to communist spheres of influence in southeast Asia.
The winds picked up as the day wore on. Cedric Woodward, pilot of the Swedish-flagged Avafors, and Captain Jesse Cooper of the Arthur M. Anderson were both on the lake that evening, though they were coming from opposite ends of the lake. Each had a different take on the weather. “I would consider it a severe local storm because it was intense, but it was not a vast wide two-day storm,” Cooper said. “It was very severe . . . it was one of the biggest and wildest seas I have been in,” Woodward said.
The difference in perspective can be easily explained. According to Ledolf Baer, director of the National Oceanographic Services office, “There is a great deal of variance between eyeball estimates.”
“What studies show is if you are on a big boat, you tend to underestimate the waves. . . . [The studies] showed that what people think they see from a ship, what they talk about wave height, is the significant height,” said Baer.
Woodward’s Avafors was a saltwater ship and built for the rolling seas of an ocean, not the mercurial, pounding waves of Superior. And Woodward had the added perspective of sailing oceans and not just lakes. The waves appeared larger and felt worse to Woodward than what Cooper saw and experienced. The inexact science of “eyeballing” wave size proved even more dangerous because that was all captains had to go on. Ships on the Great Lakes did not have any instruments to measure the size of waves.
Just nineteen minutes after the Fitzgerald left safe harbor, the National Weather Service issued gale warnings. They were upgrades from the report they received at 2:20 p.m. but nothing of great concern; the reports were always subject to change, sometimes at a moment’s notice. In the Midwest, there is a saying, “If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour.”
At 4:15 p.m., McSorley spotted the Arthur M. Anderson, the other ore freighter, leaving her port of Two Harbors, Minnesota, about half an hour south of the Fitzgerald’s normal upper lake port of Silver Bay. The Anderson was about fifteen miles behind the Fitzgerald. Just to be cautious, McSorley and the Anderson’s skipper, Jesse “Bernie” Cooper, made it a point to stay in contact. This was particularly important for the Fitzgerald because they were heading north and east, away from the storm. The Anderson would get the weather first and would be the Fitzgerald’s main source of weather information from here on out — more so than the National Weather Service.
The two ships crossed paths around 7:00 p.m. The Anderson would be sailing to the south of the Fitzgerald, while the latter would be taking a more northerly route. They would remain in this formation until the following afternoon at 12:30 p.m. and then switch once more around 3:30 p.m., when each was approaching Whitefish Bay on the far eastern edge of the lake and thereafter the Soo Locks at Sault (pronounced “Soo”) Ste. Marie, which connected Superior with Huron via the Saint Mary’s River.
The next important milestone for the Fitzgerald was passing Isle Royale in the lake’s northern waters around 1:00 a.m. This island was a leftover chunk of earth rock on the lake’s basin that the glaciers missed when retreating north some forty thousand years earlier. It was of good size and hard to miss.
While the weather conditions grew in severity, the Fitzgerald made her regular weather report at 7:00 a.m., but this would be her last one. She would miss the regularly scheduled 1:00 p.m., 7:00 p.m., 1:00 a.m., and 7:00 a.m. reports. The Fitzgerald reported that wind speeds were at thirty-five knots and waves were as high as ten feet. She also reported that their arrival at the Soo Locks would be “indefinite, due to the weather.” She would augment her route by tacking north to be closer to land, seeking cover from stormy waters. Still, there was nothing to suggest things were seriously awry. Captains and crew were well accustomed to the weather this time of the year; November was the worst month for sailing.
On Monday, November 10, at 1:00 p.m., the Fitzgerald was within eleven miles of Michipicoten Island, located in the north-central portion of the lake. This was as close to the shore as the Fitzgerald could be and still make the Soo Locks without getting too far off its direct route. McSorley had to decide: safety or efficiency. Ships carried only enough fuel to make port and had to conserve resources. There was also a tradeoff: the more fuel a ship carried, the less cargo it could haul. Battling rough seas burned up additional precious fuel. Timing was also important to captains because saving time also meant bonuses, though crew members had no such incentive.
At 2:45 p.m., the Anderson changed course to avoid the Six Fathom Shoal, which was located just north of Caribou Island and ninety miles away from Sault Ste Marie. Cooper noted that the Fitzgerald held her position and “passed close” to the shoal. According to an account taken during a U.S. Coast Guard investigation the following year, Cooper told his first mate that “the Fitzgerald was closer to [the] shoal than he wanted the Anderson to be.”
And just as older captains refuse to consult charts, they also avoid telling each other what they should or should not do with their own ships. Cooper’s testimony does not say if he warned the Fitzgerald that she appeared to be getting too close to the shoal, nor does it indicate whether the question was asked at all. According to Jim Woodward, son of Avafors captain Cedric Woodward, Cooper refused to allow his first mate to call the Fitzgerald and warn McSorley he was heading for the Six Fathom Shoal. “My dad was on the Avafors that night and they were talking of the event of that night and that’s when the mate told my dad about it.” The reason? “Another captain doesn’t sail another captain’s ship,” Woodward recalled.
The Fitzgerald did not avoid the shoal. For many historians and Fitzgerald buffs, this was the decision that triggered the chain of events leading to the ship’s demise. The decision would be central to one of the longest sustaining and credible theories, one that Cooper believed until the day he died; the ship bottomed out on the Six Fathom Shoal and tore a hole in the hull. “I don’t care what anybody says . . . she had either bottomed out or had a stress fracture in the hull,” Cooper stated in the government’s official after-action investigatory report, referring to the notorious Six Fathom Shoal near Caribou Island that had grounded other boats in the past. “She was sinking from that time on.”
Ric Mixter, a documentarian, former TV reporter, radio DJ and Fitzgerald enthusiast who has studied the wreckage since he made a dive to the Fitzgerald in 1994, would not agree. Mixter would argue that there was no sign of underlying damage to the stern despite the fact that — confirmed by his first-hand observation — it rested in an inverted position on the bottom of the lake. Mixter also argues that there were no signs of the ship running aground at Six Fathom Shoal, although this is a rather dubious conclusion since the shoal is one mile long and was never fully inspected. Moreover, shoals — like any matter on a lake bottom — are susceptible to erosion and any evidence of a grounding would have disappeared long ago.
Meanwhile, a low-pressure system from Canada was washing over the lake and mixing with water still warm from the summer, producing a massive snowfall. Combined with high winds, sailing conditions quickly deteriorated. That was enough for the Coast Guard to direct all ships headed to the Soo to anchor near shore. The locks were closing, and the weather was getting worse. But the Anderson and Fitzgerald soldiered on.
Forty-five minutes later, at 3:30 p.m., McSorley reported top-side damage. This was the first report from McSorley that the ship was sustaining damage. According to McSorley, the deck’s rail fence broke, vents on the deck were damaged, and the boat was taking on a list.
MCSORLEY: Anderson, this is the Fitzgerald. I have sustained some topside damage. I have a fence rail laid down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list. I’m checking down [slowing speed]. Will you stay by me til I get to Whitefish?
COOPER: Charlie on that Fitzgerald. Do you have your pumps going?
MCSORLEY: Yes, both of them.
McSorley had had enough. He was doing the sailing equivalent of stopping at the nearest gas station to ask for directions.
The three damage reports were significant because they were highly unusual. It was almost without precedent for them to occur at the same time.
First, fence rails on the side of an ore ship rarely come down. They are built to last and withstand the worst possible weather conditions. The rails consist of three 3/8-inch wire cords strung through three-inch-thick stanchions thirty inches tall. Sometimes one cord will snap. Once in a blue moon the second strand will break. But it is rare that all three strands break and the rail collapses. If it were to snap off completely it is likely because of hogging, according to Cooper. Hogging typically occurs when cargo is not evenly distributed. On the Fitzgerald and other Great Lakes freighters, cargo holds are separated by walls, but the dividers are not indestructible — far from it. In rough seas, shifting cargo can break through the walls and spill into other holds.
Second, the damaged vents — which had likely popped off, according to testimony by Cooper — suggested that intense water and air pressure from below popped the vent like an engine overheating and blowing a gasket. The engineers would quickly turn on the ship’s two ballast pumps. Ballast pumps pull water out of the ballast tanks when the ship comes to port. Water pours out of a hole on the side of the ship as if it were relieving itself. They can also be used to pump out water coming into the ballast tanks while sailing. The cargo hold is another matter. On a full load, and especially in heavy storms, pumps in the cargo hold are next to useless. Pumps get clogged up and water that does get into the hold usually stays there because taconite, which consists of permeable sand silica, acts like millions of little sponges absorbing water. It weighs the ship down considerably.
Third, McSorley disclosed “a list,” which occurs when damage is done to one side of the ship, including a tear in the hull. That is, the ship begins to drift just slightly in a certain direction without the control of the helm. Cooper would soon after describe the list as a “starboard list” — the side of the ship facing Six Fathom Shoal. That would mean it would be quite possible that it had run aground and sprung a leak. For some, including Ric Mixter, the details are neither significant nor accurate. Mixter likens Cooper’s claim of a starboard list to the telephone game, as telling and retelling a story allows it to take on new details, shapes, and sizes. Another Fitzgerald enthusiast, Jeff Thomas, notes the discrepancy of Cooper referring to a starboard list after the fact but gives it short shrift.
While the argument that Cooper misrepresented the occurrence certainly has some merit, Cooper’s detail should not be discounted. The events of November 10 were more significant and lasting than anecdotes and jokes told at a cocktail party. In the eighteen years since the ship’s sinking, Cooper had more than enough time to turn over in his head the events of November 10. He made this statement for the Coast Guard report and maintained his conclusion until the day he died: “I don’t care what anybody says. At 3:10 in the afternoon, she had either bottomed out or had a stress fracture in the hull. That’s the only two possibilities. She was sinking from that time on.”
In The Trial of the Edmund Fitzgerald, editor Michael Schumacher cited a transcript from the U.S. Coast Guard investigation’s interview with Cooper, which had heretofore not been published. According to Schumacher, Cooper explains why he considered it a starboard list: “I was up in the wheelhouse when [McSorley] called, and he told me that his fence rail was laid down and that he had snapped off two vents and he was taking water through those vents into the tanks. He didn’t say starboard or port list, but I would assume it was a starboard list, because the sea was on our starboard side a little bit.” If he was not certain it was a starboard list, why didn’t he change his mind in the eighteen years between the U.S. Coast Guard interview and Mixter’s interview in 1993?
It is the job of a captain to gather information and make decisions based on real-time information. Cooper had been at the helm of a Great Lakes ship for ten years and had been sailing for nearly thirty-five years. He, more than anyone else — and that includes amateur historians — would be in the position to know what was going on during the afternoon and evening of November 10, 1975. And his recall was based on recorded information — a complete radio transmission and transcript of the exchange — and not on mere memory. Indeed, the transcript is printed on a wall-size painting at the Valley Camp Museum in Sault Ste Marie for thousands of visitors across the country and world to read every year. In addition, there have been scores of books, pamphlets, scholarship, and tourist trinkets that have been written and made over the years. Now there is an entire cache of internet searches of the transmission and transcript. Cooper could easily have consulted these, reflected on the moment, and come to a different conclusion. But he didn’t. Cooper died in 1993.
At 4:10 p.m., the Fitzgerald reported that its radar was not working. The radar was the most reliable equipment the Fitzgerald had for navigation. Incredibly, both of the ship’s radars were not working even though they were on different circuits for the purposes of redundancy. The Fitzgerald would now have to rely entirely on the Anderson for radar positioning.
It was also around this time that McSorley asked for “navigational assistance”; in other words, conditions were not improving. Anderson’s first mate, Morgan Clark, was back on watch (the second mate had assumed watch after noon) and quickly obliged. But by then the Fitzgerald had already come within striking distance of Six Fathom Shoal. For McSorley, it was too little, too late. For Clark, it was “told you so.”
At 7:10 p.m., the Anderson made final contact with the Fitzgerald. The last words exchanged by First Mate Clark and McSorley would live in infamy in the annals of American shipwreck folklore. Not even the most infamous of shipwrecks, the Titanic, had a more memorable sequence at the end of its life.
ANDERSON: Fitzgerald, this is the Anderson. Have you checked down?
FITZGERALD: Yes we have.
ANDERSON: Fitzgerald, we are about 10 miles behind you, and gaining about 1 1/2 miles per hour. Fitzgerald, there is a target 19 miles ahead of us. So the target would be 9 miles on ahead of you.
FITZGERALD: Well, am I going to clear?
ANDERSON: Yes. He is going to pass to the west of you.
FITZGERALD: Well, fine.
ANDERSON: By the way, Fitzgerald, how are you making out with your problem?
FITZGERALD: We are holding our own.
ANDERSON: Okay, fine. I’ll be talking to you later.
The transcript suggests that McSorley was totally oblivious of the ship’s condition, although in McSorley’s defense, he wouldn’t have been able to tell if the waves were getting larger or he was just getting lower into the water. Said Cooper: “He gave no indication that he was worried or that he had a problem or there was something he couldn’t cope with. There was no excitement whatsoever. This was a problem, but it was under control. This is what you would assume from the way he talked, that there was no problem.”
Roy Anderson, second mate of the Anderson concurred: “I was told that he was not in any standing danger. He was not having any problems, and I believe if he was, that he was to call me on that.” In the Coast Guard report, Cooper says, “I firmly believe that he had a damaged ship and didn’t know how damaged she was.” When McSorley chose not to go “right up on the beach in Caribou” it told Cooper that he was unaware of the ship’s true condition. And Cooper was positive about that conclusion. Rare as it may be, “he would have put [the boat] on the beach. I am sure of it,” Cooper said.
It is not clear if Cooper’s assessment was made retrospectively or if he believed it at the time. If the latter, it begs the question, Why didn’t Cooper warn McSorley? Was it because “a captain doesn’t tell another how to sail their ship?” First Mate Morgan Clark could just make out what he believed were the lights of the Fitzgerald. Flickering. On and off. On and off. On and off. And then off.
Clark took a breath, rubbed his eyes, and strained to find the lights again. It was like he was trying to will them back on. He could now see the lights of the Avafors. The Fitzgerald had been in between the Anderson and the Avafors. If he could see the Avafors’ lights, he should have been able to see the Fitzgerald. But he didn’t.
She was gone.
This article appears in Nov. 12-25, 2025.