Monday marks the 50^th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a maritime disaster that claimed 29 lives in November 1975. If you’re not a maritime history buff or a Gordon Lightfoot fan, here’s everything you need to know about the tragedy and its legend.

Deb Felder holds up a picture of her father who died on the Edmund Fitzgerald Monday, Oct. 20, 2025, in her home in Nashotah, Wis. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

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What Was The Edmund Fitzgerald?

The Edmund Fitzgerald was a Great Lakes freighter ship, which sunk in a November storm on Lake Superior in 1975. None of her 29 crew members survived, and none of their remains were ever recovered. A song by Canadian folk musician Gordon Lightfoot made the tragedy one of the most famous maritime disasters in history.

When she launched in June 1958, the 729-foot-long, 75-foot-wide ship was the largest on the Great Lakes, capable of carrying 26,000 long tons of cargo. Fitzgerald was big, sturdy, fast, and modern, even in 1975; by then, the ship was still considered young by Great Lakes standards, when ships would ply the waters for fifty or sixty years before retirement. Her captain, officers, and crew were mostly experienced Great Lakes sailors with solid reputations. And none of that would be enough to save her.

On the afternoon of November 9, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald left the port of Superior, Wisconsin. Her holds were laden with more than 26,000 tons of an iron ore called taconite, which had come from mines in Minnesota and were bound for ironworks at Zug Island, Michigan. The roughly 700-mile trip eastward across Lake Superior, through the Saulte Sainte Marie locks, and south through Lake Huron should have taken Edmund Fitzgerald about two days, even with the fierce storm sweeping across the eastern half of the lake. But the Fitzgerald, the iron ore, and the 29 sailors never reached the locks, much less Zug Island. Sometime after 7:10 on the evening of November 10, the ship disappeared beneath the stormy waves of Lake Superior.

A U.S. Navy search aircraft picked up the magnetic signature of something lying on the lakefloor beneath 530 feet of water on November 14. It turned out to be the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, lying in two pieces at the bottom of Lake Superior just an hour’s sail from safe harbor. The front half of the ship had plunged to the bottom bow-first, digging a furrow in the lake bottom. The stern lay upside-down 170 feet away, with tons of iron ore and broken pieces of the hull and deck lying between them.

Why Is The Edmund Fitzgerald Famous?

A tragedy like wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald would have become a legendary part of Great Lakes maritime history no matter what happened afterward. The loss of one of the Lakes’ biggest and most well-regarded ships along with her entire crew would have rocked coastal communities and the entire Great Lakes shipping industry. Like the Titanic, the Edmund Fitzgerald demonstrated that no ship is ever big enough or advanced enough to be invincible.

But people outside the maritime communities of the Great Lakes might not have heard of the Edmund Fitzgerald – and you might not be reading this article 50 years later – without Canadian folk singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot and his 1976 ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

A few weeks after the shipwreck, Newsweek published a short article entitled “The Cruelest Month,” and the story inspired Lightfoot to write a ballad about the sinking. He included on his June 1976 album Summertime Dream. Though a ballad about a ship sinking below the frigid waves of a November storm sounds like unlikely summer radio fare, the song topped music charts in the U.S. and Canada, and it’s still a cultural staple.

Why Did The Edmund Fitzgerald Sink?

Fifty years later, it’s still not clear exactly what sent the Edmund Fitzgerald and her crew to their doom – but there are several very plausible theories. The ship was sailing through a major storm, whose gale-force winds whipped the surface of Lake Superior into mountainous waves. Picture a hurricane, but at near-freezing temperatures. Any number of things could go wrong, and we may never know exactly which one did.

Shortly before her disappearance, the Edmund Fitzgerald had just passed through a dangerous area between two islands, Michipicoten Island and Caribou Island. It may seem like a paradox to landlubbers, but that area of the lake is dangerous because it’s so shallow; the lake bottom rises steeply from several hundred feet deep to a rocky shoal lurking just 36 feet below the surface, aptly named Six Fathom Shoal (a fathom is six feet). That’s cutting it close for the Fitzgerald anyway, since the bottom of her hull usually reached 25 feet below the water’s surface. But in stormy seas, the troughs between waves can dip well below the usual surface level, and a wave-tossed ship could scrape against the rocky lake bottom with enough force to rip open her hull.

The Edmund Fitzgerald, like most of her fellow Great Lakes freighters, was much longer than she was wide, and that left her vulnerable to bending in the middle when sailing through heavy waves. If waves lifted the two ends of the ship, the hull could bend downward, or sag, in the middle. A wave passing under her midsection could cause the hull to bend upward, or hog. To much bending either way could snap the hull in two – or, less dramatically but just as fatally, open cracks in the hull that let water rush in.

Not long before the sinking, Fitzgerald’s captain (a seasoned Great Lakes captain named Ernest McSorley) told his counterpart aboard the Arthur Anderson that some of the fencing around his deck had come loose. The Anderson’s captain, Bernie Cooper, later recalled that he’d never seen waves rip deck fencing loose, but that a sudden change in the fencing wires’ tension – the kind of loosening and sharply pulling taut again that happens to a hogging hull – could snap them. That’s what Anderson thought might have happened, he said later.

On the other hand, a U.S. Coast Guard report suggested that debris in the water, like a floating log or something ripped free from the Fitzgerald itself, could have ripped the fencing free. It could also have damaged the hardware that held one (or more) of the ship’s 21 massive cargo hatches shut. Two vents on deck had also been lost, and that may have allowed water another route into the ship’s interior.

“We Are Holding Our Own”

What is known is that for the last few hours of the crew’s life, the Edmund Fitzgerald was sailing without the radar that would have helped McSorley keep track of his position; wind and waves had ripped away both of the ship’s radar antennas. The lighthouse at Whitefish Point, the shelter McSorley was hoping to reach, was darkened by a power outage, so the crew didn’t even have a light to sail toward. All they had was each other – and McSorley’s phone connection to the Arthur Anderson.

The last words anyone heard from the Edmund Fitzgerald came from McSorley at 7:10 that evening: “We are holding our own.”