the Edmund Fitzgerald

The reason we remember this shipwreck is that a songwriter made a ballad about the tragedy.

which says a lot about how artists frame the way we remember our history

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Smithsonian Magazine has an essay on the ship, the shipwreck and why we remember it.

Half a century ago, on an unseasonably warm fall day, the freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald set off from the western edge of Lake Superior with a cargo full of iron ore. Within hours, a ferocious storm gathered in strength, ultimately producing 60-foot waves and sinking the prized vessel. There were no survivors. The exact cause of its demise remains unknown.

Over the decades, many ships have faced a similar fate on the Great Lakes, a part of the world that some say is more dangerous than the open ocean. But the tragedy of the Edmund Fitzgerald looms the largest in our collective national memory—and it led to changes in the maritime industry that dramatically improved the safety of shipping.

 there is a podcast with the author of a book about the tragedy at the link

In this episode, host Ari Daniel speaks with author John U. Bacon about what made the Edmund Fitzgerald famous even before it sank, what we know and don’t know about the crew’s final moments, and the ship’s lasting legacy.

Bacon: Commercial sailors will tell you that the Great Lakes are actually more dangerous than the ocean, which seems, to me, crazy. Daniel: To jump in for context here, these lakes are just enormous. Lake Superior alone is about half the size of Florida. Even so, you might not guess that navigating these waters could be more perilous than sailing on the ocean. Bacon: So the salties, the guys in the oceans, they all laugh about the Great Lakes until they’re on them. And they stop laughing pretty quickly. When it’s smooth, it’s gorgeous and it’s pretty simple. But when it’s not, it gets ugly very fast for a lot of reasons. One, the salt on the oceans squashes down the points of the waves. It weighs them down and it also spreads them out. So you get these big but smooth roller coasters—still not fun and still can be dangerous. But by and large, you’re probably going to get over it. It’s not going to be pleasant, but you’ll get there. On the Great Lakes, there are peaks like mountaintops, and they’re twice as close together. Daniel: Which means that during a bad storm, waves the size of a four-story building can come at you every four to eight seconds. Bacon: And that’s how ships crack. They actually crack. And this has happened many times in the Great Lakes.