Nearly fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank and killed all 29 men aboard during a ferocious storm on Lake Superior, a modern maritime tragedy that has echoed for decades in song and mystery.
A hurricane-like November storm on the Great Lake is partly responsible for the ship's demise. But such storms aren't uncommon, and investigations haven't definitively figured out what went wrong onboard the ship to cause it to sink.
The shipwreck was soon to be made famous in the haunting song by Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which was released a year after the sinking.
On the morning of November 9, 1975, the ship, with its all-American crew of 29, sailed from Superior, Wisconsin, with a cargo of taconite pellets bound for Zug Island in Detroit.
In gale-force winds, 35-foot waves, and a blinding snowstorm, sometime after 7 p.m. on November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald foundered and sank more than 500 feet to the bottom of Lake Superior in Canadian waters near Whitefish Bay, according to the Detroit Historical Society.
