Ninety Fathoms Down: Canadian Stories of The Great Lakes

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

In the opening sentence of this book, newspaper columnist Mark Bourrie
bluntly states “I don’t like boats.” It might seem strange, then,
that Bourrie’s book is mostly a collection of stories about boats.
Yet, like many confirmed landlubbers, Bourrie has a fascination with
open water. He was born and raised on the shores of the Great Lakes, a
water system that gallon for gallon has claimed more ships than any
ocean or sea. Because many of his relatives worked the lakes as sailors,
Bourrie grew up steeped in tales of sudden storms and deadly mistakes.

The tales Bourrie presents span four centuries. The earliest concerns
an unnamed little boat used by the 17th-century Jesuit missionaries of
Huronia. The last retells the famous saga of the ill-fated Edmund
Fitzgerald. In between are chapters on many notorious disasters,
including those that involved the steamships Asia, Atlantic, Speedy,
Algoma, Mary Ward, and Noronic.

Bourrie has forsaken the academic style to take the reader on a chatty
and sometimes catty tour of maritime disaster. For the most part this
works, but once or twice he leaves the reader confused. In his story
about the wreck of the steamship Speedy, for example, Bourrie describes
events that only an onboard eyewitness could have seen. But there were
no survivors, and he neglects to explain how he knows what happened to
the ship. There are no footnotes, no index, and his bibliography is
frustratingly vague.

But Bourrie’s book is meant only to whet a reader’s appetite for
the rich history of the Great Lakes. It is a great read: given the
predominance of shipwrecks between its, covers, though it is probably
best enjoyed on dry land.