Fitzgerald's Storm: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Gordon Turner is the author of Empress of Britain: Canadian Pacific’s
Greatest Ship and the editor of SeaFare, a quarterly newsletter on sea
travel.

The sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald in November 1975, during a storm
that swept Lake Superior, has been commemorated in song as well as in
books, magazine and newspaper articles, and television programs. (Dr.
MacInnis and his diving team investigated the sunken ship in order to
prepare a television documentary.) This book gives an acceptable account
of the 729-foot ship, its officers and crew, and its final voyage, but
perhaps of even greater interest are the events that followed. The
central finding of the United States Coast Guard inquiry—that the
sinking was largely a result of ineffective hatch closures—was widely
criticized (an improperly charted shoal was a more likely cause).

The review copy of this book was defective (16 pages were missing from
the last four chapters), making a reliable overall assessment impossible
to render. With regard to specifics, however, the book certainly suffers
from perfunctory editing. The Whitefish Bay is misidentified as the
Edmund Fitzgerald in a caption accompanying the illustration; moreover,
the former vessel is inaccurately described as a tanker instead of a
bulk carrier. The ship Sir Denys Lowson is twice incorrectly called the
Lonson, and is wrongly termed a “veteran.” The poet Philip Sidney is
referred to as Sidney Philip. These shortcomings detract from the value
of a book that, at best, does no more than an adequate job of telling
the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald.