Lake Superior’s most famous shipwrecks have dramatic tales to tell

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The Edmund Fitzgerald vanished from the surface of Lake Superior 49 years ago this week.

The ore carrier left behind an oil slick, debris and two empty lifeboats. It was an ominous ending — mysterious and tragic, too. The 29-man crew perished.

As fans of the late folk singer Gordon Lightfoot know: “The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead.” Lightfoot’s 1976 hit “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” helped immortalize the tale of the ship that went down in the “gales of November.”

After a trip to the shore of the big lake in Bayfield, reader Michelle Tanner of Minnetonka wondered about the stories of other downed vessels that still rest below the waves. She wrote to Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-generated reporting project, to ask: What are some of the Lake Superior shipwrecks that Minnesotans should know about besides the Edmund Fitzgerald?

Another reader, Jodie Swenson from Albert Lea, sent in a related question: How many of the lake’s shipwrecks can be tied to the weather?

Most often, wrecks are indeed caused by weather. At times, other factors are also involved. Ships collide with ships. They spring leaks. A whole fleet might be poorly constructed. Or, overloaded with cargo, they disappear beneath the surface in a blink.

Hundreds of vessels have sunk in the big lake, and shipwreck hunters still work to find their watery resting places. Many of the sunken ships have striking stories. One, the Mataafa, is the namesake of the terrible storm that brought it and more than two dozen other ships aground more than a century ago.

There are at least 550 vessels that have gone to rest in the world’s largest freshwater lake (by surface area), according to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point, Mich.

The nonprofit behind the museum, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, has its own underwater research vessel that scours the lake for wreckage.

The team has had successes finding many long-lost storied ships.

Among their findings: Atlanta, a schooner-barge that had been missing more than 130 years; the Arlington, whose captain waved from the pilot house as the ship went down; Adella Shores, which mysteriously disappeared en route to Duluth with a load of salt; and the barquentine Nucleus, which had a slew of misadventures before it finally sank.

The team was also part of an expedition that recovered the 200-pound bronze bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The Fitzgerald met its fate on the windy night of Nov. 10, 1975. It was carrying 26,216 tons of taconite pellets from Superior, Wis., to Detroit. It began to take on water and the captain reported that they had turned on the 17-year-old vessel’s pumps. Another freighter, the Arthur M. Anderson, trailed the troubled ship.

Then their crew lost visual contact. The Fitzgerald fell off radar and the freighter went down near Whitefish Point. U.S. Coast Guard helicopters and airplanes, as well as least three freighters, joined in a search. But the ship was lost to the lake.

“We classify it as sunk,” a Coast Guard spokesman said after they had searched for 18 hours, according to news reports.

Each year, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum marks the sinking, hosting family members of those who were aboard. Minnesotans also mark the anniversary with an annual beacon lighting at Split Rock Lighthouse near Two Harbors and the reading of the names of the lost men.

Sometimes, the weather is so powerful that it causes widespread mayhem. Consider the Mataafa Storm of 1905. Over two days in November, 29 ships on Lake Superior were damaged or destroyed, and 36 men died.

Nine of those who died were aboard the Mataafa, the vessel that gave the storm its name. The Mataafa, towing a barge called the Nasmyth, left Duluth under the threat of storm and met the promised winds and waves. It spent hours bucking them before the captain decided to go back to the original port rather than head east toward the Apostle Islands.

As it neared Duluth, the badly beaten ship faced waves that “tossed vessels around like toys,” Michael Schumacher wrote in “Too Much Sea for their Decks: Shipwrecks of Minnesota’s North Shore and Isle Royale.”

Captain Richard F. Humble disconnected the Mataafa from the smaller barge to ease navigation into the canal.

A wave pushed the vessel perpendicular to the piers, damaging the mid-part of the Mataafa. It continued to get tossed about in the waves.

“Comber after comber struck sledgehammer blows, breaking her amidships,” Julius Wolff Jr. wrote in the collection “Lake Superior Shipwrecks.”

The vessel began to flood and touched down on the lake’s bottom more than 200 yards from the shore. About half of the crew of nearly 30 were at the front, half at the back. The former survived by gathering around lamps for warmth and building a fire within the ship. The latter froze on the top deck or drowned.

A reported 10,000 people gathered on the beach and watched helplessly.

Humble lived to tell about it. “Every bad storm that sweeps the lakes is reported by ‘old lake captains’ to be the worst,” Humble told the Duluth Herald after he was rescued. “I’ve been sailing the lakes 16 years, six years as a captain, and I can truthfully say that this was the worst storm I ever encountered. The waves were the biggest I’ve ever seen and they were sweeping over both sides.”

Earlier that same day near Two Harbors, a barge called the Madeira was in the tow of the William Edenborn. That ship’s captain also cut the line and set the smaller vessel free. The Edenborn ended up beached, one crew member dead. The Madeira, unable to drop its anchors, pounded against the rocky cliffs along the shore, and the 436-foot schooner barge began to break apart.

Fred Benson, from the Madeira’s 10-man crew, found his way to a rocky ledge with a line, according to newspaper accounts. He climbed up 60 feet while getting slammed with wind and waves. He weighed down the line with a rock and tossed it to his crewmates.

They were able to climb to safety, but were feared dead for the two days they spent on shore before they were rescued. All but the first mate survived. The captain had frozen feet, according a newspaper account.

The Mataafa Storm or Mataafa Blow, at the time described as the worst the lake had seen, led to the building of Split Rock Lighthouse.

Several of the ships destroyed in the storm belonged to U.S. Steel, and the company set to work securing a lighthouse for the coastline near Two Harbors. The project received federal funding in 1907 and construction was completed in 1910.

Today, Split Rock Lighthouse is a museum. The wreckage of the Madeira is close by, visible to kayakers and paddleboaters who float over the resting place.

The debris field from the ship stretches 25 acres, according to Hayes Scriven, the live-in caretaker at Split Rock.

“The bow is facing straight up,” he said. “You can paddle over the top of it.”

Technology has improved in the half century since the Fitzgerald went down. Captains also make different risk calculations — waiting out weather that their counterparts a century ago would likely have felt pressure to push through.

During a recent bout of bad weather near Whitefish Point, Corey Adkins, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum’s communications director, saw six freighters anchored and waiting out the storm, he said.

“You can see when there is a big blow out there,” Adkins said. “You can see them hiding wherever they can.”

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