Great Lakes Shipwrecks & Survivals

William Ratigan, Reynold H. Weidenaar

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1989
• Print ISBN: 9780802870100
• eBook ISBN: 9781467435154
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

In this breathtaking chronicle of the most spectacular shipwrecks and survivals on the Great Lakes, William Ratigan re-creates vivid scenes of high courage and screaming panic from which no reader can turn away.
Included in this striking catalog of catastrophes and Flying Dutchmen are the magnificent excursion liner Eastland, which capsized at her pier in the Chicago River, drowning 835 people within clutching distance of busy downtown streets; the shipwrecked steel freighter Mataafa, which dumped its crew into freezing waters while the snowbound town of Duluth looked on; the dark Sunday in November 1913 when Lake Huron swallowed eight long ships without a man surviving to tell the tale; and the bitter November of 1958 when the Bradley went down in Lake Michigan during one of the greatest killer storms on the freshwater seas. An entire section is dedicated to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald -- the most famous maritime loss in modern times -- in Lake Superior in 1975.
Chilling watercolor illustrations, photographs, maps, and news clippings accentuate Ratigan's compelling and dramatic storytelling. Sailors, historians, and general readers alike will be swept away by these unforgettable tales of tragedy and heroism.

BOOK ONE

LOST IN LAKE MICHIGAN

Of death these jolly lads

Never once did dream;

Brave hearts sailed under canvas

And brave hearts sailed in steam.

Lost in Lake Michigan

They failed to reach the shore;

The gallant ships and crews

Will sail the Lakes no more!

(Fresh-water chantey, 1892)

The original version of the chantey on the preceding page told of the loss of the large new steel freighter W. H. Gilcher, with all hands, 21, on the stormy night of October 28, 1892, most probably in a collision with the schooner Ostrich, also lost with all hands, 7, on the same date. Wreckage from the two vessels washed ashore not a hundred feet apart on High Island in Lake Michigan’s Beaver archipelago, where wreckage from the Carl D. Bradley was found after the spring breakup in 1959.

1. Full Many a Midnight Ship

Neither the Americans who dwell along the seaboards nor those who hail from the inland reaches of plains and mountains can understand the vastness of the Great Lakes. Here, where the high walls of water stretch in lonesome grandeur to the horizon, only seeing is believing.

Perhaps the best impression of the size of the Great Lakes may be given in the following typical reactions. Newcomers from the Atlantic or the Pacific coasts, unconsciously paying their respects to these wide bodies of water generally unbroken by landmarks, call whichever Lake they visit “the ocean.” Similarly, when people from the inland-sea area take their families on a visit to California or Florida, the children, at first sight of an ocean, cry out: “Look, there’s the Lake!”

The greatest of all American seafaring stories, Moby Dick, offers due homage to the Great Lakes. Ishmael, spinning a yarn at the Golden Inn to a group of South Americans, sets the scene:

“Now, gentlemen, in their interflowing aggregate, these grand fresh-water seas of ours — Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan — possess an ocean-like expansiveness. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles. They have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories. They are swept by Borean and dismasting waves as direful as any that lash the salted wave. They know what shipwrecks are; for, out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.”

2. Stage-Setting for Sudden Death

There are fifteen hundred rolling miles of water from the top of Lake Superior to the toe of Lake Ontario. When the Jesuit explorers first came upon Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, they knelt down and tasted the waters, marveling that such mighty inland oceans were fresh instead of salt. When Champlain’s canoe burst out upon a single bay in Lake Huron, Georgian Bay, he was so impressed with this “fragment” of the great lake that he named it the fresh-water sea.

In modern times, Champlain’s canoe has yielded to ore and grain carriers longer than football fields. During the season of navigation, an average of more than ninety long ships a day pass through the Soo Canal, a busier waterway than the Panama and Suez canals put together. Every twelve minutes a big Great Lakes freighter passes Windmill Point between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair on the Detroit River.

These steamboats are equipped with the most modern navigational aids — radio, radar, and depthometers; they are supplied with advance information by the finest weather-warning system in the world; and yet they do not always reach port.

These great ships sail Great Lakes that can swallow them in one black moment without a trace. Storms exploding across hundreds of miles of open water pile up mountainous seas that strike swifter, and more often, than the deadliest waves on any ocean. Before the ship has a chance to recover from the last blow, the next is upon her. The Lakes captain has no sea room in which to maneuver; unlike his salt-water counterpart he must stay on course throughout the storm; he must weather the teeth of the gale.

It is an old joke, and a true one, on the Great Lakes that salt-water sailors often become seasick on what they have been known to call, disparagingly, our inland ponds, before closer acquaintance turns them green in the face and forces a respectful bow over the rail. The waves on the Lakes have a different motion; they are much sharper than ocean waves; they jump and tumble rather than roll and swell.

The waves of the Lakes strike quicker in comparison to the more lethargic ocean waves because they are less dense. When a ship bound down from fresh water sails out of Lake Ontario into the St. Lawrence River, she will raise herself two or three inches at the Plimsoll line as soon as she begins to hit the more buoyant salt water.

Just as there are differences between storms on the oceans and storms on the Lakes, so are there differences in the way each Lake acts up in a blow. Most veteran mates and captains and engineers whom I have known, like yellow-green Lake Erie least of all, in fair weather or foul. Even a line squall on treacherous Erie seems to scoop this shallowest of the Great Lakes from its muddy bottom and hurl it at the sky.

Despite its violent temper and rock-bound coasts, mariners would prefer to navigate Lake Superior in a storm rather than any of the other four Lakes, because of the sea room this greatest body of fresh water affords.

To Lake Michigan — the only one of the Great Lakes without an international boundary — sailing masters pay the utmost respect, not only because of this Lake’s long history of sudden disaster, but because of the prevailing winds that can sweep its length to roll up backbreaking seas, the scarcity of natural harbors or even man-made places of refuge, and the crowning fact that it is the trickiest of the Lakes to keep a course on, due to currents caused by a flow around the Straits of Mackinac when the wind shifts.

3. Letters of Doom

With the Straits of Mackinac for a stem, cucumber-shaped Lake Michigan hangs on the map between Wisconsin and Michigan, touching Indiana and Illinois at the bottom. The ships that ply this three-hundred-mile length of waterway perform international chores and run national errands: they carry Canadian wheat to Milwaukee and the granaries of the Midwest; they haul the ore from the iron ranges of Lake Superior to the steel mills of Gary and South Chicago; they deliver cement from Petoskey and Rogers City to supply construction needs in the sprawling cities of Middle America.

In performance of their various duties, the long bulk carriers pass through more degrees of latitude than there are along the entire New England coast. When they sail past Michigan City in the southern reaches of the Lake, they are in the latitude of New Bedford and the southern coast of Cape Cod; when they sail up the Lake around the Straits of Mackinac at St. Ignace, they are closer to the North Pole than Montreal or the bulk of New Brunswick.

To get their jobs done, these steamboats go out in the spring as soon as the Coast Guard icebreakers — the Mackinaw, the Sundew, the Hollyhock — can open passage for them; and they stay out late in the season, challenging the pitiless month of great storms, November. To meet the needs of the nation, they often stay out on the Lake beyond the time of regular insurance, beyond the time of navigational prudence. Once in a while, striving to make one last trip before winter locks up the Lakes, they make one last trip indeed — the last trip forever.

Toward mid-November of 1958 the limestone carrier Carl D. Bradley put out from Rogers City, Michigan, and headed up Lake Huron to round the Straits of Mackinac into Lake Michigan. She was bound for Buffington, Indiana, on her forty-sixth trip of the year and had already covered more than 27,000 miles in all kinds of weather during the 1958 season of navigation.

The huge steamboat’s owners, the Bradley Transportation Line, a division of the U. S. Steel Corporation, had scheduled this as her last trip of the year — a schedule on which fate itself was to stamp grim approval.

Only three of the thirty-five men aboard the Bradley were outstaters; the remainder came from Northern Michigan harbors, with twenty-six of them calling the freighter’s port, Rogers City, their home, too. The departure featured the heart-warming farewells familiar in waterfront towns along the Lakes. Families waved to sons and brothers; an engaged girl blew a kiss to the boy she had promised to marry as soon as he returned; mothers held youngsters high in their arms for a last glimpse of their seafaring daddies. One regular crew member remained ashore to attend a funeral. There had been a death in his family, and, as events turned out, that death was to save his life.

The Bradley steamed from sight up Lake Huron, sailing into history books yet unwritten. She already had records to her credit. Built at Lorain, Ohio, in 1927, she was launched with the proud distinction of being the longest over-all-length ship on the Great Lakes, longer than two football fields spliced together in Paul Bunyan style — 640 feet of riveted steel plates formed into a hull that was judged unsinkable, the safest vessel afloat on the inland seas.

Another record had been set by the Bradley during the summer of 1929 when she carried the largest single cargo ever transported on the Great Lakes up to that time — 18, 114 tons of limestone, put aboard at Calcite, Michigan, and dumped at Gary, Indiana — a haul of crushed stone that would require three complete freight trains each fitted out with a string of one hundred railroad cars to move overland.

Now, in November of 1958, although there were a few Lake carriers nudging seven hundred feet in length, the Bradley still held a place among the giants of her kind. She could even look down her long patrician nose at all but a finger-count number of ocean-going liners.

On the eve of celebrating her thirtieth birthday, the Bradley was in the prime of life as Lake freighters go. Her skipper, Captain Roland Bryan, 52, of Loudonville, New York, brought the old girl cautiously around the Straits of Mackinac into the rock-studded northern reaches of Lake Michigan. He gave respectful clearance to dangerous Boulder Reef and, with the Beaver Islands off the port bow and the Wisconsin coast to starboard, he took the wide middle of the road down the Lake toward Milwaukee and Chicago and the Indiana shore.

Captain Bryan had gone sailoring at the age of fourteen. Put in command of the Bradley in 1954, he had previously served seventeen years as mate and seven years as a captain in the transportation line’s fleet. A veteran who lived by the unwritten law of the Lakes — constant vigilance is the price of staying afloat — he worried about his ship, on duty and off.

About two weeks before starting this final trip, the Bradley had struck bottom at Cedarville, Michigan, and ruptured a plate. The damage had been repaired and the owners had decided that the ship would have a new $800,000 cargo hold installed at the end of the ’58 season.

The bachelor captain of the Bradley looked forward to these new installations. Meanwhile, he had written a letter to Mrs. Florence Herd, a widow from Port Huron, saying in part:

“This boat is getting pretty ripe for too much weather. I’ll be glad when they get her fixed up.”

In another letter, this one to his best friend, Ken Faweet of Port Huron, Captain Bryan also betrayed concern:

“The hull is not good … have to nurse her along …. Take it easy’ were my instructions …. The hull was badly damaged at Cedarville….”

If the freighter had completed her final trip, these letters would be considered to express the natural anxieties of a captain who wanted to put his forty-sixth, and last, run of the year behind him so that his ship could be fitted out during the winter layover for a fresh start next season. But in the light of what happened, Captain Bryan’s letters must be regarded as foreshadowings of the doom to come.

Until that doom arrived, the Bradley Transportation Line had never lost a ship. By a weird stroke of irony, earlier in 1958, the fleet of which the Bradley was a part had been given the ranking of the safest in the world by the National Safety Council.

4. Headed for the Bottom

The Bradley made the foot of Lake Michigan without incident, discharged her cargo of limestone at Buffington, Indiana, and turned for home at 6:30 p.m., Monday, November 17. Safe refuge for the bulk carrier and a friends-and-family winter ashore for her crew lay only thirty hours or so up the Lake.

Rule of thumb on the upper Great Lakes is that it takes three days for a storm to blow itself in and then another three days to blow itself out. The wind and waves had been building strength for a couple of days when the Bradley pulled out, and the weather got dirtier overnight.

However, there seemed no reason for any real concern aboard the big boat as she plowed up the map in a following sea whipped to whitecaps by a southwest wind. The Bradley had been inspected by the Coast Guard in January and April, and found to be seaworthy. The inspection did show weakened and missing rivets in the interior wall of a ballast tank, but these had been replaced with bolts.

True, there was scuttlebutt, voiced by a deck watchman and the first assistant engineer, that several bulkheads were so badly rusted that a man could see from one compartment into the next, that the ship had “rust pouring from her hold” on trips prior to this final run, that the ballast tanks leaked constantly, that the pumps had to be kept on full time to carry off water in the cargo tunnel, that there was as much as a foot of water i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Book I: Lost in Lake Michiga
• Book II: Lost Off Lake Huron’s Shore
• Book III: One With Lake Erie Winds
• Book IV: Doomed On Lake Superior
• Book V: Sunset Fires On Lake Ontario
• Book VI: The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald