The SS Edmund Fitzgerald turned heads when she was launched in Detroit in 1958. The ship was longer and could carry more taconite than any other Great Lakes freighter, and it boasted plush quarters for the captain and sailors (carpeting! AC!), making it a sure bet to draw the best crew on the lakes.

So the 17-year-old vessel was already famous in shipping circles when, in November 1975, it ran into one of the nastiest Lake Superior storms on record. Battling driving snow, 100 mph winds and waves as high as 50 feet, the Fitz split in two and sank just short of Whitefish Bay, taking down with it all 29 men on board.

Since then, numerous books and articles have been written about the Fitz, making the freighter out to be something of a Great Lakes-style Titanic: a massive ship seemingly impregnable to the elements, until it wasn’t.

“The Fitz is the biggest ship out there, and the safest,” Nolan Church, one of the ship’s porters, told his kids. “Lake Superior doesn’t have a hole big enough to fit the Fitzgerald!”

Church, his doomed fellow crew members and the loved ones they left behind are at the heart of “The Gales of November” by Michigan author John U. Bacon, arriving just in time for the 50th anniversary of the ship’s demise.

The Fitzgerald was designed to carry as much cargo as possible and still fit through the narrow locks at Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., with a minimum of freeboard (the distance from the waterline to the deck) when fully loaded. Under the command of the unflappable Ernest McSorley, its veteran captain, the Fitz broke shipping records and tallied enormous profits. The ship was “the pride of the American side,” as Gordon Lightfoot sang in his 1976 ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

It was sunny and unseasonably warm the day McSorley pulled the Fitz out of the Superior, Wis., harbor for the last run of the season, setting out for Detroit with 26,000 tons of taconite — an oversized load that pushed the ship deep in the water, well below the traditional safe depth.

A storm out of the southwest prompted gale warnings and forced McSorley to stick to the relative calm of Superior’s north shore before heading to port along the lake’s east shore, fully exposing the starboard side to the storm’s furious western winds. By then a Canadian cold front had arrived, bringing thunderous green waves and heavy snow.

“We are holding our own,” McSorley radioed a nearby ship. It was the last anyone heard from the Fitzgerald.

Bacon takes his time getting to the fateful voyage; there are myriad sidebars of varying interest on topics such as Great Lakes shipping and the rise of taconite, two lake wrecks that foreshadowed the Fitz, even the sailors’ favorite watering holes. Background tales of crew members, based on more than 100 interviews, may have been more effective if Bacon had woven them into the story of the wreck itself.

He lays out a number of factors to explain why the Fitzgerald sank. The ship’s narrow, welded hull may have twisted too much in the storm, making it hard to steer and susceptible to cracking. Rogue waves, enormous and unpredictable, likely flooded the ship. McSorley, fatigued and with his radars on the blink, may have unwittingly bottomed out the boat on a shoal, damaging the plating underneath.

While fans of Frederick Stonehouse’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” might object to the book’s claim to be the definitive account of the Fitz’s end (and better copy editing would have saved the book from minor errors; the President Harrison in 1890 was Benjamin, not William Henry), Bacon offers an absorbing read that answers the questions most readers will have.

We’ll never know what exactly happened the night “when the gales of November came slashin’,” but Bacon has given us a superior look into an unforgettable story.

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The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald

By: John U. Bacon.

Publisher: Liveright, 464 pages.

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