What happened to the wreckage of the Edmund Fitzgerald? Gordon Lightfoot's haunting ballad revisited on the 50th anniversary of the shipwreck

Less than a year after the American cargo carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank in the Great Lakes in November 1975, the late Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot released a folk-rock ballad titled The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. It memorialized the fateful incident that claimed the lives of 29 people.

The first of its seven verses reads;

“The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down/ Of the big lake they called Gitche Gumee/ The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead/ When the skies of November turn gloomy/ With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more/ Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty.”

Lightfoot concluded the opening verse:

“That good ship and true was a bone to be chewed/ When the gales of November came early.”

The wreckage of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald still sits on the floor of Lake Superior, 530 feet below the surface. According to MPR News, the vessel is

“split in two pieces, the bow resting upright in the silt with the stern overturned nearby.”

Over the decades, a 200-pound bronze bell and a life ring have been unearthed by expedition teams that have gone underwater in search of the Fitz wreckage.

What you need to know about the SS Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy

On November 9, 1975, SS Edmund Fitzgerald, one of the largest freighters to ever set sail in the Great Lakes, began its journey with 26,000 tons of taconite from Minnesota to Michigan. The following day, it encountered a storm on the Canadian waters of Lake Superior and sank without sending out an SOS. It killed all 29 crew members on board, including Captain Ernest M. McSorley.

Four days after the storm subsided, the United States Navy and the Coast Guard carried out rescue missions by sending aircraft and boats with advanced sonar and magnetic anomaly detectors in the area where the vessel was suspected to have sunk.

According to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, the vessel was found lying on the hundreds of feet on the lakebed in two pieces, 17 miles off the nearest coast in Whitefish Bay, Michigan.

Subsequently, in May 1976, the Coast Guard used side-scan sonar technology to pinpoint the exact location of the wreckage and sent a U.S. Navy-operated CURV (cable-controlled undersea recovery vehicle). It was underwater for 56 hours and captured over 900 pictures of the wreckage and 43,000 feet of videotape.

Later, the Coast Guard and the National Transportation Safety Board released reports in 1977 and 1978, respectively, concluding that SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank as the hatches failed to close, thus flooding the ship and eventually taking it down.

Ever since, several government and independent explorers have visited the wreckage site, including Jean-Michael in 1980 and shipwreck historian Ric Mixter in 1994. One of the last dives occurred in 1995.

It was a collaborative effort by the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society, the National Geographic Society, the Canadian Navy, Sony Corporation, and the Sault St. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. They recovered a 200-pound bell, which is now displayed at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum.

Meanwhile, a life ring that was dug up during the same expedition is now exhibited at the Lake Superior Maritime Visitor Center in Duluth, Minnesota, according to MPR News. It also displays a model of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.

More about Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’

A month after the Fitz sank, Gordon Lightfoot recorded The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, which was released seven months later in August 1976. The song later appeared on the singer’s studio album Summertime Dream and became a chart-topper.

According to Genius, his song was inspired by the Newsweek article, “The Cruelest Month,” published two weeks after the tragedy.

However, according to Ric Mixter, “Gordon Lightfoot had the song wrong.” He told Fox 9 recently that, unlike the song lyrics, which stated that the freighter was coming from a Wisconsin mill, it had begun its journey from a Minnesota mill.

Likewise, the vessel wasn’t headed to Cleveland, Ohio, which was its usual destination, but rather to Detroit, Michigan. It was also not fully loaded.

"They weren't fully loaded because it was fall, they had to carry less cargo. And even less cargo because they were going into the Detroit River, where they would run aground, unfortunately, if they had a belly full of iron ore," Mixter explained.

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Last month, Michigan journalist John U. Bacon published his New York Times bestselling non-fiction book Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, based on Gordon Lightfoot’s historic song.

On November 5, 2025, a documentary titled Gales of November: Diving the Edmund Fitzgerald was released on Fox 9 and Fox Local. To mark the shipwreck's 50th anniversary, private memorials for the families of the 29 lives lost, museum tours for the public, and a relay swim in Lake Superior are also scheduled.

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