The Edmund Fitzgerald

Fifty years ago today, on November 10th, 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, with a crew of 29, was caught in the confluence of three storms on Lake Superior and sank, with no survivors. There had been around 6000 ships sunk in the Great Lakes over the previous 100 years, about one every week. Yet the Edmund Fitzgerald was the biggest and the most famous. Its legendary captain, Ernest McSorley, was to retire after the trip. That wreck 50 years ago had such an effect that no freighter has sunk on the Great Lakes since then. 

Read an interview with John U. Bacon, author of the book The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald about what we know and don't know about the shipwreck.