The Edmund Fitzgerald, the famous ship that crashed.
Wave heights in meters at 7 pm EST on November 10, 1975. Maximum waves of 25+ feet are near where the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost. (red plus sign).

Nearly fifty years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank and killed all 29 men aboard during a ferocious storm on Lake Superior, a modern maritime tragedy that has echoed for decades in song and mystery.

A hurricane-like November storm on the Great Lake is partly responsible for the ship's demise. But such storms aren't uncommon, and investigations haven't definitively figured out what went wrong onboard the ship to cause it to sink.

The shipwreck was soon to be made famous in the haunting song by Canadian songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which was released a year after the sinking.

On the morning of November 9, 1975, the ship, with its all-American crew of 29, sailed from Superior, Wisconsin, with a cargo of taconite pellets bound for Zug Island in Detroit.

In gale-force winds, 35-foot waves, and a blinding snowstorm, sometime after 7 p.m. on November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald foundered and sank more than 500 feet to the bottom of Lake Superior in Canadian waters near Whitefish Bay, according to the Detroit Historical Society.

The wreck was discovered broken into two parts, with the bow in U.S. waters and the stern in Canadian waters.

The Edmund Fitzgerald remains the largest of all the ships wrecked or sunk by bad weather in the Great Lakes. (Incredibly, in the past 300 years, about 30,000 people have died in 10,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, the Rev. William Fleming told the Detroit News in 2015.)

According to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Paradise, Michigan, "the legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald remains the most mysterious and controversial of all shipwreck tales heard around the Great Lakes. Her story is surpassed in books, film and media only by that of the Titanic."

When did the Edmund Fitzgerald sink?

The SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank on Nov. 10, 1975.

Why did the Edmund Fitzgerald sink?

The storm caused the wreck, but the exact circumstances of what happened remain uncertain.

Theories range from the Fitzgerald striking a shoal and suffering bottom damage to flooding through the freighter's hatch covers, which filled the ship with water and sank it, to rogue waves, to structural flaws in the ship that the 1975 storm made deadly.

Two major federal investigations were conducted after the Fitzgerald's 1975 sinking: the U.S. Coast Guard's Marine Board of Investigation and the National Transportation Safety Board. Each determined that the likely cause was faulty hatch covers. The NTSB report said, "(T)he probable cause of this accident was the sudden massive flooding of the cargo hold due to the collapse of one or more hatch covers."

What was the Edmund Fitzgerald carrying?

The Edmund Fitzgerald was loaded with about 26,000 tons of taconite pellets on Nov. 9, 1975, at Superior, Wisconsin, and was bound for Detroit, according to the Associated Press. The pellets are an intermediate product in iron mining.

What was the Edmund Fitzgerald?

Launched in 1958, the Edmund Fitzgerald was the largest ship on the Great Lakes designed to carry iron ore.

Who was the Edmund Fitzgerald named after?

The ship was named after the president of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, which owned the ship.

What is the 'Witch of November?'

In the song, the disaster was blamed in part on the "Witch of November," which is the colloquial name for the source of memorable and fierce storms on the Great Lakes.

"When the witch angrily stirs her cauldron, no ship, no matter how large, is safe on the Great Lakes," according to an article in Weatherwise magazine by meteorologist Steve Horstmeyer and geographer Mace Bentley.

As the season shifts toward winter, the polar jet stream begins to shift south and can stir up storms that produce howling winds and gigantic waves in November on the Great Lakes.

This makes it the most dangerous time of year for shipping, according to Bentley, now a professor at James Madison University. About 40% of all the Great Lakes shipwrecks have occurred in November.

"In late autumn, the harvest must make it to market and industry must receive enough raw materials to operate throughout the winter," Horstmeyer and Bentley wrote in the Weatherwise article. So there's a flurry of shipping activity when the weather is at its most volatile, before the lakes freeze over for the winter.

"The recurrence interval for a storm of this magnitude was estimated to be about every six years, which is testament to the strength of storms in fall that can impact the Lakes," Bentley told USA TODAY.

What to know about the storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald

Storms on the Great Lakes can rival hurricanes in their intensity. The one that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald had sustained winds of 67 mph, gusts of up to 86 mph and waves reported up to 35 feet, according to another vessel in the area that survived the storm.

The Fitzgerald was in the worst possible location during the worst weather of the storm. The wind and waves from the west hit the freighter broadside as it tried to flee south to safety in Whitefish Bay.

The ship sank in 530 feet of water about 17 miles from Whitefish Bay, near the cities of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario.

What has happened in the 50 years since the wreck?

There has not been any Great Lakes shipwreck as deadly as the Edmund Fitzgerald in the 50 years since. Much better weather forecasting today would likely prevent a similar voyage from even taking place.

There have been several expeditions to visit the wreck, beginning with a U.S. Coast Guard expedition in May 1976 that confirmed the wreck's location. Other expeditions by organizations like the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society and the National Geographic Society, using technologies such as remote operating vehicles and atmospheric diving suits, have surveyed the site, documented damage, and even recovered the ship's bell.

Diving to the Edmund Fitzgerald is now illegal without government permission. The Canadian government, at the request of the victims' families, declared it a protected site in 2006.

It is protected by the Ontario Heritage Act, which has been amended to specifically protect the wreck site as a marine archaeological site and designated grave site. In 2006, in order to further protect the wreck site, the Canadian government amended the Ontario Heritage Act to extend the perimeter around the Edmund Fitzgerald to 500 meters so that anyone diving without a permit could face a $1 million (Canadian) fine, according to the Detroit Historical Society.

'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' told the tale in song

"The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" was a big hit for Lightfoot, as it reached number 1 in his native Canada in the RPM chart and number 2 in the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States.

Lightfoot, who died in 2023, called the song his finest work.

Contributing: Keith Matheny, Detroit Free Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The haunting Edmund Fitzgerald shipwreck happened nearly 50 years ago

Reporting by Doyle Rice, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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