Curt Brown

Just before Thanksgiving 1905, a storm that many consider the largest gale to ever hit the Great Lakes sprung up. The high winds, sleet, and snow battered ships that were trying to squeeze in one more money-making run before the season ended. In all, 29 ships out on the water that week sank or ran aground, and more than 30 sailors died.

The heart of the book focuses on the crew of the Mataafa, a massive ore-hauling ship that foundered when it slammed into the north pier of the shipping channel at Duluth Harbor in Minnesota. The boat didn't sink, but half the crew was trapped at the front of the ship (where they at least had some shelter from the wheelhouse), while the other half were exposed to the elements at the stern. The waves and wind were so heavy that the crew aft could not even walk to the front of the boat without risking being swept overboard. Meanwhile, on shore, the lifesaving crew that would normally have been in the harbor had been called out to another boat in distress several miles away, leaving thousands of people crowding the shoreline to stare helplessly at the ship and its endangered crew just a few hundred yards away yet completely unreachable.

That section of the book is fairly gripping, and Brown really impressed on me both the immensity of the ships and the fierce dangers hiding inside the storm. He was less successful in his attempt to illuminate the fates of some of the other ships that were lost, given that their tragedies occurred out of sight or contact with land. Where no survivors were left to tell the story, Brown has to resort to speculation and surmise, which falls a bit flat. Similarly, he spends some time laying out the ownership structure of the time, with huge conglomerates like U.S. Steel owning larger and larger fleets and taking advantage of the reduced competition to also reduce wages and crew. He implies that some of the captains who chose to make one last run in spite of clear warnings from the weather forecasters may have felt pressured to do so by the shipping companies. But he never really provides any solid evidence that those pressures were a factor in this particular set of tragedies.

All in all, I found this to be an interesting but flawed exploration of a time and place that I knew little about. Mostly it's made me want to read more about the Great Lakes, which can't be a bad thing.

And I can't end this review without linking you to a YouTube video about the most famous Lake Superior shipwreck of them all, which happened 70 years after the events in So Terrible a Storm. The video has some great shots of ships very like the Mataafa and gives a sense of the scale of the ore-carriers.

Gordon Lightfoot, everyone:

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald… (more)

This book is about the massive November 1905 gale on Lake Superior which wrecked 30 ships to some degree, and led to the building of Split Rock Lighthouse, north of Duluth, MN. It's generally acknowledged as one of the worst storms (likely THE worst storm) in Great Lakes history.

This book was on a topic of interest to me. The writing was OK -- the author is a professional journalist. There was a lot of good information. So I'm not quite sure why it often felt like a bit of a slog. Sometimes it felt like it was sort of all over the place -- maybe because the shipwrecks that day were all over the lake, and then the follow-up threads that came out of the storm really went all over the place. Maybe the author tried to do too much, included a few too many bits of arcane info that weren't particularly helpful.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad read, and it was very thorough. If you are interested in extreme weather phenomena and/or in maritime disasters, you may enjoy this.

FYI, the book had a great list of sources and an extensive index, but no footnotes. I read the Kindle edition.… (more)