Dwight Boyer (1912–1977)

This turns out to be mostly a collection of accounts of “great shipwrecks of the Great Lakes”, with the few pieces that aren’t about shipwrecks being about salvage operations or near-disasters. The main exception is the opening piece, an account of the celebrated steamboat race between the Tashmoo and the City of Erie in June 1901. Unfortunately, this opening piece also shows Boyer indulging his penchant for journalistic cliché to the hilt, putting dialogue into the mouths of the show more participants, including a Chief Engineer with a comic “Scottish” accent… Later in the book he moderates this sort of thing a little, but it remains hard to disentangle his historical research from his taste for reconstruction.

What I took from the book was a better sense of how extreme the weather conditions on the Great Lakes can be, as well as a general impression that most of the disasters he describes could have been avoided with better weather forecasting, better ships and skippers who weren’t under as much pressure to meet schedules. But that is probably true for marine accidents anywhere in the world. Obviously what is peculiar to the Lakes is that ships are on short and very familiar, frequently travelled routes, never more than a few hours from shelter, but the weather changes can be very rapid.

Fun if you like disaster stories, but you might prefer a more recent book, especially given that the most celebrated Great Lakes shipwreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, occurred some ten years too late for Boyer to have included it. show less

First, let me say that this book is really about SHIPS, not ghosts. There are a few mentions of eerie legends, and a few accounts with odd premonitions, but make no mistake about it: this is a book about SHIPWRECKS.

Mention Great Lakes shipwrecks, and people immediately seem to think of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Well, this book (at least the edition I have) has no mention of that doomed vessel, as it was published in 1968, 7 years before the Fitzgerald went to her watery grave. But there have show more been plenty of other shipwrecks for the author to write about.

I found this book fascinating and well-written. The author seems to be a born storyteller. I thought the accounts had just the right amount of facts, description, background, etc. It offered a great overview of different kinds of ends that have overtaken ships on the Great Lakes, and a good sense of the kinds of people who worked and perished on them. show less

An excellent review of the mysteries around ships gone missing in the great lakes and a few odds and ends about the harsh business of plying that trade, such as managing ice. Not a line about the SS Edmund Fitzgerald is required to make fascinating the unresolved questions around from 1679 when LaSalle's wooden barque the Le Griffon was lost, to each Dean Richmond.

This is a collection of 11 accounts of shipping disasters on the Great Lakes. Vividly written and based on much documentation, one gets a real sense of what it is like to sail ships on the Great Lakes especially when the weather is wild. Includes photographs of most of the vessels covered.

The author has a series of books about shipping on the Great Lakes.