Get it on Kindle
(paid links)
This summer, as my family ventured up from Ohio through the U.P. to Northern Minnesota, we caught site of four of the Great Lakes. As always happens, I was awed both by their sheer immensity and by the mere thought of all the life and death that lies beneath their frigid, fresh-water waves.
Whenever I travel, I like to read short historical works about the regions through which I pass (for example reading Under the Banner of Heaven while enjoying the arid terrains of Utah and Arizona). For this Midwestern trip, I really wanted to find a book on the history of the Edmond Fitzgerald, that massive container ship whose real-life sinking Gordon Lightfoot immortalized in his ballad of the tragedy. Unable to find a book in stores during my first week, I instead came across this short book by Ed Butts which sketches not only the Fitzgerald sinking, but also a few centuries worth of other Great Lake disasters.
I really enjoyed the length of this book, each sketch being short enough to read in the bathroom at a rest stop along the road. Butts avoids filling his pages with unnecessary details or speculation, instead writing in a style akin to an old newspaperman. I found every chapter as fascinating as the last—even those about sea monsters!—and felt the book perfectly scratched my itch for learning a bit of history about the waters I was skimming.
My favorite chapter of all was that covering the Monarch, a fascinating tale of survival I had never heard before. These true-life stories reminded me so much of the shipwreck novels by Clive Cussler, yet they also made me wonder why he’s never sounded the depths of the Great Lakes in his plethora of adventures. Perhaps these seas are too mysterious, their secrets too close to home for his Middletown-American audience to handle.
©2017 E.T.
Read More about The Great Lakes:
- Great Stories of the Great Lakes by Dwight Boyer (1966)
- The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Frederick Stonehouse (1977)
- Distant Fires by Scott Anderson (1990)
- Shipwrecks, Monsters, and Mysteries of the Great Lakes by Ed Butts (2011)
- The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan (2017)