by Liz Mechem
“Pack-ice might be described as a gigantic and interminable jigsaw-puzzle devised by nature.”
—Sir Ernest Shackleton
Sir Ernest Shackleton
SHIPPING IN THE ARCTIC
Marine travel between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans was once a long and treacherous prospect. Before the Panama Canal opened in 1914, ships had to round Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America, in order to bridge the American continents. Small wonder, then, that as early as the fifteenth century, colonial powers sought an alternate route for ships—one that passed through the Arctic Circle. The Northwest Passage, as it came to be called, took on near-mythic proportions; many expeditions were lost in ice and unnavigable frigid waters seeking the fabled route. Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 Erebus and Terror expedition was one of many such attempts.
The Sea of Ice, by Caspar David Friedrich, c. 1823. The sorry remains of a ship can be seen to the right, crushed under the inexorable force of a frozen ocean.
Arctic shipping became a reality after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first to navigate the Northwest Passage in 1906. Since then, commercial freighters, cruise ships, and even small sailboats have made their way through the chain of seas and islands that dot the Arctic Circle north of Canada and Russia. One helpful innovation is the icebreaker, a ship specially designed to crush ice with its protruding bow and then guide the ice safely away from the ship’s propellers and engines
Despite advances in maritime technology, Arctic routes are still too treacherous for major commercial shipping. Furthermore, the governments whose lands border the Arctic Ocean—the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, and Greenland (Denmark)—are embroiled in territory disputes that complicate easy shipping in the Arctic.
THE ICE IS MELTING
SCIENTISTS AND EXPERTS ARE NEARLY UNANIMOUS in their misgivings about global climate change, which is seen as profoundly impacting the balance of life on Earth. The shipping industry sees a silver lining, however, because melting Arctic ice opens previously impassable shipping routes. Scientists estimate that the Arctic ice shelf has retreated up to 40 percent in the last four decades. Some experts predict that by 2030, the summer months will find the Arctic Ocean completely free of ice. Environmentalists counter with concern, though—increased shipping could wreak great damage to waters, wildlife, and native people in the already fragile Arctic ecosystem.
This satellite image of the Arctic Circle shows record ice loss. In 2007, the ice sheet coverage in this once-frozen land measured 38 percent below average.
SS Edmund Fitzgerald
TRAGEDY ON LAKE SUPERIOR
Despite rapid rescue efforts and detailed mapping, the causes of the Edmund Fitzgerald wreck were never discovered.
Great Lakes ore carrier the SS Edmund Fitzgerald disappeared in a violent November storm in 1975. The ship went down so suddenly that she had no time even for a distress call. On November 10, within sight of a sister ship not 10 miles (16 km) behind, the SS Edmund Fitzgerald sank with the loss of all 29 hands aboard.
The Edmund Fitzgerald was built to be the biggest carrier on the Great Lakes. At 729 feet (222 m), she held that title from her launching in 1958 until 1971. Her cargo that fall, loaded through vast hatches in the deck, was taconite—small pellets of iron ore that would be forged into steel for the auto industry.
DIRE STRAITS
Captain Ernest McSorley of the Fitzgerald hugged the northern shore of Lake Superior as long as possible, while the storm swept across the plains onto the Great Lakes. The “Mighty Fitz” took the lead on the SS Arthur M. Anderson as both ships left the relative safety of the lee shore and struck off to the southeast, aiming for the shelter of Whitefish Bay. By early evening, conditions had deteriorated from bad to terrible. McSorley reported over the radio that he was having trouble in the heavy waters. He had lost both of his radars and was slowing his speed to compensate for a pronounced list. The Anderson stayed 10 miles (16 km) behind the Fitzgerald, her crew relaying radar information via ship-to-ship radio. At about 7:10 PM the ships passed one final bit of radio traffic:
“Fitzgerald, how are you making out with your problems?”
“We are holding our own,” came the optimistic reply.
But they were not holding their own. Fifteen minutes later, the Fitzgerald disappeared from the Anderson’s radar screen. The Anderson immediately hailed the Fitzgerald, but to no avail. The Mighty Fitz was gone.
Searchers found the great ship within days; she had broken in two, 17 miles (27 km) off Whitefish Bay. The Coast Guard reported that crew negligence had caused the sinking: hatch covers had not been properly closed, allowing water to rush in. The Lake Carriers’ Association issued its own report, blaming poor navigation. The crew of the Anderson bolstered the latter report; they had seen radar views of the Fitzgerald passing over the dangerous Six Fathom Shoals, which could easily have grounded her. Other theories involve pairs of waves—either fore and aft waves that raised the ship and allowed her heavy cargo to break her in two, or an abaft wave (near the rear of the ship) that lifted the stern, plunged the bow into another wave, and sent her straight down to the lake floor.
The tragedy of the Fitzgerald has inspired story and song, notably the ballad “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by Gordon Lightfoot. The mystery of the powerful ship’s sudden demise only adds to her tragic allure.
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
Great Lakes seamen have a fitting name for the fierce autumn winds responsible for so many of the lakes’ shipwrecks—the “Witch of November.”
The anchor of the Edmund Fitzgerald
SEAMAN’S HONOR
CAPTAIN BERNIE COOPER, of the SS Arthur M. Anderson, proved himself a real hero that terrible night. Cooper was the first to know that the Edmund Fitzgerald was in trouble. In addition to immediately alerting the Coast Guard when the Fitzgerald’s lights and radar track went black, Cooper took his ship back out of the shelter of Whitefish Bay to search for the missing ship during the height of the storm.
The region between Grand Marais and Whitefish Point on Lake Superior is so shipwreck prone that it is called the “Graveyard of the Great Lakes.”
2 · THE FATAL FLAW
Shipwreck on a Rocky Coast by Wijnand Nuijen, 1837
The Vasa
ROYAL SWEDEN’S VAINGLORIOUS JEWEL
The customer is always right, especially when the customer is King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1611–32). The powerful monarch wanted a warship worthy of his military and naval might, one that would garner him victory in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). He ordered the magnificent Vasa, named for his royal house, to be fitted with 64 cannons and bedecked with hundreds of ornate carvings. Engineers protested; the ship would be top-heavy, they said, and poorly ballasted. But the royal order held.
Despite his failure with the Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden was a highly successful king, leaving a major European legacy and enacting widespread domestic reforms.
On her maiden voyage on August 10, 1628, the Vasa sailed out of port and into Stockholm’s harbor. Less than a mile out, her sails filled with wind, and she fired a salute. A cheer went up from the assembled onlookers. Suddenly, she heeled sharply onto her port side. She righted herself briefly before heeling again. This time, water rushed into her gun ports, and she promptly sank to the bottom of the harbor. Sweden lost 50 lives that day, and the crown lost a fortune. The Vasa’s guns, carvings, and majestic trappings plummeted into 110 feet (33 m) of cold, Baltic water. In the decades following the disaster, searchers salvaged a number of the valuable cannons from the Vasa’s wreckage. But nothing could be done to raise the grand warship, a victim of her monarch’s pride.
The Vasa. Every year, thousands of visitors flock to the Vasa Museum on the island of Djurgården in Stockholm. The Swedish government had the museum specially built to display the nearly fully intact seventeenth-century warship.
RECOVERING THE VASA
For more than three centuries, the Vasa
lay where she had fallen. Then, in 1956, an amateur archaeologist discovered the sunken ship. A consortium headed by the Swedish navy went to work uncovering and preparing to raise the wreck. In 1961, after five painstaking years of dangerous underwater work, divers raised the Vasa, a near-intact seventeenth-century warship. The frigid waters of the Baltic, the low salinity, and the absence of shipworms had combined to preserve the Vasa, her carvings, and myriad treasures. The rescuers found about 25 human skeletons in the ship, along with stores of clothing, plates, coins, and everyday objects—a virtual time capsule of seventeenth-century Sweden.
Conservators went to work immediately to restore the Vasa and prevent further deterioration. Restorers sprayed the ship with polyethylene glycol to preserve the wood, which otherwise would have disintegrated upon exposure to the air. Housed now in a dedicated museum in Stockholm, the Vasa displays her once-bright sculptures arrayed in their former positions on the gunwales and stern. A scale-model replica of the Vasa shows her in all her gilded and painted glory—the gods, demons, mermaids, and golden Swedish royal crest shining forth once more.
A model of the Vasa at the Vasa Museum. Her bold, bright colors and 700 carvings served to aggrandize Sweden and disparage her enemies.
THE DIVING BELL AND THE CANNONS
IMAGINE SITTING INSIDE a huge iron bell, open at the bottom. A massive chain attached to the bell’s top lowers you and the bell into the water. Although submerged, you can still breathe—the water pressure outside the bell has trapped air inside the bell chamber.
This is a diving bell, sometimes called a wet bell. This device was in use as early as the fourth century CE in ancient Greece. Until diving helmets appeared in the nineteenth century, it was the sole means of descending far underwater, and the only hope of rescuing lost fortune from shipwrecks. In 1664, two German divers descended 100 feet (30 m) in a diving bell to the wreck of the Vasa. With enormous effort and personal risk, they retrieved some 55 of the ship’s 64 cannons.
A diving bell on display at the Marinmuseum in Karlskrona, Sweden
A backgammon game board recovered from the sunken Vasa
The Medusa
BETRAYAL AND BRUTALITY
Some stories of shipwreck and survival remind us of the grandeur of the human spirit under the most abject of conditions. The wreck of the Medusa (La Méduse) is not one of them. It is, in fact, among the most brutal and horrifying stories in maritime history. From an incompetent captain to a murderous band of survivors, the events surrounding the 1816 wreck of the French frigate are a study in the despicable.
The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault
THE RAFT OF THE MEDUSA
The Medusa tragedy fascinated the young French painter Théodore Géricault (1791–1824). Géricault even talked with two of the survivors as he made preparatory sketches for a large-scale painting of the event. First exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1819, The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse) shows the desperate survivors crowding heedlessly over the bodies of the dead and dying as they spot a ship in the distance. The painting uncompromisingly highlighted the brutality of survival, and it had its intended effect: scandal. Viewers directed a good measure of their disgust at the Bourbon monarchy, which was blamed for the lax oversight onboard the Medusa and the horrors that ensued.
A plan of the raft of the Medusa, from an 1818 history of the shipwreck, shows the hasty assemblage that doomed most of the 147 passengers and crewmen forced to refuge on the flimsy craft.
MONSTROUS MEDUSA
The Medusa sailed for Senegal on June 17, 1816, in convoy with three other ships. She left a France that was deeply divided between supporters of Napoleon and those loyal to the newly reinstalled monarchy. Among the 400 men, women, and children aboard was the new governor of French Senegal, Julien-Désiré Schmaltz, along with his wife. The crew of 160 was under the loose command of the inept monarchist Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had last sailed some two decades earlier.
The speediest way to travel southeast along the coast of West Africa is to hug the shore, profiting from the dominant winds. It is also the most dangerous: the coastal geography includes shifting shoals and sandbars. De Chaumareys chose the dangerous route. Breaking away from her three-ship escort, the Medusa made good time, especially because her captain neglected to slow for regular soundings. Soon she ran aground on the notorious Arguin Bank, approximately 31 miles (50 km) off the coast of present-day Mauritania. The crew constructed a crude raft out of the ship’s masts and crossbeams. The captain, governor, and other notables seated themselves in six lifeboats, while 147 crewmen and passengers—many of them Napoleon supporters—crowded onto the 65-by-23-foot (20 x 7 m) raft. Seventeen men refused to even board the raft, and stayed with the ship. When rescuers located the Medusa 40 days later, only 3 remained alive.
ANARCHY ADRIFT
Setting off for shore, the lifeboats towed the raft, whose desperate passengers clung on for their lives. Within hours, towing became untenable, and those aboard the lifeboats simply cut the raft loose, to cries of “Nous les abandonnes!” (“We are abandoning them!”). Some sources claim that Governor Schmaltz himself wielded the knife.
With no means of steering, no sails, and only wine and sodden biscuits for provision, the raft turned into a scene of pandemonium. Many drowned in the first few hours, when a scramble ensued for the center of the raft—the only portion above water. There was no command and no mercy, as the strong cast the weak overboard. Each day the numbers of the living dwindled; some perished by drowning, some by suicide, some by murder. By the third day, those alive were cannibalizing the dead, and, by the fifth day, only 30 remained alive. When rescuers finally recovered the raft, 17 days after it had set adrift, only 15 of its 147 original passengers remained.
Arguin Bank, today a national park in Mauritania
SS Metropolis
A PITIFUL RUIN ON THE OUTER BANKS
All was not well as the steamship Metropolis left Philadelphia in late January 1878, bound for Brazil with 248 passengers and a load of iron rail. A leak near the rudder got steadily worse, to the point where the pumps couldn’t keep up and water started to fill the bilges. The captain ordered coal dumped overboard to lighten the ship, a prudent and effective action. Not prudent, however, was his decision to continue the voyage and steam past the nearby port of Hampton Bays, Virginia, where he could have put in for repairs. Instead, the Metropolis continued south into the troubled waters off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. By then, the heavy cargo had begun to shift, pounding the ship from within with every wave.
As the Metropolis approached the light at Currituck Beach, a rogue wave overtook her, tearing away most of her superstructure and half of her lifeboats and dousing the fires in her boilers. She proceeded under sail, but failed to make the beach. Within hours, her hull was battered and smashed against the sands of the Outer Banks, and the Atlantic had taken 85 souls to their final rest.
The Currituck Beach Lighthouse, constructed only three years before the tragic loss of the SS Metropolis
FAILED RESCUE
Lighthouse keeper John G. Chappell and the men of the Currituck Lifesaving Station had been patrolling the storm-tossed beach all night. They were back at the station recuperating when the report came in that the Metropolis had gone aground and was breaking up. Quickly deciding that they didn’t have time to drag their huge surfboat several miles to the wreck site, Chappell immediately strapped the first-aid kit to his back and set off on the station’s only horse. His exhausted men followed behind, dragging the half-ton cart of rescue gear across the soft sand.
Upon arriving at the wreck site, Chappell found the Metropolis foundering offshore, under siege from the pounding breakers. Rescuers on the beach clearly heard the screams of her passengers. Many had already jumped into the sea. Chappell offered aid to those who made it to the beach as his crew arrived and began setting up their state-of-the-art rescue equipment. A mortar fired a projectile, trying to attach a rope to the stricken s
hip, but missed. The second shot was perfectly on target, but an inexperienced seaman on the Metropolis rigged the rope improperly, and it parted. Further attempts to land a line failed. Though many passengers made it to shore, those who remained on board perished when the ship broke up. They, along with unlucky swimmers, were lost to the waves. The wreck lived in infamy, with contemporary reports denouncing the captain’s fatefully bad decision.
FLOTSAM & JETSAM
According to eyewitnesses, a large Newfoundland dog dragged one half-drowned Metropolis survivor from the pounding surf.
A contemporary illustration of the foundering Metropolis and the merciless onslaught of the waves
Illustrations of a Merriman suit from 1875
CUTTING-EDGE RESCUE ATTEMPT
BECAUSE THE METROPOLIS had the good fortune to go aground adjacent to the lifesaving station at Currituck Beach, she was treated to the most modern rescue techniques of the day. These techniques were almost—but not quite—up to the task. Failing to land a rope onto the ship from shore, the rescuers were forced to give up from lack of powder. If they had landed a line, they could have deployed rigging and brand-new “Merriman suits,” which were the precursors to today’s survival suits. After the wrecks of the Metropolis and her predecessor, the Huron, which had wrecked nearby two months earlier, Congress appropriated funds for increased lifesaving operations along the East Coast.
SS Eastland
SUMMER OUTING TURNED TO RUIN
Saturday morning, July 24, 1915, dawned unseasonably cool in downtown Chicago. For its annual all-company picnic, Western Electric had engaged three steamships to take employees to Michigan City, Indiana, for the day. At 6:30 AM, passengers began streaming onto the SS Eastland, docked on the Chicago River at the Clark Street Bridge. A total of 2,752 people jammed onto the liner for the short trip across Lake Michigan. Many of the picnic-goers stood on deck, wanting to watch the departure from outside.
Their festive mood was soon shattered. At 7:10, the Eastland began to list to her port side, and, for the next 15 minutes, passengers grew increasingly alarmed. As the ship continued to list, the portside gangways began to admit water. At 7:28, the great ship groaned and rolled gently, but inexorably, onto her side, coming to rest abreast of the dock. In the confusion that ensued, a third of those aboard perished that terrible day in Chicago, in only 20 feet (6 m) of water.
