By Eric Freedman
Nov. 30, 2009
LANSING — The Edmund Fitzgerald is the best-known of the Great Lakes’ doomed ships, but the freighter’s demise with its entire crew off Whitefish Point in the Upper Peninsula is by no means the state’s only such maritime disaster.
Andrew Kantar, a Ferris State University professor, tells another such story, that of the ill-fated freighter Daniel J. Morrell. It sank in 1966 off the tip of the Thumb in Lake Huron, northwest of Harbor Beach.
“Each of the Great Lakes has its own tragic history, and Lake Huron’s violent moods have become legendary,” Kantar writes in “Deadly Voyage: The S.S. Daniel J. Morrell Tragedy” (Michigan State University Press, $16.95).
Like the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Morrell went down in a brutal November storm.
Unlike the Fitzgerald, there was a survivor .As the ship sank, four shipmates made it onto a life raft, but Dennis Hale was the only one to live through the 38 hours it took before a Coast Guard rescue helicopter spotted the raft.
Twenty-six bodies were recovered. Two others were never found.
“All that was left were the families, the fathers and mothers, wives and children, sisters and brothers. It was a human wreckage of loss and emptiness,” Kantar says.
Related mashup: Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes
Eric Freedman reports for Capital News Service
© 2009, Capital News Service, Michigan State University School of Journalism. Not to be reproduced without permission.