Library's review
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
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Description
"Not since Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm has a writer captured so well the fury of the seas as Curt Brown." --The Maritime Executive Through masterful research and elegant prose, Curt Brown traces the devastating intersection of nature's fury and corporate greed. It was Thanksgiving week 1905, and the industry bosses wanted one last run before the shipping season ended; the bottom line depended on it. The tragedy that followed led to the building of Split Rock Lighthouse--and went down in history as one of the nation's worst shipping disasters. The explosive squall caught nearly 30 vessels on Lake Superior. In the wake of the storm, weather forecasting and shipbuilding were forever changed. Drawn from the accounts of witnesses and survivors, So Terrible a Storm is a must-read.… (more)