Deadly Voyage: The S.S. Daniel J. Morrell Tragedy

by Andrew Kantar

Overview

This is the harrowing story of one of the worst shipwrecks in Great Lakes history. In the early morning hours of November 29, 1966, the S.S. Daniel J. Morrell was caught in a deadly storm on Lake Huron. Waves higher than the ship crested over it, and winds exceeding sixty miles per hour whipped at its hull, splitting the 603-foot freighter into two giant pieces. Amazingly, after the bow went down, the stern blindly powered itself through the stormy seas for another five miles! Twenty-eight men drowned in the icy waters of Lake Huron, but one sailor—26-year-old Dennis Hale—miraculously survived the treacherous storm. Wearing only boxer shorts, a lifejacket, and a pea coat, Hale clung to a life raft in near-freezing temperatures for 38 hours until he was rescued late in the afternoon of the following day. Three of his fellow crewmates died in his raft.
     In Deadly Voyage, Andrew Kantar recounts this tale of tragedy and triumph on Lake Huron. Informed by meticulous research and the eyewitness details provided by Hale, and illustrated with photographs from the Coast Guard search and rescue operation, Kantar depicts one of the most tragic shipwrecks in Great Lakes history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870138638
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	07/28/2009
Pages:	109
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Andrew Kantar is Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Ferris State University. His first book, 29 Missing: The True and Tragic Story of the Disappearance of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, was designated a Michigan Notable Book. He has also written Black November, a history of the Carl D. Bradley, the largest ship to break up and vanish during a raging storm on Lake Michigan. Kantar served as a Fulbright Scholar in Norway for two years.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE GREAT NOVEMBER TERROR

Imagine a lake so vast that you cannot even see the other side. The seemingly endless expanse reaches all the way to a watery horizon, where it is joined by the infinite sky. Now, imagine five of these magnificent bodies of water, all connected, whose basins were gouged out of the earth thousands of years ago by crawling glaciers and then filled with the remnants of their melted bodies — water. These are the Great Lakes — indeed a remarkable geologic creation, left to us from the Pleistocene epoch of the Ice Age about 11,000 years ago. Together they stretch east to west, New York to Minnesota, for more than a thousand miles and represent the world's largest supply of fresh water. They are Lakes Ontario, Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior — the Great Lakes.

As awe-inspiring as they are to see, photograph, and paint, as enjoyable as they are to swim in and sail on, these lakes have served another important purpose. For centuries they have served as the trade routes for people who needed to travel great distances or haul heavy loads across the Midwest. From the canoes of Indians and the French Canadian voyageurs to the massive 1,000-foot freighters of today, the lakes have connected cultures, countries, and cities. In fact, it is no coincidence that some of North America's most powerful industrial centers, like Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and Cleveland, developed on the shores of these lakes. Today, the main freight is iron ore, used in the making of steel, but grain is also a major cargo for these mighty steamships.

Because of their massive size and the sudden storms that changing weather can generate, the Great Lakes have been responsible for some of the most disastrous shipwrecks in history. Though no one knows for sure how many ships the lakes have claimed, by some estimates there have been more than 6,000 shipwrecks, and 35,000 lives have been lost. Galeforce winds that can reach sixty to seventy miles per hour and waves that top a staggering thirty-five feet make the violent moods of the Great Lakes some of the most intimidating and dangerous forces in nature. Only the foolhardy ignore how treacherous these natural giants become when bad weather blows across them. With astonishing power, they can take a ship the length of two football fields and unmercifully twist her until she rips in half!

And at no time are the lakes more unpredictable and dangerous than in the stormy month of November. The contorted wrecks that rest on the muddy bottoms of all of the lakes speak silently to the countless horrors of vicious storms that have claimed the lives of thousands of ill-fated sailors, leaving behind their mourning mothers, widowed wives, and fatherless children. Written in the lakes' mysterious depths are haunting tales, revealing an unleashed wrath. The lost ships buried in the murky waters across a thousand miles are carcasses of splintered timbers and twisted steel, each a silent grave, testament to a futile struggle. Most of these wrecks are long forgotten, but the stories of others are still told. One cold and stormy night on November 18, 1958, Lake Michigan claimed the giant steamer Carl D. Bradley, more than six hundred feet long. She was on her last voyage of the season, returning to port in Rogers City, the tiny Michigan town that most of the crew called home. Suddenly, in the midst of a brutal storm, a huge thud resounded through the ship. In the pilothouse, Captain Roland Bryan and First Mate Elmer Fleming spun around and looked down the length of the Bradley's hull. They could not believe their eyes. The middle of the ship was bending, humping upward several feet in the air, lifted by the huge waves underneath. Within minutes, before the eyes of her horrified crew, a raging sea tore the Bradley into two gigantic pieces.

Thirty-three men would die, while two others, Fleming and Deckwatchman Frank Mays, would survive a fifteen-hour ordeal on a storm-tossed life raft in Lake Michigan. That night, twenty-three women were widowed, and fifty-three children lost their fathers. To this day, the Carl D. Bradley is the largest ship on the bottom of Lake Michigan.

In 1975, almost two decades after the Bradley was lost, on one hellish night in November, the most famous shipwreck in Great Lakes history took place. The freighter Edmund Fitzgerald, at over seven hundred feet long, became Lake Superior's largest and perhaps most mysterious victim. The Fitz, as she was called, was the pride of her fleet, breaking and setting shipping records and weathering mammoth storms during her seventeen-year lifetime. On that terrible night, immortalized in song and literature, the Fitzgerald and her crew of twenty-nine men fought bravely against a storm that spawned waves three stories high and hurricane-strength wind gusts of ninety-five miles per hour. The Arthur Anderson, another freighter, followed the Fitzgerald, tracking her on radar and maintaining radio contact with the Fitzgerald's captain, Ernest McSorley. Captain Bernie Cooper of the Anderson knew that the Fitzgerald was taking on large amounts of water and was in serious trouble. Watching the Fitzgerald on his radar, Cooper feared that the big ship had bottomed out while navigating a perilous stretch called Six-Fathom Shoal, possibly tearing open her hull.

During the height of the storm, the Fitzgerald lost her radar and was sailing blindly into the unknown. The snow was blowing, the wind screaming, and the waves washing across the deck of the struggling freighter. Then in an instant Cooper saw the Fitzgerald drop from the radar screen, without even an SOS. Frantically, he attempted to make radio contact; the Anderson heard nothing but dead air. It was terrifying and mysterious. A ship of this size could not just drop from sight in an instant. Or could she?

Sadly, when the Fitzgerald lost her struggle with Superior, she was just seventeen miles from safe harbor at Whitefish Point, Michigan.

For decades, experts have debated the fate of the Fitzgerald in books, articles, and the news media, arguing different evidence to support theirpositions. There is no disagreement about why the Fitzgerald sank. Simply put, she took on too much water to remain buoyant. But why did she take on so much water?

Some say Captain Cooper was right, that the Fitzgerald scraped bottom (called shoaling) and damaged her hull on the pointed rocks of Six-Fathom Shoal. If a hole had been ripped in the bottom, water could have entered, causing the instability that led to her unexpected and tragic nosedive.

After an investigation, the Coast Guard concluded that the Fitzgerald's hatch cover clamps were loose, allowing water to enter the hold. All we know for sure are McSorley's own words that they were taking on water and had the pumps working. However, the water was pouring in faster than the pumps could work, and he could not stem the flow. But did this water come in from above through leaking hatch covers, or from below through a tear in the hull caused by shoaling?

Finally, there are those who subscribe to a big-wave theory. Captain Cooper considered this to be another possible cause. He recalled two thirty-five-foot waves exploding on the Anderson in rapid succession. Feeling fortunate to survive what could have been a deadly encounter, Cooper realized that the two rogue waves were rolling on a collision path with the Fitzgerald which was already struggling with a starboard list (leaning right). The monster waves would reach the Fitzgerald in just minutes. When the imperiled ship dropped from his radar, Cooper wondered if the Fitzgerald had taken the big seas across her bow, plunging nose down and propelling her five hundred feet to Superior's muddy bottom, where the wreck now rests in two pieces.

Perhaps a combination of these factors conspired against the doomed ship. Despite exhaustive research and the many theories offered, the Fitzgerald's sinking still remains a mystery.

CHAPTER 2

THE SWEETWATER SEA

Long before French explorers of the early seventeenth century discovered the Great Lakes, Indians lived and traded on their shores. Tribes like the Ojibwa, Ottawa, Huron, Algonquin, Iroquois, and Erie hunted, fished, and farmed the lands and used the lakes for their trade routes. Probably the first white explorer to encounter the Great Lakes was Samuel de Champlain, who was searching for a Northwest Passage that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific. In 1603, the year of his first trip to North America, Champlain joined a fur-trading expedition and created a map of the St. Lawrence River. He published a report on New France, a region France had claimed in North America. Upon reading Champlain's account, King Henry IV asked him to serve as geographer for another expedition to New France and write about what he saw. Champlain believed that these inland seas would serve as a northern passage to the Pacific and ultimately as a trade route to China.

One intriguing member of Champlain's expedition was Étienne Brûlé. He was there when Champlain founded Quebec in 1608, and two years later Champlain asked him to live among the Huron Indians and learn from them. At that time, between 20,000 and 30,000 Huron lived in the region now known as Quebec. For several years, Brûlé lived with and respected the Huron people and their traditions. He is probably the first white explorer to see Lake Huron, or as the French called it, La Mer Douce — the Sweetwater Sea.

Fascinated by the Huron culture and a quick learner, Brûlé became so proficient with the language of the Huron tribe that he was Champlain's interpreter during his exploration of Lakes Huron and Ontario in 1615. Champlain and his men spent the winter in the land of the Huron, where he kept journals about their way of life. As an explorer and knowing there were waterways beyond Lake Huron, Champlain longed to go farther west in search of the Northwest Passage. But this was not to be, for beyond this great water were tribes with whom the Huron were at war. The Huron feared that the French would become the friends of their enemies. Champlain, therefore, remained with the Huron, chronicling their beliefs and culture. In 1616, Champlain's interpreter, Brûlé, was captured and tortured by the Iroquois, but he was eventually freed when he bluffed them into believing he would negotiate on their behalf with their enemies. Later, suspected of treachery, Brûlé would be killed by the Huron.

Bordering the province of Ontario and the state of Michigan, Lake Huron is second in size only to Lake Superior, the world's largest body of fresh water in surface area. Although Lakes Superior and Michigan are deeper, Huron's deepest spot is almost 750 feet, and it has an average depth of nearly 200 feet. Lake Huron is 206 miles long and 183 miles wide.

Sprawling Lake Huron includes two massive bays, Michigan's Saginaw Bay and Ontario's Georgian Bay. At almost two hundred miles long, Georgian Bay is about the same size as Lake Ontario! Including its 30,000 islands (mostly in Canada), Lake Huron has the Great Lakes' longest shoreline, winding just over 3,800 miles. In fact, separating Georgian Bay from the rest of Lake Huron is Manitoulin Island, the world's largest freshwater island. Manitoulin is so big it has 108 of its own lakes, including Lake Manitoulin, which is forty square miles. Manitoulin also has eighteen towns and 12,600 permanent residents.

Because Huron is an excellent transportation connection between Lake Erie and the western Great Lakes of Michigan and Superior, it is heavily traveled by the giant freighters. From ports in Lake Superior, such as Duluth, eastbound vessels with a load of iron ore go through Sault Ste. Marie and the locks of the St. Mary's River to gain access to Lake Huron and eventually down the St. Clair River to Lake Erie and ports like Cleveland or Buffalo. Or the steamers can follow the Straits of Mackinac into Lake Michigan and down to Chicago.

All of this shipping comes with a price, however. Because of its heavy shipping traffic, Huron may be responsible for more shipwrecks than any of the other lakes, laying claim to as many as 40 percent of all Great Lakes shipwrecks. Of these many shipwrecks, the Daniel J. Morrell is the largest to succumb to the depths of mighty Lake Huron. This reputation has made Lake Huron a force to be reckoned with and one that old salts do not take lightly, especially those sailors who have seen its darker side — and lived to tell the tale.

CHAPTER 3

DEATH ON HURON

Each of the Great Lakes has its own tragic history, and Lake Huron's violent moods have become legendary. In fact, the first documented wreck on the lakes, the Griffon, went down on Lake Huron in 1679. About sixty years after Champlain's exploration of the lakes, the wealthy French explorer René-Robert Cavalier de La Salle built and sailed the Griffon, a handsome sixty-foot craft named after a mythical creature that was half lion and half eagle. Her outbound voyage to pick up valuable beaver pelts was not an easy one. Lake Erie tossed the little ship around, followed by some very rough sailing up Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinac, all the way over to Green Bay on Lake Michigan.

Loaded with a cargo of pelts, the Griffon planned to retrace her route across northern Lake Michigan, back through the Straits of Mackinac, and then down Lake Huron. LaSalle was not on board when, on her return trip, the little boat encountered a terrible September storm on Lake Huron. The four-day blow claimed the Griffon and her crew. Disappearing without a trace, the Griffon became the first known casualty of the Great Lakes.

Over the centuries, Lake Huron has been the site of thousands of shipwrecks. One of the most tragic events took place on the windy night of September 13, 1882. The steamer Asia was attempting to cross Georgian Bay, filled to capacity with 125 passengers. In terrible, blowing seas, the ship sank at about eleven-thirty in the morning, but not before three lifeboats, filled with hopeful passengers, were launched. Only one of the lifeboats survived those wild seas. Several times they were overturned, and each time fewer people returned from the churning waters. Tossed around the great bay like a feather in the wind, the only remaining lifeboat was oarless and vulnerable on the open water. She eventually lost all but two of her passengers, seventeen-year-old Duncan Tinkiss and a young woman named Christina Ann Morrison, the cousin of the Asia's first mate. The two nearly died, enduring two full days on the lake before their rescue. For the Asia's other 123 passengers, there were no survival miracles. They were the silent victims of Georgian Bay's worst storm.

The "Great Storm of 1913," beginning with warnings on Friday, November 7, marked one of the most brutal weeks in the history of the Great Lakes. During the three-day siege, the lakes, especially Lake Huron, were relentlessly battered. It was a storm like no sailor had ever seen. Wreckage and debris from destroyed ships piled up six feet high along Huron's shoreline. Eight lakers, some over 500 feet long, were lost on Lake Huron. It didn't matter if the ships had years of service, like the Scottish-built Wexford, a sturdy Canadian freighter, or were brand-new, like the James C. Carruthers, on only her third trip. At 550 feet, the Carruthers was Canada's largest freighter. Both the Wexford and the Carruthers were lost with all hands. The same horrific fate was met by many other ships as the storm continued on its path of destruction. Among those on Lake Huron and in its path were the Argus, Hydrus, Regina, John A. McGean, and Isaac M. Scott. All were lost along with the life of every man on board. The human tragedy was monumental.

The Charles S. Price, a new 524-foot freighter carrying 9,000 tons of coal bound for Milwaukee, was another victim of the Great Storm. She was sailing without one of her crew, Milton Smith, the assistant engineer, who had a bad feeling about the weather forecast and decided to disembark while at the loading dock in Ashtabula, Ohio. Smith's feeling was right on target, for the Price's journey was cut short when she came to a strange and tragic end.

It was a little before noon on Sunday, November 9, and the Price was close to Harbor Beach, on the northeast part of Michigan's "Thumb." Captain Bill Black sensed that the storm was starting to build on Lake Huron. The winds were gusting above forty miles per hour and the seas were worsening. Because of the threatening storm, the Price must have reversed her course in an effort to head back along the eastern shore of the Thumb and down to Port Huron.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Deadly Voyage"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Andrew Kantar.
Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments,
1. The Great November Terror,
2. The Sweetwater Sea,
3. Death on Huron,
4. The Morrell's World,
5. Outward Bound,
6. The Witch of November,
7. Madness at Sea,
8. Chaos!,
9. A Nightmare without End,
10. Where Is the Morrell?,
11. "Waiting to Die",
12. And the Bodies Keep Coming,
13. Human Wreckage,
14. Seeking Answers,
Epilogue,
Morrell Crew List,
Bibliography,

What People are Saying About This

sole survivor of the sinking of the S.S. Daniel J. Morrell - Dennis Hale

While reading Mr. Kantar's book, I reflected on my life. I thought of all the hardships that I faced in my childhood and adult life. Although my life was rough, I think it taught me a lesson that helped me survive the sinking. One thing I learned was to never ever, for one moment, give up.

author of Mighty Fitz and Wreck of the Carl D. - Michael Schumacher

The breaking apart of the Daniel J. Morrell, along with Dennis Hale's remarkable survival on a life raft on a storm-ravaged Lake Huron, comprises one of the most compelling shipwreck stories in Great Lakes history. In Deadly Voyage, Andrew Kantar takes his reader through a tale that is, in turns, harrowing, tragic, frustrating, uplifting, suspenseful, and, ultimately, historically important. This book is a vital addition to any collection of Great Lakes maritime books.