OFF THE SHELF: So Terrible a Storm by Curt Brown (Voyageur Press, 2008)

A MarEx Book Review by Jack O’Connell.

One of the great benefits of being in the magazine business is access to the many fine books being published these days on maritime topics and sent to us free-of-charge by publishers eager for coverage. We here at MarEx are happy to oblige, especially since we know that our readers – despite being a savvy and literate lot – have precious little time on their hands for idle pursuits like curling up with a good book. So this column is designed to both save you time and keep you abreast of the latest and greatest in maritime reads.

One recent example is So Terrible a Storm (Voyageur Press, 2008) by Curt Brown, a general assignment reporter for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. Subtitled “A Tale of Fury on Lake Superior,” the book documents the little-known but devastating Thanksgiving Week storm of 1905 that struck 31 vessels caught on the lake and destroyed half of them. Most were ore carriers making one last run from Duluth through the Soo Locks to the steel mills to the south before the winter set in. The Pittsburgh Steamship Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel and the largest operator on the Lakes, lost nearly 15 percent of its fleet. The devastation was such that it led, among other changes in operating and safety procedures, to the building of the now-famous Split Rock Lighthouse at the site just north of Duluth where the SS Ira H. Owen (named for a former president of U.S. Steel) foundered.

Mention Great Lakes’ shipwrecks and most people think of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which went down with her 29 crewmembers in a 1975 storm remarkably similar to the one described in Brown’s book. And if you don’t remember the actual event, you do remember the song by Gordon Lightfoot that immortalized it – “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” Brown demonstrates that, long before the Edmund Fitzgerald, there was a storm of far greater proportions. In the process, he pens a work that is at once a history of Great Lakes shipping and a narrative of the worst storm ever to strike Lake Superior.

Not since Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm has a writer captured so well the fury of the seas as Curt Brown. Like Junger’s 1997 classic, So Terrible a Storm makes you taste and smell the waves and salt air. Both books have illustrative maps, a useful feature that helps the reader visualize the scope and scenes of the action. And while Junger describes life in the gritty fishing village of Gloucester, Massachusetts and the fate of the Andrea Gail and her crew off the Grand Banks, so does Curt Brown define Duluth at the turn of the century and the fate of the men aboard the stricken Lakers.

But the book is more than a nerve-wracking tale of fury and destruction. More than any other body of water on earth, the Great Lakes – or the Inland Seas, as the author prefers to call them – have been sadly neglected in the annals of maritime literature. Brown is determined to correct this, and in doing so produces a volume that is at once a geological as well as social and economic history of a time that occupies a unique place in America’s industrial development.

The book opens with a handy and informative overview of the formation of the Great Lakes, the world’s largest freshwater bodies, by the receding glacier in the later stages of the last Ice Age, noting how they were “scooped” out of the earth and are relatively “new” and “young” as measured in geological time. It goes on to describe the great Mesabi Range of northern Minnesota, with its vast iron ore deposits, which transformed the emerging American economy into the world’s biggest steel producer and made Duluth the fourth biggest port in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. The ore had to be moved by steamship to the blast furnaces of Indiana and Ohio and Pennsylvania, which were fueled by the coal deposits of Appalachia. Names like Carnegie and Phipps and Mellon were making their fortunes, and America was to the world at that time what China is fast becoming today.

Among the fascinating factoids that dot Brown’s narrative is the observation that the total volume of water in Lake Superior is greater than that of the other four Great Lakes combined. Think about that for a while. The author further enlivens his narrative by viewing the events of those fateful three days in part through the eyes of a pioneering young woman reporter named Mary McFadden, who somehow gets hardened and exhausted shipwreck survivors to open up about their ordeals. We also learn much about the evolution of the U.S. Weather Service through the observations of its station chief in Duluth. The strengths and weaknesses of the U.S. Lifesaving Service, the predecessor to the U.S. Coast Guard, are also explored before, during, and after the storm. Last but not least, the economic loss and destruction wreaked by the storm are viewed through the eyes of the Pittsburgh Steamship Company and its president, who hastens to Duluth from Cleveland by private rail car to personally assess the damage.

All in all, a well-worthwhile read that will give you more than you expected and leave you thinking about it, as it did me, for a long time afterward. – MarEx

Jack O’Connell is Senior Copy Editor of The Maritime Executive.