Graveyard of the Lakes
A thorough history of Great Lakes shipwrecks from the seventeenth century to the present, covering the storms, the vessels, the salvage efforts, and the geography that makes the Lakes among the most dangerous inland waters in the world.
The Great Lakes have claimed an estimated six thousand ships and thirty thousand lives since European navigation began. Mark Thompson’s Graveyard of the Lakes is the most comprehensive popular history of those losses – organized by region and era, covering everything from eighteenth-century fur trade canoes to twentieth-century ore freighters, with particular attention to the storms that made the losses possible.
Thompson is a maritime historian who has spent decades on the Lakes, and the book reflects that depth. He writes about specific wrecks with enough detail to be genuinely informative – hull type, cargo, crew size, weather conditions, what went wrong – while keeping the narrative moving. The chapters on Lake Erie and Lake Huron are especially good for Loopers, as those are the passages where weather can build fastest and the history of losses is most vivid.
Reading this before or during a Great Lakes passage is not designed to frighten you. It is designed to give you a proper respect for what the Lakes are. They are not the ocean, but they are not lakes in any small-pond sense either. When Thompson describes a November gale on Lake Superior taking down a 700-foot freighter, you understand why Loopers who cross in the fall talk about the weather the way they do.
Published by Wayne State University Press in 2000 as part of their Great Lakes Books series. Thompson’s other titles include Steamboats and Sailors of the Great Lakes.
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