Capsized!

The deadliest shipwreck in Great lakes history happened a few feet from shore.

The average middle school student in southcentral Michigan can probably name only one shipwreck on the Great Lakes or its tributaries – the Edmund Fitzgerald.  This is undoubtedly due to the freighter’s relatively recent demise (November 10, 1975) and to the continued popularity of Gordon Lightfoot’s disaster ballad The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

But while the Fitzgerald was lost during a wild November storm near the middle of Lake Superior, the Lakes’ worst maritime disaster, in terms of lives lost, occurred in the Chicago River on a foggy summer morning in 1915, only a stone’s throw from safety.  The Eastland, a passenger vessel chartered for a company picnic, was tied to the dock where it suddenly rolled ninety degrees to port, trapping hundreds of passengers within its lower decks.

Capsized! tells this harrowing story in very human terms, recounting the actual experiences of several passengers aboard that day who ended up fighting for their lives as the cold, murky waters of the Chicago River began to fill the enclosed spaces of the Eastland.  Some people survived; 844 did not.

For readers of the I Survived series who are ready to move on to nonfiction, this is a gripping account of ordinary men, women, and children caught up in a life-or-death struggle.