How the Wreck of the ‘Edmund Fitzgerald’ Became Every Guy’s Favorite Historical Maritime Disaster

For the past several years, a Gordon Lightfoot song from 1976 has become an unlikely seasonal meme. The song, of course, is “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” a mournful ballad of the true story of the ship of the same name, which sank fifty years ago today.

The space between Halloween and Thanksgiving has been rechristened “Edmund Fitzgerald Fall,” an interval marked by a deluge of memes and posts commemorating the ship and song alike—all by people born well after the event. The sinking and song have spawned a cult-like interest on social media that has taken over algorithms and group chats.

As the fiftieth anniversary approached, Edmund Fitzgerald content seemed inescapable, leaving one social media user to ask, “can someone from the midwest please explain why I’m suddenly seeing posts for the SS Edmund Fitzgerald? I have never heard of this boat before.” Among the Seinfeld memes and Halloween costumes is a rather obscure historical event that has garnered genuine interest among young people, mostly men.

The song—and the subsequent memes—are about the tragic sinking of the Great Lakes freighter, the Edmund Fitzgerald, on November 10, 1975. The well-known ship sank in Lake Superior with all 29 crew on board after being caught in a severe storm. The disaster was memorialized in a hauntingly catchy tune by Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot the next year.

Today, you can buy Edmund Fitzgerald T-shirts, drink Edmund Fitzgerald beer, and even buy limited edition bumper stickers. Always a perennial interest to those from the Great Lakes region (the song is a regional anthem on both sides of the border), fascination with the disaster and the song has now become a full-on phenomenon.

Men love a good historical and nautical event. Witness the enduring popularity of Master and Commander, or the fact that James Cameron can’t stop going to the Titanic. “Men would literally rather get shipwrecked off the coast of Patagonia than go to therapy,” says Matt Choi, a 33-year-old New York City worker, who has been enthralled by sea history since he was a child, belongs to a book club that often reads nautical-themed works like David Grann’s The Wager, and watches hours of sailing content on YouTube, including Edmund Fitzgerald videos.

Like “my Roman Empire” before it, the Edmund Fitzgerald is a boy meme. According to Kathryn Winn, the author and editor of the Substack newsletter Memeforum, the Fitzgerald meme is so perfectly niche and historically rich that “if you’re at a party standing with five guys and you ask them, ‘what’s your favorite event from history?’” and everybody says the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, those five guys will immediately “have the best conversation of their lives.”