The November gales of Armistice Day 1940 were strong enough to sink not one, but three separate freighters. Two foundered - which meant they took on water before sinking wholesale - the SS William B. Davock and the SS Novadoc. When the SS Anna C. Minch met its final resting place, it was snapped in two pieces.
At the time she sank, Anna C. Minch was one of only a few freighters on the Great Lakes named for a woman. This was, however, less empowering than it was an omen, considering the woman in question. For almost 20 years, Anna Minch ran the Minch Transportation Company and was, for a time, one of the richest and most powerful women in the Great Lakes industrial complex. However, she was only at the reins due to her husband’s and son’s deaths, the latter of whom perished in a shipwreck himself.
Though she was the second largest of the three ships to wreck that day, 380 feet long was nothing to sniff at, certainly not for a Great Lakes freighter at that time. Not to mention, throughout the Minch’s 37-year career, she’d been a part of a handful of collisions already, with docks and other boats. She’d been run aground several times in inclement weather and suffered gale and ice damage. Throughout her clumsy work history, she’d taken damage but never faltered, granting her the reputation of a tough and seaworthy vessel.
Until the 1920s, the Anna C. Minch was built for and primarily transported grains between Cleveland and Chicago, though she did haul heavier natural materials if necessary. Following her sale to the Western Navigation Company of Ontario, the Minch still primarily hauled grain, just now sailing under a maple leaf flag.
Like the duck hunters from last week, those working on the Great Lakes that Nov. 11 morning were greeted with typical lakeside November weather: a little cloudy, a little windy, with some scattered, on-and-off-again rain. By early morning, as the Minch headed towards Chicago with her grain, reports began to come in of a massive storm brewing over the plains. And an hour after the Minnesotan duck hunters saw their temperature drop drastically, the squall hit Lake Michigan, the storm so vicious the winds could be physically seen as they approached the West Michigan shoreline.
Next Monday will mark five decades since the tragic sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior, the victim of the same freak weather system that became the Armistice Day Storm and the 1913 Blizzard. The Fitz faced sustained winds of 50 mph, gusts recorded as high as 90 mph, and waves towering 18 feet. The Anna C. Minch, William B. Davoc and the Novadoc faced worse. Sustained winds of 70 mph, gusts over 100 mph, and waves averaging 25 feet high.
It’s no wonder the Minch broke apart. Genuinely, I’m shocked the other two shipwrecks stayed in one piece.
I don’t envy the jobs of the insurance investigators who had to piece together some report of the loss, as there were no survivors to tell the tale of what exactly happened to the ship and at what time. The last people to see the ship afloat were the surviving crew of the Novadoc, who spotted her heading southwest towards Chicago, close to Grand Haven. When she wrecked, estimated to have occurred at 8 p.m., she was just south of Pentwater.
It’s unclear whether she was blown all those miles back or if she turned to seek shelter at a port. Also unclear for many years was how in the world she broke in two - her stern was found not too far off from where she rested, just 400 feet offshore. Initial theories, put forward just days after her loss, were that she had collided with the William B. Davoc, the wreckage of which would not be found for another 30 years.
Over the years, and as her wreckage has been studied by divers, that theory has fallen to the wayside, but opened the door to a slew of other possibilities. What could be seen in the wreckage was that the anchor was released, meaning that not only was the multi-ton ship being blown around like a paper boat, but she was dragging her anchor the whole time, likely done as a desperate and last-ditch attempt to save her. It’s entirely possible that the strength of the storm met the drag of the anchor and broke the ship in that way. Other ideas put forth were that she struck the famously shallow sandbars by Pentwater, or that she was hoisted airborne by the towering waves and crash-landed or that she had snapped under her own weight and cargo.
Of the 25 crew members lost, only eight bodies were recovered. Nearby some of the bodies that had washed ashore were two lifeboats, clearly in the midst of being prepared for launch, one last attempt to reach shore just several hundred yards away.
One pair of victims was a husband and wife duo who were charged with preparing meals on the ship - Howard and Mabel Kerton. Robert Vollick was only 15 when his father, William, recruited him as a last-minute deckhand on the Minch. Robert’s body was recovered, but his father’s was not. There was also 19-year-old Sheldon MacMath, a lookout, whose body was recovered and interred in his hometown of Goderich, Ontario. I won’t regale the entire poem his sister wrote as a eulogy, but I will highlight the opening stanzas:
“Our lonely hearts cry, ‘Where was God?’ / That dark November night / When all the furies of the storm / Closed in their fearful might / And swept the sailors who we loved / Forever from our sight?”
With the 50th anniversary of the Edmund Fitzgerald’s sinking approaching, I’ve heard Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad repeating on social media for weeks. The above poem couldn’t help but remind me of, perhaps, the most haunting lyrics of the song.
“Does anyone know where the love of God goes / When the waves turn the minutes to hours?”
