A Look at History
40 Years Ago, Daniel J. Morrell Foundered in Wild Storm
BY FRANK STRAUS

Most Mackinac Islanders remember the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the ore boat that foundered in Lake Superior November 10, 1975. A less well-remembered tale is the story of the Daniel J. Morrell, the Bethlehem Steel ore boat that broke apart and sank in Lake Huron on the early morning of November 29, 1966.

There are several reasons why the Morrell is forgotten while the Big Fitz is remembered. The Fitzgerald had been a record-breaking vessel in size, with a corps of admirers in the Great Lakes shipping community. Its disappearance drew nationwide news coverage at the time, and inspired one of the most popular radio tunes of the following year; and, finally, the vessel's mysterious plunge to the bottom without any survivors has created a continued sense of fascination with its fate.

In contrast to the Fitzgerald, we know exactly why the Daniel J. Morrell went down, because the vessel yielded a single survivor: watchman Dennis Hale.

By 1966, the 600-foot-long Morrell was already an old vessel, laid down in Bay City, Michigan, in 1906, but still carrying iron ore for Bethlehem Steel's Lake Erie mill. In the final days of November, the weary, veteran ore boat was assigned to make one last round trip up to Lake Superior for more ore to keep the steel mill going through the winter.

As Hale later told the story, on the night of Tuesday, November 28, the old Morrell was butting its way up Lake Huron in ballast. The boat was pitching and rolling in storm waters, but Hale, an experienced seaman, retired to his bunk anyway. As with many other lake boats at that time, the Morrell had a pilothouse and some of its quarters up forward, and that is where Hale's bunk was.

At about 2 a.m. that Wednesday morning, Hale later recalled, he was awakened in his bed by a loud "bang." Hale reached for the switch to operate the light in his bunkroom, but found that the light did not work. A few seconds later came the dreaded clang of an alarm bell.

As Hale and his fellow seamen looked back at the hull of their ore boat, they saw the wracked cargo hold cracking in half amidships. Fatigued by long service, and driven to metal failure by the storm, the riveted hull of the Morrell sheared in two. The after half of the ore boat, with engine power, began banging and grating against the helpless bow section, eventually throwing it aside; but now both halves of the vessel were open to flooding by lake water.

Dennis Hale and his fellow seamen from the pilothouse crowded into the Morrell's forward life raft. The helpless, unpowered bow half of the old boat shuddered in the heaving waters and then sank to the bottom of the lake; and in the foam the life raft and the survivors were separated. After a tumble through the waters, Hale found himself on the lake's surface a few feet from the raft, and climbed aboard. Only four men, including himself, were still alive.

The protocol of the Bethlehem Steel fleet asked its captains to radio their positions to headquarters daily. No such position report was received on the morning of Wednesday, November 29. The steel company appears to have been unconcerned by this silence; no one knows why, and the company was later at great pains not to explain itself, as its inaction was to be one of the elements of a very bitter lawsuit. The Morrell did not radio the company on the morning of Thursday, November 30, either. At 12:15 p.m. on that day, Cleveland headquarters told the U.S. Coast Guard that the ore boat was missing.

Those two days, Wednesday and Thursday, November 29 and 30, would be days that Dennis Hale would never forget. As the ruined ore boat sank, one open-boat life raft, containing four men, had been exposed to the wild seas. The temperature had dropped well below freezing, and water dashed into the raft, forming a thickening sheet of ice on the boat's exposed surfaces. Under these conditions, over the following day, night, and day, Hale's three fellow seamen had died.

As Hale later told the story, by midday Thursday, lying in the raft, sheltered by the bodies of his frozen companions, with his blood temperature dropping, he had lost control of the clarity of his thought processes, and had become thirsty and apathetic.

Feebly searching for water, the seaman began to fumble with the crusts of ice forming on his peacoat, hoping to suck and eat them. Drifting into his mind came a vision of a great old man of the sea, with white hair and moustache and a freezing expression, who seemed to be urging Hale not to do this. The survivor briefly obeyed this command, but later that Thursday afternoon, he once again began to scratch and claw at the chips of ice around and about him.

This time the vision was so powerful that it filled Dennis Hale's brain.

"I told you not to eat the ice off your coat," the aged voice said. "It will lower your body temperature and you'll die." Overcome by the specter, Hale lay back in the heaving open boat and wrestled with his thirst. And it was while he was lying there, at two o'clock on the afternoon of November 30, 1966, that those in the helicopter saw the boat, drifting slowly in the waters near Huron City, on Michigan's Thumb. There was scarcely two hours of sunlight left in the day.

So Dennis Hale lived and told his story to those who investigated the disaster. But 28 of the 29 men aboard the fated vessel did not come home.