We Are Holding Our Own

The ship and the night

Record She was Hull 301 of the Great Lakes Engineering Works at River Rouge, Michigan, just below Detroit: keel laid on 7 August 1957, launched on Saturday 7 June 1958, owned by the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee and named for its chairman.^[5] At 729 feet she was, when she went into the water, the largest ship on the Great Lakes, built to the limit of the Seaway locks then about to open. She was chartered to Oglebay Norton’s Columbia fleet and spent seventeen seasons carrying taconite — pellets of processed iron ore — from the head of Lake Superior to the mills of the lower lakes, setting seasonal haul records six times. By November 1975 she had made some 748 round trips.^[5]

Record On Sunday 9 November 1975 she loaded 26,116 long tons of taconite at Burlington Northern Dock No. 1 in Superior, Wisconsin, and left at about a quarter past two in the afternoon, bound for Detroit, under Captain Ernest M. McSorley, who was sixty‑three.^[1] A word about the clock, because this essay depends on it: the Coast Guard’s Marine Board states that all times in its report are Eastern Standard Time, and I keep that convention throughout. Superior itself was on Central time; her 2:15 was 1:15 on the dock.^[14]

Record A storm was coming up from Kansas. By seven that evening the Weather Service had posted gale warnings for the whole lake, and at two in the morning raised them to storm warnings. The Fitzgerald and the Anderson, which had fallen in with her off Two Harbors, hauled north to cross in the lee of the Canadian shore. At one in the morning she reported north‑east winds of 52 knots and ten‑foot seas; at seven, her last weather report, 35 knots. The centre of the low passed over Marquette at seven and over White River, Ontario, at one in the afternoon, and as it went by the wind fell, swung round, and came out of the north‑west with the open lake behind it.^[1]

Record About half past three, having passed Michipicoten and come down past Caribou Island and its shoals, McSorley called the Anderson: he had “a fence rail down, two vents lost or damaged, and a list,” and both pumps going. He would check down so that the Anderson could close up. Forty minutes later both his radars were out, and the Anderson began plotting his position for him. The radio beacon at Whitefish Point had failed. At 4:52 the Anderson logged 58 knots, the highest of the storm; around six, seas of twenty‑five feet. At ten past seven came the last exchange. There was no distress call.^[1]

Record The wreck was found four days later at 46°59.9′ N, 85°06.6′ W, in Canadian water north‑west of Whitefish Point. The Coast Guard’s Board concluded that the most probable cause was “massive flooding of the cargo hold” through hatch closures that were not weathertight; the National Transportation Safety Board preferred the sudden collapse of a hatch cover under boarding seas; the Lake Carriers’ Association held that she had touched bottom on the shoals off Caribou. The Board noted that there were no survivors and no witnesses, and offered its cause only as the most probable one.^[1][2][3] That remains the state of the record.

The launch

Record The launching was a civic occasion. Something over ten thousand people lined the yard and the river on a Saturday at midday. Mrs. Fitzgerald needed three swings to break the bottle. Then the yard crew struggled for thirty‑six minutes to knock out the keel blocks. When the hull finally went — sideways, as lake boats are launched — she threw a wave over the spectators and struck the far pier before she righted. One man in the crowd suffered a heart attack and died.^[5] The newspapers gave the minute: she slid into the basin, by one account as it is quoted today, at 12:34 p.m., and by another printing of what is evidently the same sentence at 12:38.^[4] Detroit kept Eastern Standard Time that summer, without daylight saving.^[14] I use 12:34 and carry the four minutes as an uncertainty; they move the rising degree by less than one degree and change nothing below except where I say so.

The almanac of the hour

Mine Before any chart, an Indian almanac gives five things about a moment — the weekday, the lunar day (tithi), the Moon’s star (nakṣatra), the yoga formed by Sun and Moon together, and the half‑tithi called the karaṇa — and a muhūrta begins by striking out the hours that fail on any of them. For 12:34 that Saturday the five are: Saturday; the seventh tithi of the dark fortnight; Dhaniṣṭhā; the yoga Vaidhṛti; the karaṇa Viṣṭi.

Text Two of those five are among the very few things every almanac forbids. Of the twenty‑seven yogas two are rejected for all beginnings, Vyatīpāta and Vaidhṛti, and the Bṛhadyātrā says why in a breath: “He who sets out in Vyatīpāta meets great calamity, or death; so also in a going under Vaidhṛti” (12.1). Of the eleven karaṇas one is rejected, Viṣṭi, also called Bhadrā, whose presiding deity in Varāhamihira’s list is Yama, lord of the dead: “What is done in Viṣṭi brings no good; it succeeds in the striking down of others, in poison and the like” (Bṛhat Saṁhitā 99.1, 99.4). And of Saturn’s day the same travel‑book says that one who goes forth on it “comes to wretchedness — to parting from kin and wealth, to death, bondage and sickness” (5.2).^[9][8]

Mine The star, to be fair, is a good one. Dhaniṣṭhā, the star of the Vasus, is on Varāhamihira’s short list of eight that are “always best” for setting out (Bṛhadyātrā 4.5), and its people in the Saṁhitā are the open‑handed and “the very wealthy” (15.21) — not a bad patron for a hull that an insurance company had built as an investment. But Viṣṭi and Vaidhṛti together are another matter. Each is a fixed slice of the lunar month, and they coincide for only about one hour in two hundred. Viṣṭi had begun at 11:16 that morning, seventy‑eight minutes before she moved; Vaidhṛti would lapse at 2:27. A launching at eleven would have had the one fault without the other, and so would a launching at three. The two overlapped that day for three hours and eleven minutes, from 11:16 to 2:27, and she went in the middle of them. This is not hindsight in the usual sense: an almanac‑maker asked on the Friday for an hour to put a hull in the water would have struck out noon on Saturday on sight. Nobody at River Rouge, of course, was asking.

Record Text The travel‑books would also have minded the day’s incidents. A good third of the Bṛhadyātrā is on nimitta, the signs that meet a departure — what breaks, what stumbles, what cries out, who is met on the road — and the stuck blocks, the thrice‑swung bottle, the blow against the pier and a death in the crowd are the kind of thing its chapters on omens were written to weigh.^[9] I note them and pass on; the chart is the firmer ground.

The chart

Mine Siṁha, the Lion, was rising, and the lord of the Lion is the Sun, who stood in the tenth house — the house of rank, of what is seen by all — in Vṛṣabha with Mercury. A lagna lord in the tenth, at midday, is the plain signature of a public career: she went into the water the largest ship on the Lakes and was still breaking cargo records in her second decade. Venus, lord of that tenth house, was in the ninth, the house of fortune. Jupiter, from the second, looked across by his seventh aspect on to the eighth house — the house of the length of life and the manner of its end — and by his ninth on to the Sun. A Jyotiṣī reading this chart in 1958 would have promised her a name and a good living.

Mine And would have paused over two planets, the two shown in red. Saturn was in the fourth house, retrograde, at 29°36′ of Vṛścika. The fourth is the house of the home ground and, classically, of vāhana, conveyances; Vṛścika is a water sign; and the last degree of Vṛścika is one of the three seams of the zodiac where a water sign gives way to a fire sign and a nakṣatra ends exactly with the sign. That seam is called gaṇḍānta, “the end of the knot,” and a planet there is counted as gravely weakened. Saturn was twenty‑four minutes of arc from it, moving backward along the last quarter of Jyeṣṭhā. From there he cast his seventh aspect on the Sun in the tenth and his tenth aspect on the rising sign itself: the chart’s lord and its lagna both under the eye of a retrograde Saturn at the water’s edge.

Mine Mars was in the eighth house, in Mīna, the Fishes. For a Lion ascendant Mars is the best planet in the sky, lord of both the fourth and the ninth; here the lord of the house of vehicles sits in the house of death, in a water sign.

Text The Bṛhajjātaka’s chapter on the manner of death opens with the eighth house. Death, it says, takes its character from the planet that aspects or occupies that house — “from fire, from water, from a weapon, from fever, from disease, from thirst, from hunger, with the Sun and the rest in the eighth” — and its place from the kind of sign: abroad if the eighth is a movable sign, at home if a fixed one, “on the road” if a dual (25.1).^[12] Mīna is a dual sign. Read as a birth, this chart says: an end by violence, in transit. The same chapter makes the twenty‑second decanate from the rising one “the cause of death,” acting through its lord (25.11); here that is the last third of Mīna, the Scorpion’s decanate, whose lord is again Mars.

Mine One near miss should be recorded, since I went looking for it. Varāhamihira has a combination for a child born aboard a boat: a watery sign rising with the Moon in the seventh house (Bṛhajjātaka 5.8). The Fitzgerald’s Moon is in the seventh. But the Lion is not a watery sign, and half a combination is no combination.

The Sunday she sailed

Mine Now the departure, which is the case the travel‑books were written for. At 2:15 p.m. Eastern time on 9 November 1975, at the dock in Superior, Makara — Capricorn — was rising, with the Moon in it.

Text I have gone through Varāhamihira’s tests for a departure one at a time. The result is a split decision, and I give it whole.

Mine The karaṇa is the nicest point in the table. Vaṇij means “the merchant”; its deity in the Saṁhitā is Śrī, the goddess of prosperity; Varāhamihira bars it for travellers and in the same verse lets it back in for trade. A bulk carrier leaving the ore dock with a paying cargo is as pure a case of vaṇik‑kriyā as could be devised. On this limb the old book would have let her go.

Mine Taken together, then, the Sunday afternoon was middling — three limbs against, one for, three that cut both ways. No almanac would have chosen it and none would have cried out against it. If the texts have a warning for this voyage it is not in the hour she left but in what she was sailing into, and the almanac shows that too. The figure below lays the thirty hours out on one line.

Mine Two things on that strip deserve a sentence each. Ten hours out, half an hour after midnight, the tithi turned to the eighth — the day on which, by the verse just quoted in the table, “even one who has gained wealth” comes to ruin by setting out — and with it Viṣṭi began; the storm warning went up ninety minutes later, and Viṣṭi lasted through the north‑east gale until the centre of the storm had passed. And at 11:37 on Monday morning the Moon crossed into Dhaniṣṭhā. Once a month, for a day, the Moon returns to the star it occupied at a birth; the tradition calls that day’s star janma, “birth,” the first of the nine tārā counted from it (Bṛhadyātrā 4.17), and treats it as a tender day, a day on which the native is exposed. Everything that matters in the Coast Guard’s narrative — the passage off Caribou, the list, the lost radars, the last word — happened with the Moon in the ship’s birth star. So, I must add, did one day in every twenty‑seven of her life.

Text One more line from the same chapter on weekdays, quoted without comment. Of those who set out on a Monday it says that they meet “diseases of wind and phlegm; the loss of strength, of honour and of food; and suffering born of water” — salila‑janita‑pīḍā (Bṛhadyātrā 5.1). She did not set out on a Monday. She was lost on one.

The last word

Mine Now the moment itself. This is the sky at 7:10 p.m. over the place where she lies. The Sun had set two hours before. The half Moon stood a little west of south, thirty‑three degrees up, above the snow.

Mine Mithuna had begun to rise at 7:04, six minutes before the mate picked up the handset, and Mars was in Mithuna: from that minute, in the language of the art, Mars was in the lagna, retrograde, motionless, in the star of Rudra. He was not yet in sight. The planet itself — at magnitude −1.2 brighter than any star then above the horizon — came over the north‑eastern horizon of the wreck site at 7:31. The Coast Guard puts the sinking “sometime after” 7:10; the Anderson’s master last saw her on the radar at the end of that call, nine miles ahead, and by 7:20 she was not among the targets on the screen.^[1][5] The Fitzgerald went down as Mars was rising — the planet whose sub‑period had opened five days before, who sat in the eighth house of her launch, and who had stopped in the sky four days earlier.

Mine And with Mithuna rising, Makara is the eighth house, and the Moon was in Makara. Both malefics looked at her there: Saturn from Karka, straight across, by the seventh aspect that every planet has; Mars from the rising sign by the eighth‑house aspect that only Mars has. Jupiter, strong in his own sign in the tenth, aspected neither the Moon nor the lagna.

Text For those two placements Varāhamihira’s travel‑book has two lines, in its chapter on what each planet does in each house at the moment of setting out. Of Mars: “In the lagna — harm from poison, fire, bloodshed and weapons” (Bṛhadyātrā 10.7). Of the Moon: “The Moon in the eighth brings the traveller death and grief” — nidhana‑śoka‑kara (10.5). And the Bṛhajjātaka’s chapter on death, in the verse quoted earlier, assigns a manner of death to each planet found in the eighth house. The Moon’s is ambu: water (25.1).^[9][12]

Text Two verses further on in that chapter is a line I did not expect to find. It is one of a string of special combinations, each naming a configuration and the death it gives:

Mine Jalodara is a disease, the one physicians call ascites or dropsy, and Varāhamihira means it as a disease: a man born under this pairing dies of fluid in the abdomen. But the word is transparent. Jala is water and udara is the belly — water in the belly. On the night of 10 November 1975 Saturn was in Karka and the Moon was in Makara, and the Marine Board’s finding, two years later, was that the Edmund Fitzgerald sank from “massive flooding of the cargo hold.”^[1]

Mine I set that down as an image, not as an argument, and the caution it needs is quickly given. The verse is a rule for a person’s nativity, not for a ship and not for the hour of an event; I have moved it twice to bring it here. And the configuration is common. Saturn was in Karka for two years, and during those two years the Moon passed through Makara for two and a quarter days of every month. The pairing held on some sixty days. One of them was this one.

What the reading is worth

Mine A reading made after the event is cheap. Any sky has hundreds of describable features, and a reader who knows the ending will find the ones that rhyme with it. The defence against that is to count: to say how often each feature occurs anyway, and to report everything that was looked at. Here are the features this essay has leaned on, with their ordinary frequencies.

Mine It is tempting to multiply the column, and it would be wrong to. These are not independent, they were not chosen in advance, and they are the survivors of a larger search. Against them stand the things that were looked at and came to nothing or to the contrary: a launch star and a sailing star both on the list of the best; a sailing tithi that is commended; seven of ten sailor‑omens absent; the boat‑birth combination half formed; the eclipses in their benign order; Jupiter strong in his own sign in a house of strength at the last hour. Altogether I examined some forty separate rules. A dozen spoke to the event, and a few of those spoke with a clarity I did not expect — the launch hour, the Mars sub‑period, the double station, the rising of Mars. I do not think that is nothing. I also do not think it is a proof of anything, and the only test that would make it one is the dull one: take a few hundred hulls with recorded launch minutes, losses and survivals alike, fix the rules beforehand, and count. Until someone does, this is a reading — a description, in an old and exact vocabulary, of the quality of three moments.

Text Varāhamihira would not have been scandalised by that modesty. He opens the Yogayātrā by denying that the stars are sufficient:

Text Success, he says in the verse before, is like a harvest: it comes of land and season and labour and counsel and of fate, all together — “and if there is a single hole, through that alone everything is lost, like water from a leaking skin” (syāc chidram ekam api cet … dṛteḥ sravaṇād ivāmbhaḥ, 1.4). The Bṛhadyātrā puts the same thing in a couplet it attributes to Vyāsa: “Not fate without human effort, nor effort without fate; neither alone brings a thing about, any more than one fire‑stick makes a fire” (1.16).^[11][9]

Mine That is the right frame for the two readings of this wreck, the investigators’ and this one. The Marine Board’s findings are all about the single hole: hatch clamps not dogged down, coamings and gaskets not kept, three feet and more of freeboard given away by successive changes to the load‑line rules, a cargo hold with no watertight subdivision. Those are puruṣakāra, the human share, and nothing in the sky dogs down a hatch. What Jyotiṣa adds is the other fire‑stick: that the same ship, with the same hatches, had made some seven hundred and fifty round trips, and that the crossing on which the hole mattered began in the first week of a Mars sub‑period, under two halted malefics, in an eclipse fortnight, on the day of her birth star. The later literature has a word for such a meeting of a weakness with its hour, and it is Varāhamihira’s word. The closing sub‑period of a major period is called its chidra, and the planets bound up with the eighth house are the chidra‑grahas: the hole. Rāhu–Mars, for this ship, was both.