Dwight Boyer (1912–1977)

This turns out to be mostly a collection of accounts of “great shipwrecks of the Great Lakes”, with the few pieces that aren’t about shipwrecks being about salvage operations or near-disasters. The main exception is the opening piece, an account of the celebrated steamboat race between the Tashmoo and the City of Erie in June 1901. Unfortunately, this opening piece also shows Boyer indulging his penchant for journalistic cliché to the hilt, putting dialogue into the mouths of the participants, including a Chief Engineer with a comic “Scottish” accent… Later in the book he moderates this sort of thing a little, but it remains hard to disentangle his historical research from his taste for reconstruction.

What I took from the book was a better sense of how extreme the weather conditions on the Great Lakes can be, as well as a general impression that most of the disasters he describes could have been avoided with better weather forecasting, better ships and skippers who weren’t under as much pressure to meet schedules. But that is probably true for marine accidents anywhere in the world. Obviously what is peculiar to the Lakes is that ships are on short and very familiar, frequently travelled routes, never more than a few hours from shelter, but the weather changes can be very rapid.

Fun if you like disaster stories, but you might prefer a more recent book, especially given that the most celebrated Great Lakes shipwreck, the Edmund Fitzgerald, occurred some ten years too late for Boyer to have included it.… (más)