Terrifying Steamboat Stories: True Tales of Shipwreck, Death, and Disaster on the Great Lakes

In Terrifying Steamboat Stories, Great Lakes historian James L. Donahue gives readers a glimpse of the romantic age of steamships from the day the Walk-In-The-Water puffed her way across Lake Erie in 1818 until diesel engines took over almost 150 years later. This was a time when the skyline over the lakes was black from the coal smoke of passing freighters, passenger liners, steam barges and tugboats. The early steamers were especially dangerous. Boilers blew up. Overheated engines mounted in wooden ships started fires. Steam pipes worked loose during the stress of heavy seas and hot seam scalded workers alive. Before there was radio and sonar, ships collided with each other and with submerged rocks and shoals. Terrifying Steamboat Stories is a collection of fascinating stories about things that happened to Great Lakes steamboats and the men and women who walked their decks. The stories in Terrifying Steamboat Stories range from horrifying tales of shipwrecks to humorous yarns such as the story of the cook who waved the steamer Hastings when it got turned around and went the wrong way on Lake Ontario and that of the Argo that made a rocky trip up the Detroit River. They bring alive in terrible detail the disastrous voyage of the Walk-In-The -Water, the fire aboard the Phoenix, the curse of the Lady Elgin, the foundering of the Western Reserve, the mystery of the loss of the Clemson, the unexplained loss of the Pere Marquette No. 18, the capsizing of the Eastland, the wreck of the Carl D. Bradley, the tragic loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald, and many, many more.