Ships and men of the Great Lakes spans more than a century of Great Lakes history in a series of true, thoroughly documented dramas, most of them describing the misadventures of vessels and the men who sailed them.What ever happened to the sturdy old SOO CITY—what caused her to vanish with all hands? There was no mystery, however, about why the Daniel J. Morrell went down one stormy night in November 1966, although the survival of crewman Dennis Hale and his graphic account of his encounter with a ghostly stranger on the life raft is another matter.Stories of dreadful tragedy and unbridled stupidity are intermingled with unsurpassed acts of heroism such as recounted in the ill-fated voyage of the passenger steamer Erie. One August 9, 1841, the Erie left her dock at Buffalo, New York bound for Chicago with stops in Erie, Cleveland, and Detroit with over three hundred passengers aboard. She never made it!The W.W. Arnold was smashed to pieces on Lake Superior in 1869, when aids to navigation were practically nonexistent. Yet, 106 years later, in 1975, the gigantic ore carrier, Edmund Fitzgerald, loaded with state-of-the-art navigational equipment, also disappeared, with all hands, in Lake Superior. Years after the fact, the circumstances leading to their demise are still subject to speculation, suspicion, and heated debate.