TOLEDO, Ohio — Modern day freighters are massive – the Edmund Fitzgerald stood more than 700 feet long and weighed over 13,000 tons. Today’s ships are designed off the back of generations of shipping on these inland seas.
The first to experience the violent and sudden storms were fur traders in the 1700s. It took a certain type of human to face the dangers with nothing but a hand-built canoe.
One French explorer, Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, found this out during a passage of the lakes in 1721, writing:…