Wreck of the DANIEL J MORRELL

On this day in 1966, the ore carrier the Daniel J Morrell was making her final run of the season on Lake Huron.  She was traveling with a sister ship, the Edward Townsend.  Both were very old ships; they were built in 1906, six years before the Titanic, and had the same problem with the steel.  The Great Lakes are very cold and the steel made during the early part of the 20th Century got very brittle in cold water.  In fact, many sailors who had been on her said the Morrell was a rust bucket.  She had been mothballed and only called back into service earlier that year.  
      During the trip on November 26th 1966, a late-autumn storm struck Lake Huron and battered the Morrell and the Townsend.  Watchman Dennis Hale recalls that a loud bang woke him up and knocked the books off his shelf.  The Morrell had been buffeted so badly by the storm that she broke in two on the surface.  Hale grabbed a life jacket and a pea coat and managed to get to a life raft with several other crewmates.  The Morrell's bow sank while her stern continued on for five miles before sinking.  Hale's crewmates gradually succumbed to hypothermia and he huddled under their bodies in order to keep warm.  During his time on the raft, he had an strange experience in which an old man told not to eat the ice chips from his pea coat.  Hale was on the life raft for forty hours before being rescued.  He later found out that he alone had survived the sinking.  He never spoke of the incident for twenty years.  He wrote a book a few years ago called Sole Survivor, about his ordeal on Lake Huron that night.  
       After the Morrell sank, there was a crack found in the hull of the Edward Townsend.  This crack was enough to deem her unseaworthy and she was sold for scrap in Europe.  While she was being towed across the Atlantic, however, the Townsend broke and sank near the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland.