When you think of Lake Superior shipwrecks, most likely the Edmund Fitzgerald floats to the surface of your memory. In "So Terrible a Storm," author Curt Brown (a staff writer for the Star Tribune) tells the largely forgotten story of the great November storm 70 years before the Fitz went missing.

The storm of 1905 left more than 30 vessels damaged, sunk or tossed onto the shoreline of Lake Superior, with more than 30 sailors killed. When I was growing up in Duluth in the 1960s, the storm was still remembered as "The Mataafa Blow" after the ore carrier that was wrecked a few hundred yards from shore at the entrance to Duluth's ship canal.

As thousands of Duluthians stood around bonfires watching, the crew of the 429-foot Mataafa struggled to survive frigid temperatures and waves that constantly broke over their grounded ship. Fifteen men in the forecastle survived by shuffling all night around a fire lit in a bathtub, fueled by woodwork torn from the ship's bulkheads; they were taken off the following morning by lifesavers in surf boats.

But nine crew members stranded on the exposed stern were washed over the side or froze to death, in sight of the fires on shore. The early 20th century had different ideas about privacy, respect and entertainment than now exist, and many of those who had stood around the bonfires subsequently trooped through a local mortuary to view the thawing bodies of the frozen sailors on display.

Farther up the shore, ships and the barges they towed were thrown onto land, leaving their crews to make it to safety before their vessels were pounded apart by the monstrous waves. One of the most notable wrecks was at Gold Cliff, where the 436-foot barge Madiera met a 60-foot cliff. In a feat still listed in guidebooks as the most impressive lead climb in North Shore climbing history, a teenage seaman leaped from the foundering barge to the cliff face in the dim squint of a reluctant November dawn and worked his way up icy ledges and cracks to the top, trailing a line that allowed all but one of the crew to follow to the relative safety of a desolate snow-covered bluff in the middle of nowhere.

Besides telling the story of the ships and sailors mauled by the storm, Brown works in the tradition of Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm" to weave a number of side narratives into the history, including that of 29-year-old Mary McFadden, Duluth's first female journalist, who covered the storm and its aftermath, and Herbert Richardson, the government meteorologist who tracked and recorded the storm's statistics in the combination home and weather station still sitting on top of Duluth's hill.

The 1905 Mataafa Blow left a legacy on the North Shore, from place names like Lafayette Bluff north of Two Harbors, named after the steamer that grounded there, to Split Rock Lighthouse, established by Congress in response to demands from shipping interests after their great losses. Brown's book makes a necessary addition to any Boat Nerd's shelf, with many seldom-seen photographs. It also provides great reading for anyone who spends time traveling up and down the shoreline of our own vast unsalted sea.

Rick Allen runs the Kenspeckle Letterpress in Duluth, mere feet from the wreck site of the Mataafa.