The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea Read online

  More praise for

  THE PERFECT STORM

  “There is nothing imaginary about Junger’s book; it is all terrifyingly, awesomely real.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “Ferociously dramatic and vividly written…. The Perfect Storm is not just the best book of the summer. It’s an indelible experience.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “You know from the start that the Andrea Gail is doomed, but Junger keeps the suspense level high nevertheless, putting you on-board and making the lure of fishing understandable, the fate of these men memorable.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “One powerful piece of journalism…. A high-seas adventure complete with romance and heartbreak, heart-stopping danger and thrilling rescues.”

  —Houston Chronicle

  “Harrowing, relentless…and thoroughly enjoyable. Sebastian Jungers’s chronicle of a tragedy never fails to thrill. The perfect book for the beach. It is the skillful telling of this tale that makes it so compelling.”

  —Kansas City Star

  “Among the most important books ever written about the sea. Using gripping narrative and mesmerizing detail, Sebastian Junger’s first book will make you respect the power of the ocean. Incredible imagery…. For anyone who sails, boats, swims, or even takes a ferry ride, this book is a must read.”

  —Waterbury Republican (Conn.)

  “Rich, compassionate characterization, as well as taut, suspenseful prose. A tale that doesn’t skimp on facts, yet keeps you turning pages from beginning to end.”

  —Seattle Times

  “Riveting…. The natural upheaval holds center stage and acts as a character, but the story converges upon human beings—in this case, the six-man crew of the doomed Gloucester swordfishing boat Andrea Gail. Plausible and affecting.”

  —Boston Globe

  “A thrilling read…. Junger masterfully handles his account of that storm and its devastation.”

  —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Takes readers into the heart of the maelstrom and shows nature’s splendid and dangerous havoc at its utmost. Every boater is drawn to storm-at-sea stories, and this one beats them all…. Junger treats readers to some splendidly vivid writing and imbues the story with all the suspense it deserves.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “An important work to be especially appreciated by local people…. An impressive account and an incredible read about the place we call home.”

  —Gloucester Daily Times

  “The book builds as the storm builds, full of wonderful detailed and to-the-point information, always powered by a stern suspense.”

  —Newsday

  “A harrowing tale of tragedy and struggle, of great heroics, and of circumstances and situations beyond the control of any of the players.”

  —Sailing

  “During the long, drawn-out and wholly convincing climaxes one reads with the most intense concern, anxiety and concentration; and if one knows anything at all about the sea one feels the absolutely enormous strength of the hurricane winds and the incredibly towering mass of the hundred-foot waves.”

  —Patrick O’Brian

  “A fascinating book, not just about a storm, but about the hard-drinking, fatalistic lives of commercial fishermen and the families and friends they leave behind with each dangerous voyage.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Spellbindingly captured…Junger’s fine dramatic style is complemented by a wealth of details that flesh out the story.…Reading this book is likely to make the would-be sailor feel both awed and a little frightened by nature’s remorseless power.”

  —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “The pages of this book crunch with salt…. Good reading.”

  —Boating

  “A vivid and damp-chill-to-the-bone account…. Convincing.…Whether he’s tackling the mechanics of waves, the dangers of swordfishing, the construction of the ship or the inexact art of navigation, Junger knows how to use a precise detail or tight anecdote to make a point.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “A terrifying, edifying read. Like victims of a perfect crime, readers of The Perfect Storm are first seduced into caring for the book’s doomed characters, then compelled to watch them carried into the maw of a meteorological hell. And all the while, Sebastian Junger’s compassionate, intelligent voice instructs us effortlessly on the sea life of the swordfisherman, the physics of a sinking steel ship, and the details of death by drowning.”

  —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude

  “A journalistic triumph, the perfect meeting of the awesome power of a storm at sea and our own fascination with it.”

  —Arizona Republic

  Also by Sebastian Junger

  Fire

  A Death in Belmont

  THE PERFECT STORM

  A TRUE STORY OF MEN AGAINST THE SEA

  SEBASTIAN JUNGER

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Copyright © 2009, 1997 by Sebastian Junger

  All rights reserved

  Insert credits: pages 1, 4, 6 (bottom): courtesy of the Gloucester Daily Times;

  pages 3 (bottom), 7: © Teun Voeten/HH; pages 3 (top), 5, 6

  (top): courtesy of Crow’s Nest; pages 2 (top), 8: © Associated Press;

  page 2 (bottom): © NASA

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Junger, Sebastian.

  The perfect storm/Sebastian Junger.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07661-5

  1. Northeast storms—New England. 2. n-usn. I. Title.

  QC945.J66 1997

  974.4'5—dc20

  96-42412

  CIP

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

  TTO MY FATHER, WHO

  TFIRST INTRODUCED ME

  TTO THE SEA.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  GEORGES BANK, 1896

  GLOUCESTER, MASS., 1991

  GOD’S COUNTRY

  THE FLEMISH CAP

  THE BARREL OF THE GUN

  GRAVEYARD OF THE ATLANTIC

  THE ZERO-MOMENT POINT

  THE WORLD OF THE LIVING

  INTO THE ABYSS

  THE DREAMS OF THE DEAD

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FOREWORD

  RECREATING the last days of six men who disappeared at sea presented some obvious problems for me. On the one hand, I wanted to write a completely factual book that would stand on its own as a piece of journalism. On the other hand, I didn’t want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture. I toyed with the idea of fictionalizing minor parts of the story—conversations, personal thoughts, day-to-day routines—to make it more readable, but that risked diminishing the value of whatever facts I was able to determine. In the end I wound up sticking strictly to the facts, but in as wide-ranging a way as possible. If I didn’t know exactly what happened aboard the doomed boat, for example, I would interview people who had been through similar situations, and survived. Their experiences, I felt, would provide a fairly good description of what the six men on the Andrea Gail
had gone through, and said, and perhaps even felt.

  As a result, there are varying kinds of information in the book. Anything in direct quotes was recorded by me in a formal interview, either in person or on the telephone, and was altered as little as possible for grammar and clarity. All dialogue is based on the recollection of people who are still alive, and appears in dialogue form without quotation marks. No dialogue was made up. Radio conversations are also based on people’s recollections, and appear in italics in the text. Quotes from published material are in italics, and have occasionally been condensed to better fit the text. Technical discussions of meteorology, wave motion, ship stability, etc., are based on my own library research and are generally not referenced, but I feel compelled to recommend William Van Dorn’s The Oceanography of Seamanship as a comprehensive and immensely readable text on ships and the sea.

  In short, I’ve written as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known. It is exactly that unknowable element, however, that has made it an interesting book to write and, I hope, to read. I had some misgivings about calling it The Perfect Storm, but in the end I decided that the intent was sufficiently clear. I use perfect in the meteorological sense: a storm that could not possibly have been worse. I certainly mean no disrespect to the men who died at sea or the people who still grieve for them.

  My own experience in the storm was limited to standing on Gloucester’s Back Shore watching thirty-foot swells advance on Cape Ann, but that was all it took. The next day I read in the paper that a Gloucester boat was feared lost at sea, and I clipped the article and stuck it in a drawer. Without even knowing it, I had begun to write The Perfect Storm.

  THE PERFECT STORM

  GEORGES BANK, 1896

  ONE midwinter day off the coast of Massachusetts, the crew of a mackerel schooner spotted a bottle with a note in it. The schooner was on Georges Bank, one of the most dangerous fishing grounds in the world, and a bottle with a note in it was a dire sign indeed. A deckhand scooped it out of the water, the sea grass was stripped away, and the captain uncorked the bottle and turned to his assembled crew: “On Georges Bank with our cable gone our rudder gone and leaking. Two men have been swept away and all hands have been given up as our cable is gone and our rudder is gone. The one that picks this up let it be known. God have mercy on us.”

  The note was from the Falcon, a boat that had set sail from Gloucester the year before. She hadn’t been heard from since. A boat that parts her cable off Georges careens helplessly along until she fetches up in some shallow water and gets pounded to pieces by the surf. One of the Falcon’s crew must have wedged himself against a bunk in the fo’c’sle and written furiously beneath the heaving light of a storm lantern. This was the end, and everyone on the boat would have known it. How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?

  This man wrote; he put down on a scrap of paper the last moments of twenty men in this world. Then he corked the bottle and threw it overboard. There’s not a chance in hell, he must have thought. And then he went below again. He breathed in deep. He tried to calm himself. He readied himself for the first shock of sea.

  GLOUCESTER, MASS., 1991

  It’s no fish ye’re buying, it’s men’s lives.

  —SIR WALTER SCOTT The Antiquary, Chapter 11

  A SOFT fall rain slips down through the trees and the smell of ocean is so strong that it can almost be licked off the air. Trucks rumble along Rogers Street and men in t-shirts stained with fishblood shout to each other from the decks of boats. Beneath them the ocean swells up against the black pilings and sucks back down to the barnacles. Beer cans and old pieces of styrofoam rise and fall and pools of spilled diesel fuel undulate like huge iridescent jellyfish. The boats rock and creak against their ropes and seagulls complain and hunker down and complain some more. Across Rogers Street and around the back of the Crow’s Nest, through the door and up the cement stairs, down the carpeted hallway and into one of the doors on the left, stretched out on a double bed in room #27 with a sheet pulled over him, Bobby Shatford lies asleep.

  He’s got one black eye. There are beer cans and food wrappers scattered around the room and a duffel bag on the floor with t-shirts and flannel shirts and blue jeans spilling out. Lying asleep next to him is his girlfriend, Christina Cotter. She’s an attractive woman in her early forties with rust-blond hair and a strong, narrow face. There’s a T.V. in the room and a low chest of drawers with a mirror on top of it and a chair of the sort they have in high-school cafeterias. The plastic cushion cover has cigarette burns in it. The window looks out on Rogers Street where trucks ease themselves into fish-plant bays.

  It’s still raining. Across the street is Rose Marine, where fishing boats fuel up, and across a small leg of water is the State Fish Pier, where they unload their catch. The State Pier is essentially a huge parking lot on pilings, and on the far side, across another leg of water, is a boatyard and a small park where mothers bring their children to play. Looking over the park on the corner of Haskell Street is an elegant brick house built by the famous Boston architect, Charles Bulfinch. It originally stood on the corner of Washington and Summer Streets in Boston, but in 1850 it was jacked up, rolled onto a barge, and transported to Gloucester. That is where Bobby’s mother, Ethel, raised four sons and two daughters. For the past fourteen years she has been a daytime bartender at the Crow’s Nest. Ethel’s grandfather was a fisherman and both her daughters dated fishermen and all four of the sons fished at one point or another. Most of them still do.

  The Crow’s Nest windows face east into the coming day over a street used at dawn by reefer trucks. Guests don’t tend to sleep late. Around eight o’clock in the morning, Bobby Shatford struggles awake. He has flax-brown hair, hollow cheeks, and a sinewy build that has seen a lot of work. In a few hours he’s due on a swordfishing boat named the Andrea Gail, which is headed on a one-month trip to the Grand Banks. He could return with five thousand dollars in his pocket or he could not return at all. Outside, the rain drips on. Chris groans, opens her eyes, and squints up at him. One of Bobby’s eyes is the color of an overripe plum.

  Did I do that?

  Yeah.

  Jesus.

  She considers his eye for a moment. How did I reach that high?

  They smoke a cigarette and then pull on their clothes and grope their way downstairs. A metal fire door opens onto a back alley, they push it open and walk around to the Rogers Street entrance. The Crow’s Nest is a block-long faux-Tudor construction across from the J. B. Wright Fish Company and Rose Marine. The plate-glass window in front is said to be the biggest barroom window in town. That’s quite a distinction in a town where barroom windows are made small so that patrons don’t get thrown through them. There’s an old pool table, a pay phone by the door, and a horseshoe-shaped bar. Budweiser costs a dollar seventy-five, but as often as not there’s a fisherman just in from a trip who’s buying for the whole house. Money flows through a fisherman like water through a fishing net; one regular ran up a $4,000 tab in a week.

  Bobby and Chris walk in and look around. Ethel’s behind the bar, and a couple of the town’s earlier risers are already gripping bottles of beer. A shipmate of Bobby’s named Bugsy Moran is seated at the bar, a little dazed. Rough night, huh? Bobby says. Bugsy grunts. His real name is Michael. He’s got wild long hair and a crazy reputation and everyone in town loves him. Chris invites him to join them for breakfast and Bugsy slides off his stool and follows them out the door into the light rain. They climb into Chris’s 20-year-old Volvo and drive down to the White Hen Pantry and shuffle in, eyes bloodshot, heads throbbing. They buy sandwiches and cheap sunglasses and then they make their way out into the unrelenting greyness of the day. Chris drives them back to the Nest and they pick up 30-year-old Dale Murphy, another crew member from the Andrea Gail, and head out of town.

  Dale’s nickname is Murph, he’s a big grizzly bear of a guy from Bradenton Beach, Florida. He h
as shaggy black hair, a thin beard, and angled, almost Mongolian eyes; he gets a lot of looks around town. He has a three-year-old baby, also named Dale, whom he openly adores. His ex-wife, Debra, was three-time Southwestern Florida Women’s boxing champion and by all rights, young Dale is going to be a bruiser. Murph wants to get him some toys before he leaves, and Chris takes the three men to the shopping center out by Good Harbor Beach. They go into the Ames and Bobby and Bugsy get extra thermals and sweats for the trip and Murph walks down the aisles, filling a cart with Tonka trucks and firemen’s helmets and ray guns. When he can’t fit any more in he pays for it, and they all pile into the car and drive back to the Nest. Murph gets out and the other three decide to drive around the corner to the Green Tavern for another drink.

  The Green Tavern looks like a smaller version of the Nest, all brick and false timber. Across the street is a bar called Bill’s; the three bars form the Bermuda Triangle of downtown Gloucester. Chris and Bugsy and Bobby walk in and seat themselves at the bar and order a round of beers. The television’s going and they watch it idly and talk about the trip and the last night of craziness at the Nest. Their hangovers are starting to soften. They drink another round and maybe half an hour goes by and finally Bobby’s sister Mary Anne walks in. She’s a tall blonde who inspires crushes in the teenaged sons of some of her friends, but there’s a certain no-nonsense air about her that has always kept Bobby on his toes. Oh shit, here she comes, he whispers.

  He hides his beer behind his arm and pulls the sunglasses down over his black eye. Mary Anne walks up. What do you think I am, stupid? she asks. Bobby pulls the beer out from hiding. She looks at his eye. Nice one, she says.