Into the Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, and the Sinking of El Faro

by Rachel Slade

New Englanders were global citizens. Southern planters waited for the world to come to them.

“The word ‘experienced’ often refers to someone who has gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.”

Maritime history is well documented and several excellent books have been published on the subject. I am grateful for the impressive scholarship found in the following works: The Way of the Ship: America’s Maritime History Reeinvisioned, 1600–2000, by Alex Roland, W. Jeffrey Bolster, and Alexander Keyssar; The Sea & Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine; The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783–1860 by Samuel Eliot Morison; The Forgotten Heroes: The Heroic Story of the United States Merchant Marine by Brian Herbert; Until the Sea Shall Free Them: Life, Death and Survival in the Merchant Marine by Robert Frump; America and the Sea: A Maritime History by Benjamin W. Labaree, William M. Fowler Jr., John B. Hattendorf, Jeffrey J. Safford, Edward W. Sloan, and Andrew W. German; and an obscure out of print volume published in 1958, The Maritime Story: A Study in Labor-Management Relations by Joseph P. Goldberg. And for anyone who still harbors a romantic view of the age of sail, Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. will disabuse you of that notion.