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

by Sebastian Junger

That’s quite a distinction in a town where barroom windows are made small so that patrons don’t get thrown through them.

One of the best times I ever had here was when this Irishman walked in and ordered fifty beers. It was a dead Sunday afternoon and I just looked at him. He said that his friends would be along in a minute, and sure enough, an entire Irish soccer team came in. They’d been staying in Rockport, which is a dry town, and so they just started walking. They walked all the way down Route 127, five miles, and this was the first place they came to. They were drinking beer so fast we were selling it right out of the cases. They were doing three-part harmonies on the tabletops.”

Between the towers is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, who gazes down with love and concern at a bundle in her arms. This is the Virgin who has been charged with the safety of the local fishermen. The bundle in her arms is not the infant Jesus; it’s a Gloucester schooner.

Going to sea is going to prison, with a chance at drowning besides.

If one of the crew backed out now he’d sit around for a month and then either go to a welcome-home party or a memorial service. Either would be horrible in its own way. Half the crew have misgivings about this trip, but they’re going anyhow; they’ve crossed some invisible line, and now even the most desperate premonitions won’t save them. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are going to the Grand Banks on the Andrea Gail

Farmers are easy to control because they’re tied to their land, but fishermen are not so easy to control. A twenty-year-old off a three-month trip to the Banks has precious little reason to heed the bourgeois mores of the town. Gloucester developed a reputation for tolerance, if not outright debauchery, that drew people from all over the Bay Colony. The town began to thrive.

(Wellfleet, for example, reserved an island across the harbor for its young men. In due time a brothel, a tavern, and a whale lookout were built there—just about everything a young fisherman needed.)

The scientific name for swordfish is Xiphias gladius; the first word means “sword” in Greek and the second word means “sword” in Latin. “The scientist who named it was evidently impressed by the fact that it had a sword,” as one guidebook says.

Sportsfishermen accused commercial fishermen of raping the oceans, commercial fishermen accused sportsfishermen of squandering a resource, and almost everyone accused the government of gross incompetence.

Fishermen say they can gauge how fast the wind is—and how worried they should be—by the sound it makes against the wire stays and outrigger cables. A scream means the wind is around Force 9 on the Beaufort Scale, forty or fifty knots. Force 10 is a shriek. Force 11 is a moan. Over Force 11 is something fishermen don’t want to hear. Linda Greenlaw, captain of the Hannah Boden, was in a storm where the wind registered a hundred miles an hour before it tore the anemometer off the boat. The wind, she says, made a sound she’d never heard before, a deep tonal vibration like a church organ. There was no melody, though; it was a church organ played by a child.

The island prowls restlessly around the Scotian Shelf, losing sand from one end, building it up on the other, endlessly, throughout the centuries. Since 1873 it has melted away beneath the foundations of six lighthouses.

The only good thing about such winter gales, as far as coastal residents are concerned, is that they tend to travel west-to-east offshore. That means their forward movement is subtracted from their windspeed: A seventy-knot wind from a storm moving away at twenty knots effectively becomes a fifty-knot wind. The opposite is also true—forward movement is added to wind speed—but that almost never happens on the East Coast. The atmospheric movement is all west-to-east in the midlatitudes, and it’s nearly impossible for a weather system to overcome that. Storms may wobble northeast or southeast for a while, but they never really buck the jet stream. It takes a freakish alignment of variables to permit that to happen, a third cog in the huge machinations of the sky. Generally speaking, it takes a hurricane. By

Meteorologists see perfection in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.

Helicopters have a limited amount of flying time—generally about four hours—but they can pluck people out of the water if need be. Falcon jets can’t do much for people in the water except circle them and watch them drown.