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

by Sebastian Junger

  Alfred Pierre finally comes down and sidles into the bar. He’s a big, shy man who’s not well known around town, although people seem to like him. His girlfriend has come down from Maine to see him off and she’s not handling it well, her eyes are red and she’s holding him as if she might physically keep him from getting on the boat. Murph finishes strapping his package up with tape and asks Chris to run him across town on an errand. He wants to pick up some movies. Sully is talking to Bugsy in a corner, and everyone’s congratulating Ethel’s eldest son, Rusty, for his upcoming marriage next week. Most of the people in the room will be a thousand miles into the North Atlantic by then.

  Chris and Murph return ten minutes later with a cardboard box spilling with videos. There’s a VCR on the Andrea Gail, and someone off another boat offered Murph the movies. Alfred has a beer bottle clenched in one big hand and is still muttering about not wanting to go. Sully’s saying the same thing; he’s in a yellow slicker over by the pool table telling Bugsy how he’s got a bad feeling about this trip. It’s the money, he says; if I didn’t need the money I wouldn’t go near this thing.

  Okay you guys, Billy says. One last drink. Everyone downs one last drink. Okay, one more, someone says. Everyone has one more. Bobby’s drinking tequila. He’s standing by Chris looking down at the floor and she’s holding his hand and neither of them is saying much. Sully comes over and asks if they’re going to be okay. Chris says, Sure, we’ll be fine and then she says: Actually, I’m not sure. Actually, no, I don’t think so.

  Six men are leaving for a month and it feels as if things are shearing off into a new and empty direction from which they may never return. Ethel, trying to maintain her composure, goes around the room hugging all the men. The only person she doesn’t hug is Alfred because she doesn’t know him well enough. Bobby asks his mother if they can take the color T.V. above the bar. If it’s okay with Billy, she says.

  Billy looks up. Ethel, he says, they can take the T.V., but if they watch it instead of doin’ their work it’s goin’ straight overboard.

  That’s fine, Billy, that’s fine, Ethel says.

  Billy’s girlfriend sees Bobby’s shiner under the brim of his Budweiser cap and glances over at Chris. She’s of the old school where ladies don’t slug their men.

  You northern gals, she says.

  I didn’t mean it, says Chris. It was a mistake.

  It’s now way too late for anyone to back out. Not in the literal sense—any one of them could still take off running out the door—but people don’t work like that. More or less, they do what others expect them to. 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.

  Okay, Billy says. Let’s go.

  Everyone files out the big wooden door. The rain has stopped and there are even a few scraps of clear sky off to the west. Pale, late-summer blue. Chris and Bobby get into her Volvo and Alfred and his girlfriend get into their car and everyone else walks. They cross Rogers Street through the impatient stream of Friday afternoon traffic and then angle down through the gate in the chainlink fence. There are fuel tanks on iron scaffolds behind Rose’s, and small boats up with tarps over them, and a battered sign that says “Carter’s Boat Yard.” One of the fuel tanks has a pair of humpback whales painted on it. Chris drives past the little group, tires crunching on the gravel, and comes to a stop in front of the Andrea Gail. The boat is tied up to a small piece of wharf behind Old Port Seafoods, next to the fire boat and a dockside fuel pump. Bobby looks over at her.

  I don’t want to do this, he says. I really don’t.

  Chris is holding onto him in the front seat of her Volvo, with everything she owns in the back. Well don’t go then, she says. Well fuck it. Don’t go.

  I got to go. The money; I got to.

  Billy Tyne walks over and leans in the window. You gonna be all right? he asks. Chris nods her head. Bobby is really starting to fight the tears and he looks away so that Billy doesn’t see. Okay, Billy says to Chris. We’ll see you when we get back. He walks across the dock and jumps down onto the deck of the boat. Then Sully comes over. He’s known Bobby most of his life—without Bobby he probably wouldn’t even have taken the trip—and he’s worried about him now. Worried that somehow Bobby isn’t going to make it, that the trip’s a huge mistake. Are you two okay? he says. Are you sure?

  Yeah, we’re okay, says Chris. We just need a minute.

  Sully smiles and slaps the car roof and walks away. Bugsy and Murph don’t have anyone to linger over and so they waste no time getting on the boat; now it’s just the two couples in their cars. Alfred detaches himself from his girlfriend in the front seat and gets out and walks across the dock. His girlfriend looks around, crying, and spots Chris in the Volvo. She draws two fingers down her cheeks—“Yes, I’m sad, too”—and then just sits there, tears running down her cheeks. There’s nothing more to wait for now, nothing more to say. Bobby’s trying to keep it together because of the other five guys on the boat, but Chris is not trying to keep it together.

  Well, I gotta go now, he says.

  Yep.

  And Christina, you know, I’ll always love you.

  She smiles at him through her tears. Yeah, I know, she says.

  Bobby kisses her and gets out of the car, still holding hands. He closes the door and gives her a final smile and then starts walking across the gravel. As Chris remembers it he doesn’t look back, not once, and he keeps his face hidden the entire way.

  ALMOST as soon as the New World was discovered, Europeans were fishing it. Twelve years after Columbus, a Frenchman named Jean Denys crossed the Atlantic, worked the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and returned home with a hold full of cod. Within a few years there were so many Portuguese boats on the Banks that their king felt compelled to impose an import tax in order to protect the fishermen at home. Codfish ran so thick off Newfoundland, it was said, that they slowed ships down in the water.

  Codfish weren’t quite that plentiful, but they were certainly worth crossing the Atlantic for. And they were easily transported: Crews salted them aboard ship, dried them when they got home, and then sold them by the hundreds of thousands. The alternative was to go over with two crews, one to fish and another to preserve the catch on shore. The fish were split down the middle and then laid on racks, called flakes, to cure all summer in the Newfoundland air. Either way, the result was a rugged slab of protein that could be treated as indelicately as shoe leather and then soaked back to a palatable form. Soon European ships were shuttling back and forth across the North Atlantic in a hugely lucrative—if perilous—trade.

  For the first fifty years the European powers were content to fish off Newfoundland and leave the coastlines alone. They were jagged, gloomy places that seemed to offer little more than a chance to impale one’s ship. Then, in 1598, a French marquis named Troïlus de Mesgouez pulled sixty convicts from French prisons and deposited them on a barren strip of sand called Sable Island, south of Nova Scotia. Left to shift for themselves, the men hunted wild cattle, constructed huts from shipwrecked vessels, rendered fish oil, and gradually killed one another off. By 1603, there were only eleven left alive, and these unfortunates were dragged back to France and presented to King Henri IV. They were clothed in animal skins and had beards halfway down their chests. Not only did the king pardon them their crimes, he gave them a bounty to make up for their suffering.

  It was around this time that Cape Ann was first sighted by Europeans. In 1605, the great French explorer Samuel de Champlain was working his way south from Casco Bay, Maine, when he rounded the rock ledges of Thatcher’s, Milk, and Salt islands and cast anchor off a sandy beach. The natives drew for him a map of
the coastline to the south, and Champlain went on to explore the rest of New England before returning to Cape Ann the following year. This time he was clawing his way up the coast in some ugly fall weather when he sought shelter in a natural harbor he’d missed on his previous trip. He was greeted by a party of Abenaki Indians, some of whom wore the scraps of Portuguese clothing they had traded for a hundred years before, and they made a great show of hospitality before launching a surprise attack from the woods of Eastern Point. The Frenchmen easily fended them off and on the last day of September, 1606, with the Indians waving goodbye from the shore and the oaks and maples rusting into their fall colors, Champlain set sail again. Because of the sheltered coves and thick shellfish beds he called the place “Beauport”—The Good Harbor. Seventeen years later a group of Englishmen sailed into Beauport, eyed the local abundance of cod and cast their anchor. The year was 1623.

  The ship was financed by the Dorchester Company, a group of London investors that wanted to start tapping the riches of the New World. Their idea was to establish a settlement on Cape Ann and use it to support a fleet of boats that would fish all spring and summer and return to Europe in the fall. The shore crew was charged with building a habitable colony and drying the catch as it came in. Un fortunately, luck was against the Dorchester men from the start. The first summer they caught a tremendous amount of fish, but the bottom dropped out of the cod market, and they didn’t even make expenses. The next year prices returned to normal, but they caught almost no fish at all; and the third year violent gales damaged the boats and drove them back to England. The company was forced to liquidate its assets and bring its men home.

  A few of the settlers refused to leave, though. They combined forces with a band of outcasts from the tyrannical Plymouth colony and formed the nucleus of a new colony at Gloucester. New England was an unforgiving land in those days, where only the desperate and the devout seemed to survive, and Gloucester wound up with more than its share of the former. Its most notorious citizen was the Reverend John Lyford, whose deeds were so un-Christian—he criticized the Church and groped a local servant girl—as to be deemed unprintable by a local historian; another was a “shipwrecked adventurer” named Fells who fled Plymouth to escape public whipping. His crime was that he’d had “unsanctioned relations” with a young woman.

  Gloucester was a perfect place for loose cannons like Lyford and Fells. It was poor, remote, and the Puritan fathers didn’t particularly care what went on up there. After a brief period of desertion, the town was resettled in 1631, and almost immediately the inhabitants took to fishing. They had little choice, Cape Ann being one big rock, but in some ways that was a blessing. 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.

  Other communities also had a healthy streak of godlessness in them, but it was generally relegated to the outskirts of town. (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.) Gloucester had no such buffer, though; everything happened right on the waterfront. Young women avoided certain streets, town constables were on the lookout for errant fishermen, and orchard owners rigged guns up to trip-wires to protect their apple trees. Some Gloucester fishermen, apparently, didn’t even respect the Sabbath: “Cape Cod captains went wild-eyed in an agony of inner conflict,” recorded a Cape Cod historian named Josef Berger, “as they read the Scriptures to their crews while some godless Gloucester craft lay in plain sight…hauling up a full share of mackerel or cod.”

  If the fishermen lived hard, it was no doubt because they died hard as well. In the industry’s heyday, Gloucester was losing a couple of hundred men every year to the sea, four percent of the town’s population. Since 1650, an estimated ten thousand Gloucestermen have died at sea, far more Gloucestermen than died in all the country’s wars. Some times a storm would hit the Grand Banks and half a dozen ships would go down, a hundred men lost overnight. On more than one occasion, Newfoundlanders woke up to find their beaches strewn with bodies.

  The Grand Banks are so dangerous because they happen to sit on one of the worst storm tracks in the world. Low pressure systems form over the Great Lakes or Cape Hatteras and follow the jet stream out to sea, crossing right over the fishing grounds in the process. In the old days, there wasn’t much the boats could do but put out extra anchor cable and try to ride it out. As dangerous as the Grand Banks were, though, Georges Bank—only 180 miles east of Cape Cod—was even worse. There was something so ominous about Georges that fishing captains refused to go near it for three hundred years. Currents ran in strange vortexes on Georges, and the tide was said to run off so fast that ocean bottom was left exposed for gulls to feed on. Men talked of strange dreams and visions they had there, and the uneasy feeling that dire forces were assembling themselves.

  Unfortunately, Georges was also home to one of the greatest concentrations of marine life in the world, and it was only a matter of time before someone tried to fish it. In 1827, a Gloucester skipper named John Fletcher Wonson hove-to off Georges, threw out a fishing line, and pulled up a halibut. The ease with which the fish had been caught stuck in his mind, and three years later he went back to Georges expressly to fish. Nothing particularly awful happened, and soon ships were going back and forth to Georges without a second thought. It was only a one-day trip from Gloucester, and the superstitions about the place started to fade. That was when Georges turned deadly.

  Because the fishing grounds were so small and close to shore, dozens of schooners might be anchored within sight of each other on a fair day. If a storm came on gradually, the fleet had time to weigh anchor and disperse into deeper water; but a sudden storm could pile ship upon ship until they all went down in a mass of tangled spars and rigging. Men would be stationed at the bow of each boat to cut their anchor cables if another boat were bearing down on them, but that was usually a death sentence in itself. The chances of sailing clear of the shoal water were horribly small.

  One of the worst of these catastrophes happened in 1862, when a winter gale bore down on seventy schooners that were working a closely packed school of cod. Without warning the sky turned black and the snow began to drive down almost horizontally. One fisherman described what ensued:

  My shipmates showed no sign of fear; they were now all on deck and the skipper was keeping a sharp lookout. Somewhere about nine o’clock, the skipper sang out, ‘There’s a vessel adrift right ahead of us! Stand by with your hatchet, but don’t cut until you hear the word!’ All eyes were bent now on the drifting craft. On she came, directly at us. A moment more and the signal to cut must be given. With the swiftness of a gull, she passed by, so near that I could have leaped aboard. The hopeless, terror-stricken faces of the crew we saw but a moment, as the doomed craft sped on her course. She struck one of the fleet a short distance astern, and we saw the waters close over both vessels almost instantly.

  A FEW modern swordfishing boats still fish Georges Bank, but most make the long trip to the Grand. They’re out for longer but come back with more fish—the old trade-off. It takes a week to reach the Grand Banks on a modern sword boat. You drive east-northeast around the clock until you’re twelve hundred miles out of Gloucester and four hundred miles out of Newfoundland. From there it’s easier to get to the Azores than back to the Crow’s Nest. Like Georges, the Grand Banks are shallow enough to allow sunlight to penetrate all the way to the bottom. An infusion of cold water called the Labrador Current crosses the shoals and creates the perfect environment for plankton; small fish collect to feed on the plankton, and big fish collect to feed on the small fish. Soon the whole food chain’s there, right up to the seventy-fo
ot sword boats.

  The trips in and out are basically the parts of the month that swordfishermen sleep. In port they’re too busy cramming as much life as they can into five or six days, and on the fishing grounds they’re too busy working. They work twenty hours a day for two or three weeks straight and then fall into their bunks for the long steam back. The trips entail more than just eating and sleeping, though. Fishing gear, like deck gear, takes a terrific amount of abuse and must be repaired constantly. The crew doesn’t want to waste a day’s fishing because their gear’s messed up, so they tend to it on the way out: they sharpen hooks, tie gangions, tie ball drops, set up the leader cart, check the radio buoys. At the Hague Line—where they enter Canadian waters—they must stow the gear in accordance with international law, and are briefly without anything to do. They sleep, talk, watch T.V., and read; there are high school dropouts who go through half a dozen books on the Grand Banks.

  Around eight or nine at night the crew squeeze into the galley and shovel down whatever the cook has put together. (Murph is the cook on the Andrea Gail; he’s paid extra and stands watch while the other men eat.) At dinner the crew talk about what men everywhere talk about—women, lack of women, kids, sports, horseracing, money, lack of money, work. They talk a lot about work; they talk about it the way men in prison talk about time. Work is what’s keeping them from going home, and they all want to go home. The more fish they catch, the sooner the trip’s over, which is a simple equation that turns them all into amateur marine biologists. After dinner someone takes his turn at the dishes, and Billy goes back up to the wheelhouse so Murph can eat. No one likes washing dishes, so guys sometimes trade the duty for a pack of cigarettes. The longer the trip, the cheaper labor gets, until a $50,000-a-year fisherman is washing dishes for a single smoke. Dinner, at the end of such a trip, might be a bowl of croutons with salad dressing.