Storms at Sea

I was lured into reading Richard Hughes’s short novel In Hazard (1938) when I saw a brand-new copy of the New York Review of Books paperback on sale for half price. I had enjoyed Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica (1929) which also features a hurricane. In Hazard is based on the experience of the Holt Line steamer Phemius in 1932, when she had her stack blown off in a Caribbean hurricane and then, without power to move or steer, she was held in the storm for six days but somehow survived. Hughes invents a captain and crew for his boat, the Archimedes—slyly named: at one point her captain calculates she has taken on eleven hundred tons of water and that at twelve hundred, she will weigh more than the water she displaces and go to the bottom. Aside from the captain, trained in sail, who starts out with cheerful resolve, feels it waver during the last day or two in the storm, and then finds it firming to adamant when he learns by telegraph from the owners that a salvage vessel is looking for the Archimedes. Other notable characters include Chief Engineer Ramsay MacDonald (supposedly a cousin of the Prime Minister) and his second, another Scot with whom he argues bitterly about God and the hereafter at the storm’s worst; Dick Watchett, a junior officer who gets into a sublime trance while literally pouring oil on troubled waters for many hours; and Ao Ling, one of the exclusively Chinese crew members (officers and engineers are all Scots and Englishmen) and a Communist revolutionary. Hughes describes how a hurricane arises, how a steamship works, why a sailing vessel might have advantages over a steamer when both are damaged and in peril, why some steamship owners preferred masters trained in sail, and how the various men aboard Archimedes deal with fear. The narration begins as first person (“Amongt the people I have met….”) and there are a few instances when we see the first person pronoun later, but it is overwhelmingly in an omniscient third person voice. In an “Afterword” written thirty years after the novel’s publication, Hughes describes it as an unconscious and prescient symbolic narrative about the storm that was engulfing the world in the thirties and the varieties of denial, stalwart resolution, and abject fear with which people met it. For me, though, it was just one of the best accounts of a storm at sea and the people caught in it.

Hughes’s book sent me back to Conrad’s Typhoon (1902), the story of an encounter with a storm in the China Sea by a coastal steamer, the Nan-Shan, skippered by an unimaginative master named MacWhirr who heartens his first officer and his engineers to face the storm (and literally turn into it), subdues the second officer who loses his nerve and attacks the captain, and then when the storm is past, handles another potential disaster just as cool headedly by dealing fairly and evenly with two hundred Chinese workers on board after their sea chests—with all the money they had earned over several years of work—go adrift between decks during the storm and are smashed to pieces. But I found that I had misremembered Typhoon. The image that I recalled was of a ship rolled over onto her beam ends for many hours, with men lashed to whatever they could get a line around, ship and men alike helpless in the teeth of the storm. But this, I finally realized, was another Conrad story, and the ship, the Narcissus, was not a steamer but a sailing freighter and it was not in a tropical cyclone but in extreme southern latitudes. Conrad’s story is called The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and it was published in 1897.

Though the Hughes and Conrad stories were based on real experiences, they are fiction. The best true story about a monstrous storm at sea has to be Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. A Gloucester swordfishing boat, the Andrea Gail, is lost in a 1991 hurricane, a hundred-year storm formed when two massive systems collided in late October in “a storm that could not possibly have been worse.” Junger also recounts a successful rescue of the crew of a sailing yacht, the Satori, and the ditching of a National Guard rescue helicopter that ran out of fuel while searching for it.

Other books featuring big storms at sea are Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny (1954) and two nonfiction stories of modern ocean racing sailboats encountering extreme weather, Sir Francis Chichester’s Gipsy Moth Circles the World (1967) and John Rousmaniere’s Fastnet, Force 10 (1980).