Stormy seas; voices of protest
Fatal Forecast: An Incredible True Tale of Disaster and Survival at Sea
By Michael J. Tougias
Scribner, 222 pp., illustrated, $24
The Pendleton Disaster off Cape Cod: The Greatest Small Boat Rescue in Coast Guard History
By Theresa Mitchell Barbo, John Galluzzo, and Captain W. Russell Webster
History Press, 126 pp., illustrated, paperback, $19.99
In Danger at Sea: Adventures of a New England Fishing Family
Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Nineteenth-Century Culture of Antebellum Reform
By Scott Gac
Yale University, 311
The winding down of the summer boating season carries with it forebodings of the perilous weather ahead for mariners for whom the New England waters provide a livelihood. Three well-crafted books provide vivid accounts of offshore disasters and rescues.
In the late summer of 1980, the weather buoy on the prime fishing grounds of Georges Bank had stopped working, and repairs were deferred until a new wind sensor could be installed the following January.
That equipment failure, described in Michael J. Tougias's "Fatal Forecast," resulted in a tragically inaccurate weather prediction. This in turn led the skippers of two Hyannis-based offshore lobster boats, the Fair Wind and the Sea Fever, to head out confidently, only to be ambushed by the Thanksgiving Storm of 1980, whose catastrophic force was felt ashore as "just a blustery day," Tougias writes.
Tougias's account picks up the two boats, on the outer edge of Georges Bank, experiencing seas "that only a handful of people on earth have ever seen" - climbing "to an unimaginable sixty to seventy feet of cresting fury." On the Sea Fever, one crewman was lost after a huge wave smashed out a window in its pilothouse, but the boat made its way back to port. But the Fair Wind was pitch-poled - flipped over by a massive wave. It sank with the loss of three of its crew. The fourth, Ernie Hazard, had been swept overboard and managed to reach the ship's self-inflating life raft. Hazard's experiences (he was battered by "the high, jagged waves" and forced to keep pumping up the leaking raft through 48 numbing hours until spotted by a Coast Guard search plane), as related by Tougias, deserve a place as a classic of survival at sea.
A quarter-century before, in February 1952, the tankers Fort Mercer and Pendleton were both snapped in two in a storm east of Cape Cod. The Fort Mercer's crew was shortly rescued, but the Pendleton never sent a distress call, and the foundering ship was spotted from the air by chance.
A 36-foot motor lifeboat and its four-man crew were dispatched into the night and the storm from the Coast Guard Station at Chatham. As its coxswain, Bernard Webber, recalled, they located the Pendleton in the dark only by "this rumbling, crashing, banging sound over the wind and the sea." Maneuvering boldly, the Coast Guard lifeboat rescued 32 of the crew, a mission ably recounted by Theresa Mitchell Barbo of the Cape Cod Maritime Research Association, in "The Pendleton Disaster off Cape Cod."
Samuel S. Cottle is a retired commercial fisherman who fished out of Point Judith, R.I. In his account of a life offshore, "In Danger at Sea," the details are vivid, as is the remembered sense of just how it was and how it felt. Cottle was a teenager hanging around at the docks at Point Judith on the afternoon of May 5, 1945, when the Coast Guard station was alerted to the sinking of the coal carrier Black Point barely 3 miles offshore.
Torpedoed by a German U-boat, the collier capsized and sank within 15 minutes. Most of the crew was rescued, and Cottle remembers waiting on the dock as the survivors were brought ashore. The submarine was attacked throughout the night and into the next morning, when it was declared sunk. "She has the sad distinction," Cottle writes, of having been the last German submarine to have sunk an American merchant ship - "and that on the day that Germany had surrendered."
Two signature songs pretty much defined the Hutchinson Family Singers. There was "The Old Granite State" and "Get Off the Track." From their hometown of Milford, N.H., in the early 1840s, three Hutchinson brothers - joined until her marriage by their young sister Abby - rode the waves of antislavery reform to become, as Scott Gac puts it in "Singing for Freedom," "one of the greatest musical acts in American history."
Music, writes Gac, "was a new technology in antebellum America - if one thinks of technology as something that changes the world or how the world is experienced." And the Hutchinsons "successfully implemented a technological transformation" of the antislavery movement.
Michael Kenney, a freelance writer living in Cambridge, writes on books of local and regional interest.
