30 pages • 1 hour read
Sebastian JungerThe Perfect Storm
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Beta“George’s Bank, 1896”-“Gloucester, Mass., 1991”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter Summary: “George’s Bank, 1896”
In 1896, in George’s Bank, a fishing ship found a message in a bottle describing the last moments of the Falcon, a ship that had gone missing the year before. The note asked that whomever found it should share the fate of the crew with the larger world.
Chapter Summary: “Gloucester, Mass., 1991”
In Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1991, the Andrea Gail is preparing to set out to sea for a month-long swordfishing trip. In a room in the Crow’s Nest, a bar and flophouse, Bobby Shatford wakes with his girlfriend, Chris. Bobby’s mother, Ethel, is downstairs at the bar where she works. The Crow’s Nest sits across the street from the waterfront in Gloucester; all around are other buildings catering to the fishing industry: ice plants, repair ports, and grocery stores that sell in bulk, in order to accommodate the needs of long fishing trips. Bobby needs money to pay his debts and so has agreed to go fishing. Other young men—Bugsy and Sully among them—are in the same situation. Bobby has just returned from his first fishing trip, in which he made almost $5,000. For the last week, he and the other fishermen have been drinking hard, not wanting to return, but this is the day, and so they go around town, buying supplies, preparing for the trip.
The whole town is devoted to fishing. It always has been. As early as the 1650s, three-man crews were running up the coast to fish for cod. The town, and much of New England, depends on the sea, and Junger, the author, relates small histories of fishing, including the dangers and deaths that have occurred over the centuries. By late afternoon, all the supplies are on board the Andrea Gail. It needs only the crew to head out to sea.
“George’s Bank, 1896”-“Gloucester, Mass., 1991” Analysis
The short introduction and the first chapter alternate between the history of Gloucester and the lives of the men who will board the Andrea Gail. Inherent in the history are stories of danger: how men died on dories, or ships that were broadsided by the sea. All the buildings Junger describes face the ocean, from the bar called the Crow’s Nest, (the name for the platform on a ship high atop the mast where lookouts might see approaching danger), to the houses, where women wore grooves in the wood pacing until their husbands returned. These dangers foreshadow the fate of the Andrea Gail. They also show that ships have been lost at sea in this area of the world for a good while.
In the stories of the men who board the Andrea Gail is a sense of desperation. Bobby Shatford needs money to move on with his life. Bugsy keeps looking for companionship in the form of a woman, but never finds it. The streets are run-down, and the bars, according to Chris, Bobby’s girlfriend, are a road to a life she doesn’t want to lead. The older captains are getting out of the game; what’s left are mostly boys who need money, or who have no imagination—they have grown up in the town watching the ships go out and come in. Now they have taken sites on the ships and get drunk in the bars when they get paid. The people Junger describes have fallen on hard times: drink or drugs or divorce. They have little choice but to take sites on the Andrea Gail and hope to get themselves out of trouble by turning to the sea.
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