The recent success of 1997's The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger (Harper, 301 pages, $6.99) and the National Book Award-winning In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick (Penguin, 298 pages, $14), have unleashed a tsunami of books about perilous sea journeys.
Considering that most people are currently either at the seashore or wished they were, there is more impetus to be interested in the sea right now. Not only that, but compared with the wealth of "important" novels in which people talk a great deal but don't actually do anything, these real-life sea stories are filled with drama because they are about people facing the ultimate human experiences -- life and death.
It is a serious topic, and it makes for fascinating reading. Unencumbered by fancy plot twists and overwrought writing, great shipwreck books tell gripping tales of perfect storms and (supposedly) unsinkable ships, navigational errors and remarkable courage, hubris and ignorance in a refreshingly straightforward manner. The villain is obvious. The tension is palatable. And there is never any question about what's at stake.
But just because a book involves life and death on the sea doesn't necessarily mean it's dramatic, or any good, for that matter. Looking at some of these new shipwreck books, it becomes obvious that a reader needs a depth finder to indicate which books deserve to be kept and which should be tossed back as shark bait.
For a perfectly told tale of tragedy on the high seas, look no further than Walter Lord's A Night to Remember (Bantam Books, 209 pages, $6.50). In a slim little volume published in 1955, the late Baltimore native brings the 1912 wreck of the Titanic to life. Using meticulous reporting, clean, vivid writing and telling detail about the ships' passengers and crew, Lord relates the now-familiar story of how 1,500 people died when the boat previously heralded as "unsinkable" collided with an iceberg and sank.
The strength of this book, credited with fueling the world's fascination with the Titanic, lies in Lord's restraint. He knows that the facts -- gathered from interviews with 63 survivors -- are powerful enough. As a result, he doesn't insert himself into the story or attempt to overdramatize the narrative by using a lot of seafaring jargon or eye-rollingly bad writing like the authors of some more recent offerings do.
Take, for example, the seaspeak-laden tome The Race by Tim Zimmerman (Houghton Mifflin, 316 pages, $25). The story of the "first round the world, no holds barred sailing competition," starts off promisingly enough when a sailor swipes the sea spray from his goggles to discover his twin-hulled sailing catamaran is about to collide with an iceberg at 30 knots. Alas, the author then uses a footnote of six highly technical sentences to explain nautical miles and chip logs, thus losing any and all dramatic tension previously attained. I abandoned ship.
Red Sky in Mourning (Hyperion, 223 pages, $23.95) is Tami Oldham Ashcraft's first-person account of her 41 days lost at sea in 1983 after Hurricane Raymond washed her fiance Richard overboard and destroyed their 44-foot ketch Hazana's masts and motor.
The book has more than enough drama, but it comes with the painful price of a hefty dose of narrative more befitting of bodice-ripper fiction than seafaring fact. After admiring a pod of pilot whales surface and dive into the ocean, the author succumbs to the perils of this:
"As Hazana glided down into the trough, Richard reached around and untied my pareu as he clung to me with his knees. He knotted the material into the pulpit with a ring knot and cupped my breasts with his warm hands 'I want to dive with you, Tami,' Richard murmured in my ear. 'I want to surface and dive as these wild mammals do.' " (p. 17)
Um, yeah, guys -- about that shipwreck?
The Ship and the Storm by Jim Carrier (Harvest Books, 317 pages, $14) also appears to have all of the components of a good shipwreck story: Happy-go-lucky, hard-drinking passengers and crew, a hurricane forecast that went largely ignored, and an author named Jim (most shipwreck books seem to be written by men with virile-sounding, single-syllable first names).
Unfortunately, Carrier fails to keep the story simple, and instead gets bogged down in details of the lives and loved ones of the crew of the Fantome, a 282-foot schooner cruise ship manned by a captain and a 30-person crew, all of whom perished when they tried to dodge Hurricane Mitch and failed. Who can focus on the crew's certain death when one is trying to figure out whose girlfriend is the psychologist, which crewman's daughter lived in Belize and whose mother was named Athelene?
Keeping track of a ship in a storm is challenging enough for a reader. Complicating matters with too many details about the people onboard and on land only saps the narrative of its strength. Perhaps the most powerful pages of A Night to Remember come at the end when Lord reprints the passenger and crew lists from the Titanic. The names of the 651 people saved were put in italics, the names of those who perished were not. The end result is chilling and powerful, more so than snippets of anecdotes about scores of passengers ever could have been.
There are some treasures to be found. Perhaps the best new book about terror at sea right now is Mutiny on the Globe by Thomas Farel Heffernan (Norton, 215 pages, $24.95). The book isn't about a shipwreck, but it does tell the story of Samuel Comstock of Nantucket and New York, who signed onto the whaleship Globe in 1822.
Two years into the voyage, Comstock organized a mutiny, killed the ship's officers and set about establishing his own island kingdom on Mili Atol in the Marshall Islands. Comstock was murdered by his crew, six sailors escaped the island on the Globe and natives killed most of the rest.
Heffernan, who used historical documents, including a rare first-person account of the mutiny, to research the book, keeps the narrative moving and the writing crisp. He knows his story is exciting and he stays out of the way -- a fact a reader only truly appreciates after reading a second book about the Globe mutiny, Demon of the Waters by Gregory Gibson (Litttle Brown, 248 pages, $24.95).
Gibson, a rare-book dealer, winds the Globe narrative together with the story of the discovery of a journal written in 1825 by a sailor who was on the ship that discovered the men left on the islands after the mutiny. Sounds like it could be interesting, but it's not.
Every time the story switches to the journal, it is impossible not to wonder when it will revert back to the mutiny itself. Given the choice between a story about documents and one about a mutiny, I'll take the mutiny every time.
That said, a good shipwreck story is never just about the event itself. Using historical information and thorough reporting, the author should provide a portrait of life on a cruise ship, a whaler or sword boat. For example, Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea isn't just about the sperm whale that attacked the whaleship Essex and inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick. It's about what life was like in the whaling community on Nantucket in 1819.
This is precisely why Moby Dick is the most immortal of all sea tragedies -- it reaches far beyond a man, weather, whales and the sea to go to the very essence of the human experience.
The Perfect Storm -- though no Moby Dick -- also doesn't just focus on the storm that caused the six-man crew of the Andrea Gail to disappear off the coast of Nova Scotia. It also explains to the reader how fishermen risk their lives to bring home the swordfish that sells for $12 a pound.
Propelled by the drama of life and death, shipwreck stories often read as quickly as mysteries or popular novels. But unlike those genres, which tend to fade from memory soon after the stories end, well-done shipwreck stories linger as haunting reminders of the unpredictability of the sea and the fragility of man.
Maria Blackburn, a Baltimore County bureau reporter for The Sun, once signed up for sailing lessons on the Charles River in Boston but dropped out once she discovered that learning to sail might involve falling into the polluted Charles. She is the former assistant to The Sun's book editor.