Brian Murphy - Adrift: a true story of tragedy on the icy atlantic and the one who lived to tell about it

W hen my daughter was young, she and I enjoyed hunting for sea glass on beaches around Greece. For years, we filled containers and bottles with the sea-scrubbed nuggets. These castaway bitsdifferent shapes, different textures and colorsgradually built a story. A layer of sea glass in a small cup might represent one week attached to one specific memory. A fat jam jar filled to the brim might be the remembrances of a full season.

This book is a lot like that.

I came across the first stray fragment of the story in a basement on Cape Cod, where a local historical museum had assembled a wonderful exhibit on shipwrecks. From there, and for the next three years, I collected more pieces wherever I could find them. They turned up in places such as the old waterfront in Liverpool on the River Mersey, the side streets of Fairhaven on Buzzards Bay, and the archives at Mystic Seaport on tidewaters pulled toward Long Island Sound.

Like the sea glass, the scattered shards of this story, waiting to be gathered and brought together, added up to a moment in time. This one took place far out in the cold Atlantic more than a century and a half ago.

This is a work of nonfiction. All the events occurred. I did my best with what I found, making every effort to portray, with accuracy and precision, the arc of the story and the people involved. The narrative comes together from an array of sources that include published material, family archives, civil and church records, shipping ledgers, and interviews conducted in Europe and the United States.

That was the easy part.

The more challenging task was properly conveying the thoughts, emotions, and dialogue of the people involved.

There is, of course, no way to know the exact words exchanged on the John Rutledge or among those huddled in an open lifeboat adrift in the North Atlantic. Even harder to discern are characters inner voices and fears. On both fronts, I relied heavily on the only person who could know: the sole survivor of the wreck. Fortunately, just after rescue he gave detailed statements to various newspapers. He also offered recollections decades later and his accounts did not vary in any significant ways. Most important, they were highly consistent in describing how those on the lifeboat interacted, battled for life, and, ultimately, died. The various retellings, however, do include some minor discrepancies, mainly in the order of events aboard the lifeboat. None of these variations change the story in any fundamental manner.

To further enhance the dialogue, I consulted experts in mid-nineteenth-century linguistics and speech patterns in New England, Ireland, and Britain.

I mention all this for an important reason:

To ask for a small indulgence. Do not look on the dialogue as verbatim. Rather, view it as a carefully considered approximation based on research. I put quotation marks around only the passages that appear in logs, newspapers, and other sources. The rest of the dialogueexchanges among the crew and so forthdoes not carry quotation marks because I dont want to suggest that these are the exact words spoken. Instead, they are a literary reflection of what is known about how the various figures in the story interacted.

I try to recount this story in its full sweep and attempt to explore the souls and sensibilities of those involved. This is, I believe, my duty as a storyteller. I also have an obligation as a journalist. I can never turn my back on facts. I have endeavored to keep every aspect of this book aligned with what is known or what can be surmised with strong confidence.

The vagaries of recordkeeping and newspaper reporting in that era forced some decisions. A few names appear in records with different spellings. I added footnotes to further explain the choices I made. In every case, I selected the spelling most widely used in the accounts or confirmed through further documentation.

One final point of context: although this book keeps a tight focus on one tragedy in the age of sail, it strives for a greater reach. Scores of shipscarrying tens of thousands of passengers and crewmet a similar fate in the Atlantic before twentieth-century advances in communications technology enabled better notice on looming ice fields and approaching storms. The names of some lost ships are remembered. So are a few of the prominent figures who perished at sea.

But almost totally forgotten are the others who went down with them: emigrants, seamen, travelers, merchants, and envoys. Entire families. Young men and women striking out for a new life. Children too young to grasp the dangers of an Atlantic crossing.

They are the anonymous dead.

The sea is good at swallowing lives without a trace.

This is my belated elegy for them all and the risks they faced on the North Atlantic.