and 81 Days Below Zero: The Incredible Survival Story of a World War II Pilot in Alaska’s Frozen Wilderness.Murphy applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Adrift: A True Story of Tragedy on the Icy Atlantic and the One Man who Lived to Tell about It, and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Adrift, and follow Brian Murphy on Facebook.Over the next half hour or so, the commotion on deck grew more troubling. More movement. Shouting. Heavy footfalls.Page 99 comes just before the heart of the book: the sinking of the ship John Rutledge and the life-and-death struggles of 13 people on a lifeboat. The page, however, touches on a critical part of the narrative. We get a glimpse of the harrowing conditions and great risks for emigrants crossing the Atlantic in the mid-19th century.
This didn’t seem routine at all.
Let me set the scene for page 99.
Hours earlier, the hull of the ship John Rutledge had been gouged open by an iceberg. It is February 1856. They are 450 miles off Newfoundland, an area of the North Atlantic known as Ice Alley. Down in the steerage, more than 100 emigrants – mostly Irish bound for New York – are listening to the chaos on deck as the crew struggles to save the ship. The steerage passengers do not yet know the ship is doomed. But the sounds from above are ominous. Panic begins to feed more panic. Soon – later in this chapter – the ship begins to slip into the sea. Five lifeboats get off, quickly disappearing into the fog. Thirty other souls are left onboard to be taken by the Atlantic.
I came across the story of the John Rutledge at an exhibit on shipwrecks in Centerville, Mass., the hometown of the captain. There was the obvious tale of the lone survivor, a young sailor from near New Bedford, who was picked up by a ship after nine days adrift. It was remarkable on many levels. There were rarely survivors from wrecks on Ice Alley. And Nye was from a prominent family in shipping and whaling, adding another element to his brief celebrity and the subject of sensational headlines. He was the man who watched 12 others perish around him from cold, exposure and the horrible madness and pain brought on by drinking seawater.
But I hope this book is considered more than just a survival story.
I strived to give readers a sense of the incredible perils of sea travel in the 19th century age of immigration.
Tens of thousands of people were lost at sea in those decades. It became so common that the loss of ships merited little more than a passing notice. Early 1856 was particularly cruel. The ice was heavier than anyone had seen in generations. Three other ships were lost without a trace about the same time as the Rutledge: two American clipper ships and a transatlantic steamer, the Pacific, carrying many well-known figures from Britain and New York. More than 800 people were gone. (In an incredible twist, one of the owners of the John Rutledge was on the Pacific.)
As I wrote in the Author’s Note: “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.”
--Marshal Zeringue
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