Review of the book Adrift: A True Story on the Icy Atlantic and the One Who Lived to Tell About it by Brian Murphy Rating ****
Having just read The Graves Are Walking about the Irish potato famine, I was intrigued by this survival story set ten years later. Many of the people described in this story were likely impacted by the famine. The immigration from Ireland to the United States, which had begun due to the potato blight, was still going strong ten years later. And for the sorry folks who boarded the John Rutledge, which struck an iceberg and sunk, their quest for a new beginning didn’t end any better than those who stayed behind.
Author Brian Murphy does an excellent job of compiling a mountain of research into a readable narrative. The story of the thirteen people who find themselves adrift at sea in a lifeboat and how only one survives is compelling, but it takes up only a small portion of the story. The rest of the book is a history lesson about the boat, the people, and the harsh realities of life in the mid-nineteenth century.
The author describes many other vessels, besides the John Rutledge, that also met an uncertain fate in the same three-month period. One such vessel was the steamship the SS Pacific. With ship-to-ship communication not yet available, ship captains did not have up-to-the-minute information about weather, sea conditions, and ice warnings. Those who were made aware of the dire conditions during this period, from boats arriving at port, altered their trek across the Atlantic to a more southerly course. Unfortunately for the survivors of the John Rutledge, who managed to board three lifeboats, it meant there was less chance of being spotted by a passing boat on the same route.
Besides the lack of food and water, the survivors had no protection from the elements. The sinking had occurred so unexpectedly that many were dressed inappropriately for the conditions. Being adrift at sea in a lifeboat in 1856 was not a desirable place to be.
Of all the stories of what transpired before, during, and after the sinking, one story stuck with me. The lone survivor was Thomas Nye. He was rescued by the boat HMS Germania. At one point after the rescue, while the ship’s captain sets out to look for the survivors on the other two lifeboats, one sailor tells the captain about hearing voices he could not identify coming from the water a few days earlier. It was foggy at the time, and he didn’t tell anyone, unsure of what he had heard. Once they picked up Nye, and learned that there were two other lifeboats out there, he realized that what he heard may have been pleas from the survivors from one of the other boats.
Once Thomas Nye is rescued, the author follows the characters in the story until Nye’s death. One of the last anecdotes he tells is about a message found in a bottle many years after the Pacific disappeared. The message, supposedly written by a crewmember aboard the boat, describes the sinking of the ship after colliding with an iceberg.
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