The Ninth Wave

[Henry_Burdett_Messenger@cup.portal.com]

A New Analysis of "The Ninth Wave"

                Out of the cloud burst the head of the tempest
                Murderer, Murderer of calm
                Why did I go?
                Why did I go?

                "Hello Earth"

It's always been clear to us that "The Ninth Wave" is about someone
who's been in a terrible accident at sea and is trying to survive in
the water. But these words had always troubled me -- these are the words
of someone who had a choice when making the journey. Usually this isn't
the case. We travel because we must, for the most part. 

Several years after hearing "The Ninth Wave," I started sailing again. 
I learned to sail when I was 16, in a Cal 20 in Monterey Bay. I was a 
natural. Whenever they wanted to get the boat from point A to point B 
in the Bay, the instructors would give me the helm and the rest of the 
group would catch rays on the foredeck. I remember some screaming beats 
around Soquel point with great fondness.

Unfortunately, I didn't sail much again until I was 30. A good friend of
mine married a woman who owned a Catalina 27. I became her partner in
the boat, and later I bought it outright (they had a child, and the
boat was no longer in the game plan). Now I sail about twice a week during
the summer, and about once every two weeks during the winter.

Naturally, I wanted to become a better sailor, so I started reading
sailing books. One very good book that I read is called _'Fastnet: 
Force 10'_, by John Rousmaniere. It's about a particularly disasterous 
ocean sailing race. It then occurred to me that the words of the 
protagonist in "The Ninth Wave" are those of a racing sailor. This
is the introduction to _'Fastnet: Force 10'_:

        This is a sea story, and it is true. It is the story of 
        how fifteen people died, not in wartime, or on a hunt for
        whales, or in a typhoon in the South China Sea, but during
        a yacht race only seventy miles off the coast of England.
        What began as a six hundred-mile sail in fine weather around
        a lighthouse off the Irish coast became, for twenty-seven
        hundred men and women in 303 yachts, a terrifying ordeal as
        one of the most vicious summer gales in the twentieth century
        swept east from the American Great Plains to trap the Fastnet
        race fleet in the shallow water of the Western Approaches to
        Britain.

        The worst disaster in the one-hundred year history of ocean
        yacht racing, the 1979 Fastnet race is a startling reminder 
        of man's vulnerability before the elements. As the official
        inquiry into the calamity concluded, "the sea showed that it
        can be a deadly enemy and those who go to sea for pleasure
        must do so in the full knowledge that they may encounter
        dangers of the highest order." From 10:00 PM on August 13
        until 6:00 PM on August 14, those dangers were a shrieking
        wind that blew at force 10 velocity (forty-eight to fifty-five
        knots) and up to hurricane strength, and, more dangerous,
        a true maelstrom of a seaway. Steep waves as high as fifty
        feet formed towering breakers that collapsed on boats and
        sailors like surf on a beach, hurling twenty thousand pounds
        of water at twenty or thirty knots onto hulls that, on average,
        were only thirty-eight feet long and weighed about fifteen
        thousand pounds. More than one-third of the boats were knocked
        over until their masts paralleled the water. One-fourth were
        capsized entirely, many rolling over through a circle. Even
        the larger boats -- anoung them former prime minister Edward
        Heath's _Morning Cloud_ and Ted Turner's _Tenacious_ -- were
        battered. Many boats were damaged and some crews were badly
        injured.

        Worse yet, six men were lost overboard and swept away when
        their safety harnesses broke. Nine others drowned or died 
        of hypothermia in the cold water and air, either on board
        yachts or near life rafts that had capsized. In all, 
        twenty-four crews abandonded their yachts, five of which sank.
        One hundred and thirty-six men and women were saved from sinking
        yachts, life rafts and the water itself by heroic helicopter
        crews, commercial and naval seamen, and fellow yachtsmen, 
        and seventy yachtsmen were towed or escorted to safety by
        lifeboats.

        What follows is the story of the case and the storm, told in
        the accounts of over seventy yachts and rescue vessels.

        "This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates
        one from one's kind," Joseph Conrad wrote in _Typhoon_. Besides
        affection for the outdoors and competitiveness, one of the 
        reasons why people undergo the rigors of racing boats out of 
        sight of land in the opportunity that the sport offers for
        companionship. The Fastnet gale, however, showed how isolated
        and helpless we all can be. Human contact was difficult and 
        and communication was impossible in the shrieking wind and
        and pounding seas. Even the security of the cabins was false,
        as galley stoves, tins of food, sails, and bodies flew from
        side to side below with every lurch and roll. While offshore
        racing had always been respected as a challenge, and, at worst,
        a risk, few people caught in the gale would have previously
        thought the sport to be actually dangerous. The realization that
        they, their shipmates, and their competitors were in danger 
        dawned on the most unlucky sailors during the gale, and on many
        of the survivors after the storm passed and the fight for 
        survival ended. 

        Acknowledging vulnerability has not driven this sailor from the
        sea. I had seen gales before the Fastnet race -- but none as
        bad -- and probably will see gales again -- I hope, none worse.
        Yet like many people at the turn of the decade, I feel 
        considerably more aware of the limitations of both myself and
        of the increasingly complex technology that surrounds my sport
        and my life. Like many activities in late twentieth-century 
        life, yachting apparantly has benefited from professionalism,
        specialization and rationality. In the year of famine in 
        Southeast Asia, a revolution in Iran, and a frightening accident
        at a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, the calamity in the
        Western Approaches seems to be yet another indication and our
        positivic faith in technology may be groundless. We appear
        to have been led by transitory successes into the heresy that
        we can completely manipulate our lives and our environments -- 
        a modern version of the medieval doctrine of justification by
        works. 

        Hunger, religious fervor, and nuclear energy may eventually
        be channeled or controlled, but only with the deepest respect
        for their latent powers. More certainly, wind and water will 
        again be used for emotionally satisfying ends, but only by
        people who acknowledge that catastrophe is always possible.


        _'Fastnet: Force 10'_

This book was written in 1980, and the Fastnet disaster was front page
news in England at the time:

        The events that occurred in the Western Approaches on August
        13, 14, 15 and 16 received immense international attention, and
        the accounts published at the time in many newspapers and
        magazines were important sources...

        London -- _Daily Express_, _Daily Mail_, _Daily Mirror_, 
        _Daily Star_, _Daily Telegraph_, _Guardian_, _Lloyd's List_,
        _Observer_, _Sunday Telegraph_...

        _'Fastnet: Force 10'_

I don't find it coincidental that "Hounds of Love" was released in 1985.
This is enough time to have written "The Ninth Wave" and the rest of
the album and then record and release it. Kate certainly would have known
about the Fastnet gale, and it's possible she actually read _'Fastnet: 
Force 10'_.

Most of the clues are in "And Dream of Sheep" and "Hello Earth." Compare
these passages:

        My face is all lit up
        My face is all lit up
        If they find me racing white horses --
        They'll not take me for for a buoy

        "And Dream of Sheep"

        Yet with 600 feet of line dragging over the stern, _Grimalkin_
        was barely in control. She surfed wildly down the faces of
        waves like an elevator cut loose from its cable, and threatened
        to pitchpole, or somersault over her bow...

        Ward... frantically looked to port and starboard for a flat
        spot to aim for... but all around was broiling white foam and
        ahead was a black wall -- the back of the next wave rising out
        of the narrow trough.

        _'Fastnet: Force 10'_

The "white horses" were the breaking Fastnet seas that destroyed five
racing yachts and caused twenty-four crews to abandon their boats.

The storm that hit the Fastnet fleet was known to the meterologists.
They had tracked it from the American Midwest all the way across
the Atlantic. It was just much stronger than they anticipated, and
took a turn to the south that they didn't expect:

        Watching storms
        Start to form
        Over America
        Can't do anything
        Just watch them swing
        With the wind
        Out to sea

        "Hello Earth"

Compare that with John Rousmaniere's description:

        The storm was born [on August 9] in the northern Great 
        Plains of the United States, where hot air over baking wheat 
        fields frequently tangles with cold Canadian air to 
        produce tornadoes and violent thunderstorms.

        On Friday [August 10]... seventy-eight boats boats 
        competeting in the J/24 sailboat class were swept by 
        unpredictable, violent gusts from the south-west and
        north-west. The boats finished the race under a black
        sky and made it safely into the protected harbor of 
        Newport just before the Coast Guard issued an alert warning
        for all sailors to seek shelter.

        Moving east at speeds as high as fifty knots, the swirling 
        air was over Nova Scotia at about the time the Fastnet race
        started on Saturday [August 11], and was in the open Atlantic
        a day later.

        In the predawn hours of Monday, August 13, the dangerous little
        depression changed course and headed northeast... British
        forecasters realized at about noon on Monday that Low Y [the
        Fastnet gale], swinging around Low X, would sweep across
        southern Ireland and the Western Approaches that night.

        _'Fastnet: Force 10'_

And I'll leave you with a description of force 10 conditions:

        Force 10: Wind speed, forty-eight to fifty-five knots. 
        Very high waves with long overhanging crests. The resulting
        foam in great patches is blown in dense white streaks along
        the direction of the wind. On the whole, the surface of the
        sea takes a white appearance. The tumbling of the sea  
        becomes heavy and shocklike. Visibility affected.

        "Beaufort scale of wind and sea conditions"