The Andrea Gail was one of maybe a dozen big commercial boats gearing up in Gloucester in mid-September 1991. She was owned by Bob Brown, a longtime fisherman who was known locally as Suicide Brown because of the risks he'd taken as a young man. He owned a second longliner, the Hannah Boden, and a couple of lobster boats. The Andrea Gail and the Hannah Boden were Brown's biggest investments, collectively worth well over a million dollars.

The Andrea Gail, in the language, was a raked-stem, hard-chined, western-rig boat. That meant that her bow had a lot of angle to it, she had a nearly square cross-section, and her pilothouse was up front rather than in the stern. She was built of welded steel plate, rust-red below waterline, green above, and she had a white wheelhouse with half-inch-thick safety glass windows. Fully rigged, for a long trip, she carried hundreds of miles of monofilament line, thousands of hooks, and 10,000 pounds of baitfish. There were seven life preservers on board, six survival suits, an emergency position indicating radio beacon, and one life raft.

The Andrea Gail was captained by a local named Frank "Billy" Tyne, a former carpenter and drug counselor who had switched to fishing at age 27. Tyne had a reputation as a fearless captain, and in his ten years of professional fishing he had made it through several treacherous storms. He had returned from a recent trip with almost 40,000 pounds of swordfish in his hold, close to a quarter of a million dollars' worth. Jobs aboard Tyne's boat were sought after. So it seemed odd, on September 18, when Adam Randall walked back up the dock at Gloucester Marine Railways and returned to town.

Randall's replacement was 28-year-old David Sullivan, who was mildly famous in town for having saved the lives of his entire crew one bitter January night two years before. When his boat, the Harmony, had unexpectedly begun taking on water, Sullivan had pulled himself across a rope to a sister ship 'and got help just in time to rescue his sinking crew. Along with Sullivan were a young West Indian named Alfred Pierre; 30-year-old Bobby Shatford, whose mother, Ethel, tended bar at the Crow's Nest on Main Street; and two men from Bradenton Beach, Florida-Dale Murphy, 30, and Michael "Bugsy" Moran, 36.

On September 20, Billy Tyne and his crew passed Ten Pound Island, rounded Dogbar Breakwater, and headed northeast on a dead-calm sea.

FOR SEVERAL GENERATIONS AFTER THE FIRST BRITISH settlers arrived in Gloucester, the main industries on Cape Ann were farming and logging. Then around 1700 the cod market took off, and Gloucester schooners began making runs up to the Grand Banks two or three times a year. French and Basque fishermen had already been working the area from Europe since 1510, perhaps earlier. They could fill their holds faster by crossing the Atlantic and fishing the rich waters of the Banks than by plying their own shores.

The Gloucester codfishermen worked from dories and returned to the schooners each night. Payment was reckoned by cutting the tongues out of the cod and adding them up at the end of the trip. When fog rolled in, the dories would drift out of earshot and were often never heard from again. Occasionally, weeks later, a two-man dory crew might be picked up by a schooner bound for, say, Pernambuco or Liverpool. The fishermen would make it back to Gloucester several months later, walking up Main Street as if returning from the dead.

The other danger, of course, was storms. Like a war, a big storm might take out all the young men of a single town. In 1862, for example, a winter gale struck 70 schooners fishing the dangerous waters of Georges Bank, east of Cape Cod. The ships tried to ride out 50-foot seas at anchor. By morning 15 Gloucester boats had gone down with 125 men. At least 4,000 Gloucestermen have been lost at sea, but some estimates run closer to 10,000. A bronze sculpture on the waterfront commemorates them: THEY THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS 1623-1923. It shows a schooner captain fighting heavy weather, his face framed by a sou'wester hat.

In the early days, a lot of superstition went into seafaring. Occasionally men stepped off of ill-fated boats on a hunch. Captains refused to set sail on Fridays, since that was the day their Lord had been crucified. Boats often had lucky silver coins affixed to the base of their masts, and crew members took care never to tear up a printed page because they never knew-most of them being illiterate-whether it was from the Bible.