The Perfect Storm

by

Sebastian Junger

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Perfect Storm makes teaching easy.

Science and Technology Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Money and the Fishing Industry Theme Icon
Danger, Human Frailty, and Death Theme Icon
Family and Domestic Strife Theme Icon
Science and Technology Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Perfect Storm, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Technology Theme Icon

Throughout The Perfect Storm, Junger charts the growth of the North Atlantic fishing industry, which began soon after Europeans began sailing to what’s now New England. This industry is continually evolving—in the design of fishing boats and gear, navigational advances, weather forecasting, and more. An advance in technology often leads to unforeseen problems in the environment or marketplace, which in turn leads to legislative or other changes shaping the industry in an ongoing cycle. Changes in technology especially affect the speed and efficiency with which fishermen do their work—and incentivize captains’ decision-making in ways that can jeopardize both the natural environment and human safety. Though Junger doesn’t draw a clear conclusion about the fishing industry as a whole, he suggests that technology has always had an ambivalent impact on human lives and their natural environment, partly because technology, in turn, is more strongly driven by economic incentives than by anything else.

Technology drives the evolution of the fishing industry, in both good and bad ways, and in turn impacts the safety of fishermen themselves. Once ice companies began to proliferate in the mid-1800s, “The market for fresh fish changed fishing forever. No longer could schooner captains return home at their leisure with a hold full of salt cod; now it was all one big race. Several full schooners pulling into port at once could saturate the market and ruin the efforts of anyone following. […] Overloaded schooners built like racing sloops dashed home through fall gales […] Bad weather sank these elegant craft by the dozen, but a lot of people made a lot of money.” Because the market for fresh fish, made possible by new technology, incentivized a fast return to port, captains were increasingly pressured to make unsafe decisions that endangered lives.

In the 20th century, after passing conservation legislation to stop foreign fishermen—such as huge Russian factory ships—from depleting American waters, the United States fishing industry quickly developed technology that had a similarly devastating effect. “After the passage of the Magnuson Act, American fishermen could […] set themselves up for business in quarter-million dollar steel boats. […] Better equipment resulted in such huge takes that prices dropped and fishermen had to resort to more and more devastating methods just to keep up. Draggers raked the bottom so hard that they actually levelled outcrops and filled in valleys,” devastating fish habitats. As fishermen developed the capability to bring in huge catches, in other words, one of the results was environmental damage and corresponding damage to the industry itself.

One measure taken to address such environmental problems was the establishment of fishing quotas. In 1991, just before the events of the book, “the National Marine Fishery Service implemented a quota of 6.9 million pounds of dressed swordfish for U.S.-licensed sword boats, roughly two-thirds of the previous year’s catch. […] as soon as the overall quota was met, the entire fishery was shut down. […] When the Andrea Gail left port on September 23, she was working under a quota for the first time in her life.” One knock-on effect of quotas, then, was to add more pressure to fishing vessels to rush back to port with their catch before the season’s quota was met. From something as rudimentary as the ability to freeze fish in the 19th century, to the unintentional side-effects of conservation efforts a century later, the industry constantly faces competing pressures. However, the most enduring one—the need to get fish to market as quickly as possible—doesn’t change.

Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…

Science and Technology ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Science and Technology appears in each chapter of The Perfect Storm. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire The Perfect Storm LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Perfect Storm PDF

Science and Technology Quotes in The Perfect Storm

Below you will find the important quotes in The Perfect Storm related to the theme of Science and Technology.
Georges Bank, 1896 Quotes

"On Georges Bank with our cable gone our rudder gone and leaking. Two men have been swept away and all hands have been given up as our cable is gone and our rudder is gone. The one that picks this up let it be known. God have mercy on us."

The note was from the Falcon, a boat that had set sail from Gloucester the year before. She hadn’t been heard from since.

Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:
Gloucester, Mass., 1991 Quotes

The market for fresh fish changed fishing forever. No longer could schooner captains return home at their leisure with a hold full of salt cod; now it was all one big race. Several full schooners pulling into port at once could saturate the market and ruin the efforts of anyone following. In the 1890s, one schooner had to dump 200 tons of halibut into Gloucester harbor because she'd been beaten into port by six other vessels. Overloaded schooners built like racing sloops dashed home through fall gales with every inch of canvas showing and their decks practically awash. Bad weather sank these elegant craft by the dozen, but a lot of people made a lot of money.

Page Number: 34
Explanation and Analysis:
God’s Country Quotes

A longliner might pull up ten or twenty swordfish on a good day, one ton of meat. The most Bob Brown has ever heard of anyone catching was five tons a day for seven days—70,000 pounds of fish. That was on the Hannah Boden in the mid-eighties. The lowest crew member made ten thousand dollars. That's why people fish; that’s why they spend ten months a year inside seventy feet of steel plate.

Related Characters: Bob Brown
Page Number: 57
Explanation and Analysis:
The Flemish Cap Quotes

Having chased out the competition, America set about constructing an industry that could scrape Georges Bank just as bare as any Russian factory ship. […] Within three years of Magnuson, the New England fleet had doubled to 1,300 boats. Better equipment resulted in such huge takes that prices dropped and fishermen had to resort to more and more devastating methods just to keep up. Draggers raked the bottom so hard that they actually levelled outcrops and filled in valleys—the very habitats where fish thrived.

Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

The following year the National Marine Fishery Service implemented a quota of 6.9 million pounds of dressed swordfish for U.S.-licensed sword boats, roughly two-thirds of the previous year’s catch. Every U.S.-licensed boat had to report their catch when they arrived back in port, and as soon as the overall quota was met, the entire fishery was shut down. […] The result was that not only were fishing boats now racing the season, they were racing each other. When the Andrea Gail left port on September 23, she was working under a quota for the first time in her life.

Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:

The circumstances that place a boat at a certain place at a certain time are so random that they can’t even be catalogued, much less predicted, and a total of fifty or sixty more people—swordfishermen, mariners, sailors—are also converging on the storm grounds of the North Atlantic. Some of these people have been heading there, unavoidably, for months; others made a bad choice just a few days ago.

Related Symbols: Storms
Page Number: 88
Explanation and Analysis:

Around nightfall a Canadian weather map creaks out of the satellite fax. There’s a hurricane off Bermuda, a cold front coming down off the Canadian Shield and a storm brewing over the Great Lakes. They're all heading for the Grand Banks. A few minutes after the fax, Linda Greenlaw calls.

Billy, you seen the chart? she asks.

Yeah I saw it, he says.

What do you think?

Looks like it's gonna be wicked.

Related Characters: Billy Tyne (speaker), Linda Greenlaw (speaker)
Related Symbols: Storms
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:
The Barrel of the Gun Quotes

In a sense Billy’s no longer at the helm, the conditions are, and all he can do is react. If danger can be seen in terms of a narrowing range of choices, Billy Tyne’s choices have just racheted down a notch. A week ago he could have headed in early. A day ago he could have run north like Johnston. An hour ago he could have radioed to see if there were any other vessels around. Now the electrical noise has made the VHF practically useless, and the single sideband only works for long range. These aren’t mistakes so much as an inability to see into the future. No one, not even the Weather Service, knows for sure what a storm's going to do.

Related Characters: Billy Tyne, Albert Johnston
Related Symbols: Storms
Page Number: 112
Explanation and Analysis:
Graveyard of the Atlantic Quotes

In the old days it was known that most shipwrecks on Sable occurred because of errors in navigation; the westerly current was so strong that it could throw boats off by sixty to a hundred miles. If Billy has lost his electronics—his GPS, radar, and loran—he's effectively back in the old days. He’d have a chart of the Grand Banks on the chart table and would be estimating his position based on compass heading, forward speed, and wind conditions. This is called dead reckoning. Maybe the currents and the storm winds push Billy farther west than he realizes, and he gets into the shallows around Sable. […] Or maybe their steering’s gone and, like the Eishin Maru, they’re just careening westward on the weather.

Related Characters: Billy Tyne
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:
The World of the Living Quotes

By October 30th, the Sable Island storm is firmly imbedded between the remnants of Hurricane Grace and the Canadian high. […] These two systems function like huge gears that catch the storm between their teeth and extrude it westward. This is called a retrograde; it's an act of meteorological defiance that might happen in a major storm only every hundred years or so. […] Meteorologists see perfection in strange things, and the meshing of three completely independent weather systems to form a hundred-year event is one of them. My God, thought Case, this is the perfect storm.

Related Characters: Bob Case (speaker)
Related Symbols: Storms
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
The Dreams of the Dead Quotes

And then, on the afternoon of November 5th, an EPIRB washes up on Sable Island. […] Like the bottled note thrown overboard from the schooner Falcon a century ago, the odds of something as small as an EPIRB winding up in human hands are absurdly small. And the odds of Billy Tyne disarming his EPIRB—there's no reason to, it wouldn’t even save batteries—are even smaller. Bob Brown, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed, no one who knows Billy can explain it.

Related Characters: Bob Brown, Billy Tyne, Linda Greenlaw, Charlie Reed
Page Number: 211
Explanation and Analysis: