A high school teacher during the tumultuous years of the 1960's and early 1970's, Myron ("Mike") Arms abandoned the formal classroom in 1977 in favor of a different kind of educational setting: a 60-foot traditional wooden schooner called Dawn Treader. As founder and director of a program of "sea learning" experiences and as a Coast Guard licensed Ocean Master, he sailed for the next five years with hundreds of teenage boys and girls. "The curriculum was life," says Arms of his program. "the teacher was the sea.  I learned as much as my students. We measured the sea's chemistry, sampled its bottom sediments, studied its microscopic populations with a plankton net and microscope. It was the beginning, really, of my own emerging awareness of the stresses being suffered by virtually all of the world's marine environments."

Several years later, while sailing with a group of young adults in eastern Canada aboard his new 50-foot bluewater cutter Brendan's Isle, Arms found himself confronted yet again by a series of disquieting signs of environmental stress--disappearing species, collapsing fisheries, changing patterns of climate. After a particularly dramatic encounter with a barrier of late summer sea ice during a voyage to Labrador in 1991, he became intrigued with questions of why the ice had persisted in such vast quantity along this coast in a year when much of the rest of North America was suffering from a debilitating heatwave and scientists were warning of the onset of global warming. Three years and hundreds of research-hours later, he set sail to the north again, this time by way of western Greenland. Unlike earlier voyages, this one was specifically designed to serve as the narrative setting for a book, Riddle of the Ice, and to dramatize an emerging climate story about the polar sea ice that scientists were just beginning to understand.

          "It's funny how things go," Arms wrote after his return from Greenland. "Sailing, for me, used to be a hobby. Then it became a vocation. Then an obsession. Then a metaphor: a window on the world. What began as a series of casual summer cruises has evolved into a means of making contact with the planet we live on and with the severe stressing of planetary systems caused by our collective human activity. Ever since the Greenland voyage I've been writing in the winters and sailing with my wife Kay each summer. Next year, with luck, I'll be heading north again, with a group of young sail-trainees, to circumnavigate Newfoundland and gather material for a book on the people of the outports and the collapse of the Grand Banks fisheries."

         The voyage to Newfoundland took place as planned during the summer of 1998, and Arms returned home with a ship's log containing hundreds of pages of notes and anecdotes. These, along with dozens of hours of tape-recorded interviews with Newfoundlanders from every walk of life, have provided the basis for a sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, always heart-rending story of a people who are both the perpetrators and the victims of one of the greatest ecological disasters of our time. Nearly six years in the writing, Servants of the Fish is now available for sale on this website as well as in major bookstores and online booksellers across the U.S. and Canada.  In addition, readers may also keep abreast of Arms's other thoughts and sailing adventures by means of a steady diet of feature magazine articles as well as by a book of essays, Cathedral of the World, published in hardback by Doubleday in early 1999, then released in paperback in the spring of 2000.

"My hope," says Arms, "is that these books may become a means, not only for sharing the experience of sailing to remote and exotic coasts but also for raising readers' consciousness about some of the troubling changes taking place there."