As
the last of the northern cod disappeared from the fishing banks of
eastern North America during the waning years of the twentieth
century, more than just fish faced the threat of extinction. In
communities all around the island of Newfoundland, thousands of
fishermen and their families suddenly found themselves confronted
by a similar threat.
Servants of the Fish is the story of these people--at once the
perpetrators and the victims of an event that some have termed the
greatest ecological disaster of the modern era. Set in the context
of a sailing voyage around the island of Newfoundland, it is a
story of loss and dislocation, yet as the voyage evolves, it also
becomes a story of heroism, simple kindness, and the distinctly
human capacity to survive in the face of seemingly impossible
odds.
As he did in his bestselling Riddle of the Ice, author Myron Arms
employs the drama of the voyage to bring readers face to face with
the people and the geography of the tale he tells. It is the tale
of a particular time and place. Yet it is also an allegory of
sorts--about preditors and prey, about greed and denial, and about
our collective ability as human beings to destroy natural systems
once thought to be infinite.
In prose that is crisp, straightforward, and intelligent, Arms
delivers a moving tale not only of the plight of Newfoundlanders
but of all of us as we seek for better means to care for the
planet that sustains us.
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By
any account, the impenetrable barrier of sea ice that blocked
Brendan's Isle halfway up the Labrador Coast should not have been
there in late July, in what was one of the hottest summers in
memory a few hundred miles to the south. Frustrated and mystified
at having to turn back so early in his 1991 northbound voyage,
sailor Myron Arms became determined to explain the anomaly.
Three years later, having pursued this obsession from the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution to Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth
Observatory to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Arms took his
fifty-foot sailboat and a small crew back up the coast to test his
ideas--this time making it past the Arctic Circle.
The days and nights at sea are an experience of both untold
vastness and the closest of quarters, of calm seas one hour and
pounding gales the next. And by the time the Brendan's Isle rides
the great swells of Baffin Bay, north of everything but towering
icebergs, the reader can be in no doubt that, together with the
crew, he is holding a finger to the very pulse of our planet.
Weaving together the unfolding narrative of the voyage itself with
a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest theories about Arctic ice
production--and the troubling signals it may now be sending
us--Riddle of the Ice is a taut and suspenseful science mystery
told as captain's log. This is narrative nonfiction of the highest calibre, and it is certain to become a classic in the genre.
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The
curved lines of a sailing ship resemble the inverted dome of a
great cathedral, surrounded not by soot-covered buildings and
crowded streets but by a vast liquid wilderness. This physical
and symbolic connection is at the thematic heart of Cathedral
of the World, a collection of essays in which writer and
professional small-boat sailor Myron Arms sets out on a journey
both physical and spiritual, seeking to explore what he calls "the
primal spaces" and to articulate the sailor's age-old quest to
understand his world and himself.
Arms, author of the Boston Globe bestseller Riddle of the Ice, weaves the experiences of four decades at sea into a series of reflections that range across half a lifetime and thousands of ocean miles. During these journeys, he takes readers to some of the last wild places on Earth, climbing the hills of the North Atlantic in a full gale, watching the flight of seabirds, listening to the night-breath of whales, and pondering the questions that all such encounters inspire.
What John Muir did for western forests, what Edward Abbey did for the desert, Arms now does for the ocean. In a voice that is reverent, impassioned, and clear-sighted, he celebrates the wilderness he has come to love, mourns its wounds, and demonstrates for all of us its power to heal.
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