He could be given cardiopulmonary resuscitation, put on a respirator, and coaxed back to life. Still, the body is doing everything it can to delay the inevitable. When cold water touches the face, an impulse travels along the trigeminal and vagus nerves to the central nervous system and lowers the metabolic rate. The pulse slows down and the blood pools where it's needed most, in the heart and skull. It's a sort of temporary hibernation that drastically reduces the body's need for oxygen. Nurses will splash ice water on the face of a person with a racing heart to trigger the same reaction.
The diving reflex, as this is called, is compounded by the general effect of cold temperature on tissue—it preserves it. All chemical reactions, and metabolic processes, become honey-slow, and the brain can get by on less than half the oxygen it normally requires. There are cases of people spending forty or fifty minutes under lake ice and surviving. The colder the water, the stronger the diving reflex, the slower the metabolic processes, and the longer the survival time. The crew of the Andrea Gail do not find themselves in particularly cold water, though; it may add five or ten minutes to their lives. And there is no one around to save them anyway. The electrical activity in their brains gets weaker and weaker until, after fifteen or twenty minutes, it ceases altogether.
The body could be likened to a crew that resorts to increasingly desperate measures to keep their vessel afloat. Eventually the last wire has shorted out, the last bit of decking has settled under the water. Tyne, Pierre, Sullivan, Moran, Murphy, and Shatford are dead.
THE WORLD OF THE LIVING
The sea had kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and his shipmates called him mad.
—HERMAN MELVILLE, Moby Dick ALBERT JOHNSTON, fifty miles south of the Tail on the Mary T, gets hit a few hours after the Andrea Gail but just as hard. The first sign of the storm is a massive amount of static over the VHF, and then the wind comes: thirty, forty, fifty knots, and finally it tears the anemometer off buoy #44138. The buoy is about fifty miles northwest of Johnston's position and pegs fifty-six knots before flatlining at the bottom of the chart. Wind speeds above the interference of the wave crests are probably half again as high. The center of the low slides past Johnston late on the 18th and continues curving back around toward the coast throughout the next day. That motion spares Johnston the worst of the storm. It also, as far as he's concerned, spares him his life.
Johnston jogs into the wind and seas until night falls and then turns around and goes with it. He doesn't want to take the chance of running into a rogue wave in the dark and blowing his windows out. Throughout the early hours of October 29th, he surfs downwind on the backs of the huge seas, following a finger of cold Labrador Current, and when dawn breaks he turns around and fights his way northward again. He wants to gain enough sea room so that he won't hit the Gulf Stream when he runs south again the following night. On the second day the crew fight their way onto the deck to check the fish-hold and lazarette hatches and tighten the anchor fastenings. The sun has come out, glancing dully off the green ocean, and the wind screams out of the east, setting the cables to moaning and sending long streaks of foam scudding through the air. Radio waves become so bogged down in the saturated air that the radar stops working; at one point an unidentified Japanese sword boat appears out of nowhere, searchlight prying into the gloom, and passes within a few hundred yards of the Mary T. On the steeper seas she can't get her bow up in time and plunges straight through the wall of water. Nothing but her wheelhouse shows and then slowly, unstoppably, her bow rises back up. The two vessels pass by each other without a word or a sign, unable to communicate, unable to help each other, navigating their own courses through hell.