Jeff Herman

Robert DeLaurentis had an impossibly big dream: to circumnavigate the globe in a single-engine piston plane. Meant to be the ultimate test of his flying skills as a pilot, the journey would take him to the ends of the Earth and over some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. He diligently prepared himself and his plane, the Spirit of San Diego, for the excursion. Having previously flown to far-off places, he thought he knew what to expect. But reality doesn’t always make for the best co-pilot.

In the winter of 1952, New England was battered by the most brutal nor’easter in years. As the weather wreaked havoc on land, the freezing Atlantic became a wind-whipped zone of peril, setting the stage for one of the most heroic rescue stories ever lived. On February 18, while the storm raged, two oil tankers, the Pendleton and the Fort Mercer, were in the same horrifying predicament. Built with “dirty steel,” and not prepared to withstand such ferocious seas, both tankers split in two, leaving the dozens of men on board utterly at the Atlantic’s mercy.