LITMIR.BIZ

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her first tours on one of TOTE’s vessels, the chief mate called her into his stateroom. He said that he wanted to show her something. She knocked on his door; he opened it and dropped his towel. She fled, told her friends, and word got up to the captain. The chief mate was unpopular with the other officers and was quickly fired for sexual harassment. When the second and third mates moved up to take his place, Danielle was given the third mate position aboard that vessel.

      After that, she was branded as the girl who got her job because she claimed some chief mate harassed her. Which wasn’t quite fair. At the time, she was very young and very green. She did what she was told. She didn’t ask for this, she didn’t want it. She’d worked hard to be a deck officer in the merchant marine. She wanted to be taken seriously.

      Academically, things didn’t always come easily to Danielle. She sometimes transposed numbers and dreaded taking azimuths at sea. At two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon as they headed to Puerto Rico during the final voyage, she sent a weather report to the National Weather Service—a voluntary spot-report requested of all commercial vessels at sea—and ended up sending erroneous coordinates that positioned El Faro squarely atop mainland Cuba. Because of that mistake, her data was chucked.

      One former ship’s officer told me that he’d tell her to do something and then she’d walk away and forget it entirely. “Write stuff down,” he admonished her. He liked her a lot, everyone liked her, but she was often distracted. It took her a few times to pass her second mate’s exam.

      Danielle loved life, though, and onshore, she was a regular Martha Stewart—cooking, decorating, planning parties. She had a passion for the past, especially vintage clothes. She would order ’50s dresses off the web whenever the ship had internet service and came bouncing down the gangway to dozens of boxes of things she’d bought for herself and friends; it was like Christmas every seventy days.

      She adored holidays and planning parties, too. One fall, she decorated a backyard path that led out to a table under a tree with homemade lanterns—mason jar lanterns with votive candles, which she also hung from the tree’s branches—and she decked out each setting with decorative cloth placemats and a carved pumpkin with a candle in it. She went all out.

      When she was ashore, Danielle was tireless. “She exhausted me,” her friend says with a smile. “She had lots of energy, so by the time the ten weeks were over on this end, we needed a break. She would run us ragged because she’d have so much that she wanted to squeeze in.”

      Danielle’s brutal work schedule on the ship, along with a steady diet of cafeteria food and lack of sleep, was beginning to show. She worried a lot about her weight; it didn’t help that the other officers sometimes teased her for putting on the pounds. During shore leave, she became a workout fanatic, and built a strong friendship with her fitness instructor, Korinn Scattoloni. Danielle was memorable because she pushed herself hard, enough that Korinn sometimes worried about her. “I watched that red face to make sure it didn’t turn purple,” she says. At first, Korinn didn’t understand why the high-energy woman in the back of the class with the hot pink workout clothes would vanish for months at a time. Eventually, Danielle told her instructor that she was in the merchant marine, a career path Korinn understood well.

      There was a time when Korinn herself had answered the call of the sea. She was a successful dancer in New York City when, one day, she went down to see the tall ships at South Street Seaport. As soon as she saw the elegant historic sailing vessels moored to the dock, she knew that was where she was meant to be. Korinn quit her job and signed up to work on the HMS Rose, a replica of a twenty-gun Royal Navy ship built in 1757. As a hired hand aboard the three-masted frigate, she was expected to haul and furl the sails, keep the decks and sails clean and mended, and help in the galley.

      Late one afternoon, she and another member of the crew were ordered to climb seventy feet up the mast to furl a sail. They’d been working all day and were exhausted, but as the only woman aboard, she wouldn’t complain. At the time, they didn’t tie-in, trying to be as authentic as possible. Leaning over the yardarm, Korinn began pulling up the yards of canvas, her feet supported only by a slack horizontal rope. When her partner accidentally kicked the rope out from under her, she fell. She would have died if it hadn’t been for the chief mate, Robin Walbridge, who violently shoved her into the water right before she hit the deck. She made out with a few cracked ribs and a broken wrist.

      Robin later became known as the captain who took the replica of the HMS Bounty out to sea during Hurricane Sandy and died with the ship when she was swamped by the storm.

      Shipping out all the time made it difficult for Danielle to keep up relationships, which she valued more than anything. She was gone half the year and began to realize how much she was missing. “She was at a point in her life where she was ready to move on,” her friend says. Danielle wanted to come ashore for good; the ten-week rotation was dragging her down.

      “Yeah, she was missing things,” her friend says. “She wanted to be home. She struggled with scheduling, you know? We’d get the calendar out and say, What Christmas are you gonna be here? What Easter are you gonna be here? What summer are you gonna be here? That sort of thing, I think that part was tiring.”

      Danielle was home throughout the summer of 2015. She threw parties at night, built bonfires and make s’mores with giant marshmallows. She lazed about in hammocks with her friends and used an app to look at the stars, picking out constellations. Danielle had spent her entire life laughing off things that bothered her. That summer, she laughed a lot.

      Still, the specter of another voyage loomed. She refused to talk about life on the ship, but occasionally let her closest friends know how frustrated she was with how much El Faro was being neglected. The four men who’d been fired a few years ago, officers who’d trained and supported Danielle, had taken great pride in keeping the old vessel looking her best. Now no one seemed to care.

      But like many mariners, Danielle had developed an addiction to shipping. You’re addicted to the sea, or you’re addicted to the money, or you’re addicted to both. You leave your family for months to drive the huge ships on the open ocean. It’s intense work and the money’s good. You can’t find that kind of rush in an office cubicle. You tell them onshore, I’m quitting in a year. I’m quitting in five years. I’ll find a job on land. But you get into a rhythm, the rhythm of the sea, and you keep going.

      Danielle dreamed of coming home for good but starting a new career would cost a lot of money that she didn’t have. Everything she wanted to try required more schooling, which she couldn’t afford. The pay aboard the ships was too good to walk away from; she wasn’t in a position to start from scratch. She had to keep shipping.

      Adding to her frustration that summer was the fact that she was about to lose her home. For years, she’d been living with her two cats in her mother’s Rockland house. But now her mother, who’d moved to Wisconsin with her boyfriend, told Danielle that she was selling it. The whole situation upset Danielle. Her grandmother and great-aunt had passed away; her mother was halfway across the country pursuing a new life. Her home, her only anchor, was slipping away.

      Late in the summer, Danielle learned that she hadn’t been assigned to the new LNG ships. Instead, she was slated to ship out to Alaska with the decrepit El Faro. And Captain Davidson.

      There was something else bothering her that summer. During her previous tour of duty, in the spring of 2015, it happened again.

      Davidson, a man she never liked, came onto her. He caught up with her when she was alone, cornered her, and said, Will you be my special friend?

      Many guys had hit on her during her career. She was a tough girl, her friends say. She could handle it. But when the ship’s captain wants sleep with you, how do you deal with it? How do you delicately push him away without damaging his ego? How do you escape his advances trapped on a ship at sea? What if you pissed him off so much that he got you fired and ruined your professional reputation? It could happen.

      She knew exactly how things played out when a woman reported sexual harassment on a ship. Yeah, she could handle it. But behind her back, the guys would wonder

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