After the Storm | Summary

First published in 1932, “After the Storm” is told by a first-person narrator, an unnamed sponge fisherman who is also the principal character of the story. Set in the Florida Keys circa 1930, the story begins with the narrator engaged in a fight with another man in a local bar. Although their dispute is trivial, the combatants go at each other with unrestrained ferocity. When his attacker seizes the narrator’s throat and begins to choke him, the sponge diver manages to pull out a knife, and he slashes his assailants arm. He then leaves for his small boat. He takes to the sea after bailing out the water that has collected in the craft from a recent storm.

As the narrator sails along the seacoast, he encounters wreckage from the storm. He first spies the masts of a ship that is partially submerged, but he reckons that it is too far below the waves for him to salvage it. He then notices a flock of gulls in the distance and heads toward them. He comes upon a large steamship that has run aground, and his mind immediately turns to the money and other riches that probably remain on board. He tries to enter the vessel through a porthole through which he sees a dead woman, her hair floating on the water. But he is unable to break through with the wrench that he carries. He undertakes several additional dives using different makeshift tools, but he is not successful and reluctantly abandons his quest.

When the narrator returns to land, he is told that the man he has stabbed is not gravely wounded. He is nonetheless arrested, but his friends in the tavern tell the authorities that his victim first came at the narrator with an axe, and this lie wins his release. A week-long bout of foul weather prevents the sponge diver from returning to the steamship. When he does finally reach it again, he finds that he is too late. “Greeks” have blown the ship and its safe open with dynamite, stripping the derelict liner of its riches. The narrator reconstructs the events that must have occurred on the night that it sank, taking 450 passengers and the ship’s crew to watery graves. He learns that an enormous jewfish now occupies the water beneath its hull. The story ends as the narrator bitterly recounts that the Greeks got the riches, the jewfish got a home, and that even the birds that brought his attention to the steamship “got more out of her than I did.”