A WRECK UPON THE CAPE
Ever since the early days of European exploration, the back shore of the Cape has been feared by mariners. The vast shoals to the south, the off-shore bars to the north, the blizzard nor’easters that blow ships directly on the land, all these have strewn the outer shore with wrecks. To this day the sands hide and reveal and hide them again. It is an easy enough thing to say that the day of the great wrecks is over. Yet one of the greatest disasters in modern maritime history occurred on the Cape as recently as the first year of the war, and the winter of 1922 to ’23 saw wreck follow wreck upon the shore. But coast guard crews have seldom been called to such a battle as was theirs on that bitter winter morn of February 17, 1914.
On the night of the 16th a nor’nor’west wind, the wind which brings the snow and cold, had been blowing squally gales, and a heavy fall of powdery snow was blowing about upon the moors. The sea was running high, running to the very foot of the frozen bank, and the broad beach was but a mass of breaking waves and foam. Through the wild night, fighting his way through the thickets of beach plum, the bitter wind, and the snow smother whirling in the dark, went the patrol, Joseph Francis, a surfman from Cahoons. The dawn began to pale, and presently Francis made out a large square-rigged bark stranded in the breakers some two hundred and fifty feet from shore. The vessel was thick with ice, the seas were breaking over her, flinging spray as high as the crosstrees, and this spray was freezing where it fell. In the main rigging were the indistinct figures of the crew.
The wreck was the Italian steel barkCastagnabound for Weymouth, Massachusetts, with a cargo of fertilizer from the Argentine.
An ill chance of the sea had dogged her. Twice had she picked up Boston Light, twice had nor’west gales blown her out into Massachusetts Bay. Lying off the coast bewildered in the flurrying gale, her barefooted Italian crew exhausted and ill-prepared for our northern weather, the second storm had wrecked her on the Cape. Her anchors and anchor gear were iced solidly in, her rigging was a mass of ice, and the sails she displayed were but glassy gray sheets of ice solid as so many boards.
Doomed, and so tragically helpless that she made neither sign nor sound, the great bark lay in the thunder of the breakers, now vaguely glimpsed, now lost in the snow squalls blowing from the moors.
A little after five o’clock the news of the disaster reached Cahoons, and from there the tidings were telephoned to the Nauset station eight miles to the south. TheCastagnalay at the southern end of the Cahoons patrol, close to the halfway house used by Nauset and Cahoons. Realizing that the life-saving apparatus would have to be carried overland along the moors, Captain Tobin of Cahoons and Captain Walker of Nauset arranged to divide the load. The wreck lay a good four miles from either house, four miles of nor’west squalls, and deep, unbroken snow upon a wild, uneven waste.
Each station kept a horse to pull its heavier apparatus to the beach, and these poor creatures were presently harnessed to their loads and urged to their hard but necessary task. Tugging, pushing and trudging on as best they could, the crews arrived by seven at the wreck. The snow squalls were petering out, but the buffeting wind still shrilled under the ragged sky, and the ebbing sea was still a vast width of rollers, seething white with foam. Fierce currents of tide, stirred by the long-shore wind, were moving underneath the surface fury; it was a sea in which no boat could be launched, or being launched could live.
Sea after sea burst and poured from theCastagna’sdeck. There were faint yells from aloft as the greater seas swung in out of the storm and came rolling down upon the ship.
Working as fast as they could in the tumult, the coast guards set up their life-saving apparatus on an edge of the beach left bare by the ebbing tide. Then, like the opening crash of a battle, the life-saving cannon fired its first thin line across the width of sea.
The shot was a good one and passed well aboard, but the men in the rigging strangely made no attempt to get the cord. The fact was that the barefooted men on the mast were clad only in cotton trousers, shirts, and thin coats, and that the hands and feet of those who were not dead were but lifeless and unwieldy clods of ice. With the sailor’s instinct “to get out of the water,” the crew had scrambled aloft the minute their vessel struck. A second charge remained likewise unattended. Two men suddenly dropped “like ripe plums” into the confusion of the sea.
A figure moved in the rigging and a great powerful giant of a young seaman, Nils Halverson his name stands on the book, was seen to work off his coat, and wrap it round the mess boy who was dying in the cold.
The cannon now crashed a third defiance at the sea, and this third line fell nearer to the men. Frozen as they were, the giant and one or two others descended to the breaker-beaten decks, and managed to secure the line. But knots cannot be made with frozen fists big as boxing gloves, and all stood as it did before.
More than ever now all depended upon the guards. The crew of the wreck were unable to help themselves in any way.
It was now nine o’clock and the sea had dropped enough to permit an attempt at the launching of the boat. The task was one of crudest difficulty, and it was only after several hard battles and a show of finest courage and boating skill that the coast guards’ vessel was tugged to theCastagna’spouring side. Two of the crew of thirteen had perished overside, two were dead in the rigging, their faces and bodies glassing over in strange mummy shrouds of ice, a third lay dying in the racing waters of the deck. The eight left alive, forlorn, swarthy Giovannis, Giuseppes, Angelos, and Carlos were in terrible condition. But to this day they tell of how the big man, refusing aid, walked to the near shelter on his frozen feet, his great frozen hands held out a little from his sides. The lad he had tried to help was dead.
After receiving skillful first aid from their rescuers, the crew of theCastagnawere hurried to a Boston hospital, one to die there, others to suffer amputations. And from the hospital and the kindly care of the Sisters of Mercy, these tragic children of the sea disappear into the world again, Heaven alone knows where.
On the following morning those who went aboard the ship found the Captain’s cabin to be reasonably secure and dry. Had the crew taken refuge there, instead of in the rigging, they might possibly have all been saved. The fire was out in the stove, but a tiger cat was waiting for its rescuers, and a silent, wet canary stood in a tarnished cage. The bird soon died, but the cat lived out the rest of its eight lives on a Truro farm.
The captain of the vessel had been one of the two figures to drop into the sea. His body, curiously preserved in some unaccountable manner, suddenly appeared two years later, twelve miles away in the marshes of Orleans. And this is one of the mysteries of the Cape. The rescue of the men of theCastagnaby the crews of Cahoons and Nauset does honor to the great traditions of the guard. It was a feat which called not only for daring and skill, but also for resourcefulness, perseverance and endurance. Toward the end of the struggle Captain Tobin of Cahoons, overcome by the long strain, toppled into the waves and was himself in gravest danger. At low-course tides, the wreck may still be seen. Being built of iron, her sides have rusted and fallen in, but bow and stern rise twisted and black above the waves. Her steep spars lie beside her where they fell. On a sunny summer day when the rollers advance up the beach in the face of a southwest wind, and the sharp, musketry-crack and deep-voiced roar of the breakers travel down the empty sands, nothing remains to tell of theCastagnaand her men.
THE LAST STANDTHE LAST STANDOld wrecks that finish out their lives resisting the cannonading surf
THE LAST STANDOld wrecks that finish out their lives resisting the cannonading surf
THE LAST STANDOld wrecks that finish out their lives resisting the cannonading surf
A sandspit of marshland and low dunes, some twelve miles long and scarce two thirds of a mile wide, runs south into the Atlantic from the elbow of the Cape, its seaward rim continuing the line of the great beach to the north. East of it and south, far flung into the sea, lie the great shoals of the Cape, Bearses, the Stone Horse, the Handkerchief, Great and Little Round, Shovelful, and Pollock Rip. No tide uncovers them, but on clear, sunny days, from the watch house at Monomoy Point, their place is marked by vast, vague mottles of yellow-green lying on the water with fierce blue-black rivers of tide running high between.
At the end of the dunes, on a table land of sand that might be the very end of inhabited world, stands the Coast Guard Station of Monomoy Point, watching over ship and shoal.
There are strange regions in the world where a brooding melancholy dwells, regions where much that is tragic in the lives of men seems linked with a tragic something in the world. The ancient Roman towns of the Adriatic, now far from the shrunken sea, and slowly sinking into marshes that once were ports, are haunted thus, but in our own new land, this sense of ruin in a ruined world is all unknown. Yet you will find precisely this at Monomoy. The dreadful lonely quiet of the place, the haunting memory of the great wrecks of the shoals, the thin piping of sea birds in the scummy marsh, the endless cataract chatter of the shoaling seas, all these weigh with a strange solemnity upon even an unimaginative mind.
Tales of wrecks upon the shoals have something of this uncanny character. I recall a story which my friend Mr. Tarvis of the Highland Station told me as I sat talking with him one quiet winter night. He had spent some time at Monomoy Point.
There was a schooner called theMary Rose, and she was missing. There had been a storm on the shoals about the time she was due to go through, but nobody at the station had a sight of her, though we kept a sharp lookout on what we could see of the shoals. When you can see off in stormy weather, all the shoal water to the east and south is one big boiling smother of white. When the weather cleared, I had the morning watch, and I was up in the watch house, standing at the open window, looking over the shoals through the telescope. Pretty soon I saw something sticking up out of the water that looked like a schooner’s topmast. The captain was with me so I said to him to come and take a look, and he thought we ought to go out there and see what it was. So the Captain and I took the big dory and rowed out there, and it was this missing schooner, theMary Rose. She was sitting right on the bottom on even keel, just the topmast of her showing above the waters, her hoisted sails moving a little down below there in the sea. The water was clear and you could see her deck and her dories all lashed in. They never found what had happened to her, never found even one of the bodies of the crew. Pretty soon she began to settle in the sand, her topmast broke off or went under the water, and that’s the last we saw of theMary Rose.
A land of utter loneliness, a land of lagoons opening and closing to the sea, of marshes sunken in the dunes and afloat with scum thin and black as watery tar, marshes in which the hulks of ancient wrecks are slowly rotting with the years, a No Man’s Land of the long and endless war of the ocean with the earth. Strange things lie in those shifting sands, wreckage washed up from the shoals; the carcasses of innumerable birds killed by the fuel oil and ravined by the skunks; great, queer Southern-looking shells.
In the summer time there is a tiny settlement of Chatham fishermen at the point, but when winter comes, the dozen weather-beaten huts and shacks are deserted and the men of the station are left to their own pursuits. All along the Cape they regard Monomoy Point as “the end of creation,” and surfmen, married men in particular, do not like to be sent there. But youngsters of the gunner and roustabout type seem to get accustomed to life there, and make out very well.
A RUM RUNNER ASHOREA RUM RUNNER ASHOREThe Cape takes its toll from all kinds of ships that sail the sea from the old-fashioned coal cargoes to the new style of rum cargoes
A RUM RUNNER ASHOREThe Cape takes its toll from all kinds of ships that sail the sea from the old-fashioned coal cargoes to the new style of rum cargoes
A RUM RUNNER ASHOREThe Cape takes its toll from all kinds of ships that sail the sea from the old-fashioned coal cargoes to the new style of rum cargoes