Chapter XI: Storms, Wrecks, and Wreckers

It has been said that if all the wrecks which have piled up on the back side of the Cape were placed bow to stern, they would make a continuous wall from Chatham to Provincetown. This is a picturesque way of putting what is substantially the truth, for Peaked Hill Bars and the Monomoy Shoals are to sailors of to-day what Scylla and Charybdis were to Æneas. Nauset Beach, which stretches along the whole coast line of Orleans and Eastham, holds in its fatal sands the shattered skeletons of vessels from half the seaports of the world; while farther north, the outer shores of Wellfleet and Truro have gathered in the hulls of a thousand ships, driven helplessly upon them by northeast gales. Even the comparatively sheltered waters of the Bay have had their share of shipwrecks, though there the hulls are not usually pounded to pieces as they are on the outer shore. It is not idle curiosity that makes the Cape-Codder a keen observer of the weather; it is habit inherited from ancestors who antedate lighthouses and life-saving stations, who have weathered typhoons and outguessed the fog.

Great storms become, like wars, points from which each generation dates events. The gale of August, 1635, marked an epoch in the lives of the Pilgrims, who in the intensity of their religion, were torn two ways in trying to interpret its significance. One half thanked God on their knees for not having obliterated their settlement entirely; the others anxiously scrutinized their past actions to discover wherein they had offended. It was well for Plymouth that she had no fishing fleet at sea when this storm hit the coast. If we can believe Bradford, it was of such fury as to frighten men from the sea forever--if men could stay frightened by memories. It seems to have been a vicious swing of the tail of a West India hurricane, like that which visited the coast in August, 1924. A building at the Manomet trading post lost its roof; many thousand trees were uprooted or snapped off, and a twenty-foot tide flooded acres of upland on the Cape. ‘The wrecks of it,’ says Bradford, ‘will remain a hundred years.’

The lower Cape had a close call in September, 1815. Its towns lay along the edge of a hurricane which wrought havoc on the shores of Buzzards Bay but which did no damage to speak of farther east. A few small vessels came ashore--among them a brig at Hyannis. The tide in Buzzards Bay, backed by a furious gale from the east and later from the southwest and south, all but made the Cape an island: a rise of another foot would have done the trick. As it was, salt works were carried away, vessels torn from their moorings, and trees uprooted. Salt houses on the Elizabeth Islands, lifted bodily from their posts, came to anchor in the Wareham woods. Coasting vessels were swept inland and deposited in the front yards of houses alongshore; thousands of dollars’ worth of crops were ruined; wells and springs became brackish; sand was deposited thick over hayfields.

But though the Cape towns, with the exception of Falmouth, suffered little from this gale, they made up for it ten years later in the succession of storms that raged along the coast in 1825. Between January and June, three distinct gales sent a fleet of fishing vessels and their crews to the bottom. Truro was especially hard hit. The names Snow, Atkins, and Collins, all of them familiar in the town, were conspicuous on the long list of casualties which her fishermen sustained between Provincetown and the Grand Banks.

Grim as the records of this disaster are, they become a mere preface to the October gale of 1841, which brought death to so many Cape fishermen and poverty to their families. Truro alone lost seven vessels and fifty-seven men. Ten men of Yarmouth perished, and upwards of twenty from Dennis. The storm caught most of the fleet on the Georges Banks, and, coming as it did from the northeast, made the passage home a beat to windward in the face of a sea that swept the decks from stem to stern. Of the Truro fleet only two crews survived: Captain Matthias Rich brought his schooner Water Witch safe round the Cape and anchored in Herring Cove under the lee of Race Point, having spent twelve hours lashed to the wheel. Captain Joshua Knowles lost his vessel Garnet, but saved the crew. No better picture of the storm or of the valiant fight that the young fishermen put up against it can be had than Captain Knowles’s account of his experiences.

We left Provincetown Saturday, second; at sunset were off head of
Pamet, one league East. Soon after spoke the Vesper of Dennis direct
from Georges, bound home; reported good fishing. For Georges we
shaped our course setting all sail. Wind light from the northeast
but soon began to breeze. At ten took in light sails. At twelve took
in mainsail, the wind now blowing a gale. At four Sunday morning
took in the jib. Had thirty-four fathoms of water. Judged myself on
the southwest part of Georges. At six double-reefed the foresail,
which soon after parted the leachrope and tore to the luff. We
cross-barred the sail, and put on a preventer leachrope as soon as
possible, and set it close reefed. The gale increased every moment.
At ten a heavy sea took the boat and davits. By sounding found we
were fast drifting across South Channel, and knew the shoals were
under our lea. Determined to carry sail as long as it would stand, to
clear the shoals, if possible. To the close-reefed foresail, set a
balanced-reefed mainsail and reefed jib, and, blowing as it was, she
carried it off in good shape; and had our sails stood, I have little
doubt we should have carried out clear.

The foresail again gave out, was repaired and set; as soon as up, it
blew to ribbons. Mainsail soon shared the same fate. We had only one
jib left. It was now about eight o’clock Sunday evening. We could
do no more. Sounded in fifteen fathoms of water and knew we were
rapidly drifting into shoal water. The next throw of the lead was
six fathoms. As the sea was breaking over fore and aft, advised all
to go below but brother Zack. We concluded to swing her off before
the wind, and if by any possibility we were nearing land, should
have a better chance. Put up the helm. Just as she began to fall
off, a tremendous sea or a breaker completely buried the vessel,
leaving her on her broadside, or beam ends. Brother Zack was washed
overboard but caught the mainsheet and hauled himself on board. The
foremast was broken about fifteen feet above the deck, the strain
on the spring-stay hauled the main mast out of the step, and tore
up the deck, swept away the galley, bulwarks and everything clean,
and shifted the ballast into the wing. I thought at once of a sharp
hatchet that was always kept under my berth, which was soon found. A
lanyard was fastened to the hatchet and a rope to Brother Zack, who
went to the leeward, and when she rolled out of water, he watched
his chance and cut away the rigging. I did the same forward, cut
the jibstay and other ropes, so we got clear of spars, sails and
rigging sheet anchor and chains. The men got into the hold through
the lazaret, and threw ballast to windward, so that she partially
righted. We were now a helpless wreck. I had noticed that immediately
after the great breaker the sea was more regular. With a few of the
waist-boards left, and a spare old canvas, we battened the hole
in the deck, and with the remaining anchor out for a drag, we made
a pretty good drift considering the circumstances, though mostly
under water. It was now nearly daylight, and the gale unabated. As
soon as fairly day, I saw by the color of the water that we were
off soundings, and had a fair drift. During the afternoon the wind
moderated considerably. Tuesday morning, the fifth, the wind was more
moderate. Saw a schooner under reefs standing by the wind to the
northwest; made every effort to attract their attention, but as we
lay so low on the water she did not notice us, and soon passed out of
sight.

We put a stay on the stump of the foremast, set the staysail for a
foresail, and the gaff topsail for a jib, so we could steer.

At ten A.M. the weather was fine. We opened the hatches, found some
potatoes floating in the hold--fortunately the teakettle was in the
cabin when the galley went overboard. The boys built a fire on the
ballast and boiled potatoes, the first mouthful of food since Sunday
morning the third. Just before sunset discovered a sail approaching
from the East. Our flag on a long pole served as a signal and we used
every effort to get in her track, lest we should not be discovered.
We were soon satisfied she was steering for us, and that there was
great interest in our behalf, as the yards and rigging were full of
men on the watch.

As soon as within hailing distance, the Captain inquired what
assistance he could give. I had before determined to abandon my
vessel and so replied. A quarter boat was soon alongside; the crew
and luggage were mostly taken in the first boat; during her absence
with the same hatchet that had done such good work, I let in the
blue water and stepped in the boat, leaving the Garnet, which had
been my home for several years, to find the bottom. Never was rescue
more fortunate. I found myself and crew of ten men on board the New
York and Liverpool packet ship Roscius, the first merchant ship of
her day, commanded by John Collins, a Truro boy, and formerly my
nearest neighbor, and a connection by marriage. One of the officers
was Joshua Caleb Paine, a Truro young man, and a nephew of Captain
Collins. I need not say we received every attention and were regarded
by the passengers, of whom there were four hundred in steerage
and cabin, with much interest. We were two hundred miles from the
highlands of Neversink, which we sighted the next day, landing at
New York on the seventh, receiving the most generous offers and kind
attention, and in good time all arrived safely in our homes.

So much for the survivors. The fate of the rest of the fleet will never be certainly known, with the exception of the Pomona, of Truro (Captain Solomon H. Dyer, aged twenty-three), which drifted bottom-up into Nauset Harbor with three boys drowned in her cabin. But in the opinion of experts, notably Captain Eldredge, of Chatham, who has charted the whole region, they perished in the breakers on Eldredge’s and Rogers’ Shoals, two dangerous outriders of the great Nantucket Shoals.

These are the epoch-making gales--the high spots of disaster in the story of the Cape. Others might well have been included, like the squall of December, 1853, which sent twenty-one vessels ashore between Highland Light and the Race; or the tidal wave which in 1871 rolled into Provincetown Harbor in front of a heavy gale and carried the ship Nina into the post office. The Portland storm of November, 1898, is still fresh in men’s minds; wreckage from the unfortunate steamer came ashore not far from the Clay Pounds in North Truro. But if every great storm which has raged on this coast were to be mentioned, the end would be far to seek.

The same is true, but to an even greater extent, with the wrecks, for many a good ship has left her bones on the Cape beaches when no gale shrieked a requiem through the rigging. Fog is a greater foe to seamen than wind; it blinds pigmy and giant alike, and sends them groping their way through a strange, new element, where strength avails them nothing, where the old signs fail, and where science itself still falters at the threshold. It is a bewildering task, therefore, to try to select the most significant wrecks from such a list as is revealed by even the most casual research. Storm and fog have multiplied the tragedies; and sometimes the malice of man has contributed as well.

The first wreck on the Cape was probably contemporary with the voyages of French and Basque fishermen, somewhere in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. One may well ask one’s self where the Indians got the Biscay shallop in which they sailed out to meet Gosnold a day or two before he sighted the Cape, or how the blond-haired skeleton that the Pilgrims found went to his grave beside Pamet River. The wreck of the Sparrowhawk on Nauset Beach, in 1623, has been mentioned in an earlier chapter. These ancient disasters are so remote that the details and sometimes even the names of vessels are conjectural; quite different is the story of Captain Rymer, of the George and Ann.

This vessel was not wrecked; but her voyage was a prolonged nightmare of four months and a half, hardly a day of which passed without Captain Rymer’s reading the funeral service over the shrouded figure of a passenger. She sailed from Dublin in April, 1729, her decks crowded with Irish emigrants whose hopes were high for easy riches in the New World. Almost immediately an epidemic set in, and burials at sea became daily occurrences. Bad weather made progress slow, giving the disease plenty of time to take its full toll. Before its ravages were at an end, fourteen servants, forty-two children, and about forty-five other persons had died--a total of over one hundred--and the end of the voyage was nowhere in sight. The survivors, weakened by disease, by short rations, and by fright, were in no condition to work the vessel. Westerly gales blew them off their course; week followed week, and still the westerlies prevailed. The end of their drinking-water was at hand; provisions shrank lower and lower. Mutinous mutterings were heard among what were left of the passengers. Rymer, they said, was prolonging the voyage on purpose, waiting for them all to die. Then he would seize their money and baggage and sail home before the wind.

These whispers reached the Captain’s ears, but with set teeth he kept his vessel headed westward as the weeks crawled by. Finally, one October day, with fifteen biscuit and a few pints of water between them and eternity, the ghostly crew steered the George and Ann into the waters of Nantucket Sound, and saw a sail coming up on them from astern. Frantically they flew signals of distress which were seen from the other vessel, a Boston packet commanded by Captain Lothrop and bound for Martha’s Vineyard. As soon as he came alongside, the emigrants, pushing their captain aside, crowded to the rail, clamoring to be piloted to the nearest land. They threatened to throw Rymer overboard if he tried to continue the voyage.

Lothrop sized up the situation in short order; obviously these people were half crazy from suffering; the best thing to do was to put them ashore as quickly as possible. There was Jo Stewart’s tavern at Wreck Cove, not far from the end of Monomoy Point. That would be a good place to land them. So he changed his course, told them to follow in his wake, and led the way round the long arm of Monomoy, where he gave them some fresh water and provisions, pointed out the location of Stewart’s tavern, wished them good luck, and squared away for the Vineyard.

Stewart made shift to put the forlorn company up for the night; the next day they were billeted for the winter in various houses about the village. The townspeople little realized what a service they were performing for the country-to-be. The head of the party, Charles Clinton, a native of Ireland but born of Scotch parents, proceeded the following spring to establish a colony in Ulster County, New York. Among his descendants are some distinguished names. His son, General James Clinton, had a fine record in the Revolutionary War; another son, George, became Governor of New York and was Vice-President under John Adams. James’s son, DeWitt, served as Mayor of New York, Governor of the State, and United States Senator. Truly the hospitable folk of Chatham and Harwich, who sheltered the father of such sons, builded better than they knew.

A diligent historian has said that wrecks form no part of local history; and from one point of view he is right. Yet many wrecks that came ashore on the Cape presented the townspeople first with a problem in amateur life-saving, and second, with a more intricate problem in _meum and tuum_. On the whole, they had more success in solving the former than the latter, for the temptation of a rich cargo scattered along the beach is hard for a poor man to resist. So before passing on to the Cape-Codders’ exploits as life-savers, it is necessary to glance at a few of their equally successful performances as mooncussers.

To be sure, the full significance of this picturesque term never applied to the Cape. Originally it meant the villainous practice of luring vessels to destruction by false lights in order to plunder them when the crews had perished. It went even further and included murdering survivors to give free play to the looting. A humorous Provincetown saying used to be, ‘Don’t get ashore on the back side of Truro; there’s women waiting there on the beach with a brick in a stocking.’ But nowhere on the Cape was there ever a case either of decoying a ship to its death, or of maltreating her crew. To-day mooncussing means no more than the pleasant and sometimes profitable practice of strolling along the beach looking for chance wreckage--a plank worth hauling home, an unbroken lobster pot, a vessel’s quarter-board to nail over the barn door. But somewhere between the two extremes there exists a disagreeable truth, for unquestionably stranded vessels have been robbed of their cargo and gear by Cape-Codders; and who can say that mixed emotions did not sometimes exist in the breasts of men as they stood on the beach hills of Nauset and watched a ship pounding shoreward over the bars?

Laws there were, it is true, which from their very strictness, invited violation. Early in the eighteenth century the colonial authorities decreed that a man who found a wrecked vessel, any part of one, or any of her cargo on the beach, should report it to the town clerk, whose duty it was to salvage it and hold it safe until the owners should appear. This law subjected human nature to too great a strain. The rule that findings are keepings, though recorded in no statute book, is yet a principle so deeply rooted in men’s minds, and so nearly in accord with a pleasant and informal kind of justice, that it is likely to take precedence over paper decrees. The Reverend Enoch Pratt, historian of Eastham, writing in the middle of the last century, faces the facts with commendable candor. After stating the law, he continues, ‘The law requires that this should be done in all cases, yet it cannot be denied that it was frequently evaded, and the property found appropriated to private use, which has often been the case since.’ A few of the most glaring cases of looting cargo will serve.

Early in the Revolution, the brig Wilkes was wrecked at Eastham, and her cargo was made away with by certain of the townspeople before an official could get to the beach. So much indignation, some of it envy, no doubt, was aroused by the robbery, that a committee was chosen to detect the culprits if they could, and bring them to justice. Whether or not the committee succeeded in its commendable task does not appear. It is hardly fair, of course, to take war-time conditions as a criterion for normal conduct. If Cape men had not often plundered cargoes when they had not the excuse of war and hard times, the Wilkes incident would not have been mentioned. Everything considered, however, it seems probable that her cargo would have met pretty much the same fate fifty years later.

Young Zachary Lamson, of Beverly, who was wrecked on Nauset Beach in 1802, left the Cape with mixed feelings toward the inhabitants. He was obliged to stay in Chatham for some time to make arrangements for the salvaging of his cargo. His diary contains interesting comments on his visit. After paying high tribute to the hospitality of the Chatham folk, he says:

I wish I could say the same of the Orleans people; they were detected
in taking bags of coffee, and actually took one in defiance of
the watch. Apparatus of the vessel was stolen, more or less, and
deposited in an obscure outbuilding belonging to Mr. Timothy Blank,
where it was to lie for division. This fact I detected by taking one
of his party in a snowstorm with our effects in his possession, and
as he candidly confessed the whole plan and who employed him, I had
the satisfaction of deducting about one hundred and fifty dollars
from Timothy Blank’s account, which was very cutting to him.

The most sensational instance of pillaging a wreck in defiance of law occurred in the spring of 1717, when the pirate ship Whidaw was driven ashore on the back side of Wellfleet. It is a long story, but by no means a dull one; it involves, in fact, not one wreck but two. After a lurid cruise in southern waters, the notorious pirate, Samuel Bellamy, headed his ship Whidaw north to try his luck in Nantucket Sound. He was accompanied by a much smaller craft, a snow, which he had recently captured off the Virginia Coast. Between sunrise and sunset on April 26, Bellamy took two vessels near Nantucket Shoals. One of them was the Mary Anne, an Irish pink bound for New York with a cargo of Madeira; the other a Virginia sloop whose name is not recorded. Seven pirates from the Whidaw were put on board the Mary Anne; others took over the Virginia sloop, and the whole fleet of four vessels headed north into the night.

A gale came up from the northeast, and the pirates--none of them very sober--found themselves in trouble, driven off their course to the westward. The Mary Anne in particular made bad weather of it, no doubt because her crew had a larger supply of Madeira than the others, and toward midnight she got among breakers off Orleans and went aground. Not knowing what better to do, the pirates stayed on board. In the morning the Whidaw was nowhere in sight, but the snow and the Virginia sloop were riding it out at anchor in deep water. Those two vessels soon slipped their cables and made an offing--vanishing forever from the sight of the Mary Anne and from this narrative.

Before long a boat with two men, John Cole and William Smith, of Orleans, rowed off from the mainland and took the crew ashore. Not until they arrived at Cole’s house did the rescuers know that they were entertaining pirates, but here the fact was announced in no uncertain language by one Mackonachy, cook of the Mary Anne, who demanded their instant arrest. Seven to three was too long odds for Cole and Smith; they did not hanker for a knife between the ribs. So by the time the startling news reached Joseph Doane, Esq., of Eastham, who as justice of the peace was the nearest official, the seven pirates had made off over the road, headed for Rhode Island. Doane and a posse of volunteers overtook them before they had gone far and sent them to the Barnstable jail for safe-keeping. The pink went to pieces where she lay--but not, it is to be hoped, until her casks of Madeira had found their way into Eastham and Orleans cellars.

Meantime, the Whidaw, flagship of the pirate fleet, was having troubles of her own--divine retribution if ever there was a case of it. She had thrashed her way as far north as the ocean side of Wellfleet, but there Bellamy, realizing that he could keep off shore no longer, let go his anchors and tried to ride it out. The seas ran so high, however, that the Whidaw threatened to go under. As a last resort he set a little sail, cut the cables, and tried to claw off into deep water. He might have saved himself the trouble. Before morning his ship had capsized and was fast going to pieces in the breakers about two miles south of Cahoon’s Hollow. Bellamy and one hundred and forty-four of his men were drowned. Only two survivors ever reached shore alive. They were Thomas Davis, a Welshman, who had been impressed from a captured ship, and John Julian, a Cape Cod Indian.

Davis found his way to the house of Samuel Harding in Wellfleet early in the morning of April 27, and told him of the wreck. Harding scented rich pickings; he hitched up his horse and, accompanied by Davis and the Indian, salvaged several wagonloads of the most valuable plunder before any one else knew that the Whidaw was ashore. But before long the beach was black with carts, half the able-bodied men of the village being on hand to haul what they could from the surf. The great prize would have been the chest of gold coins which was supposed to have been on board when the ship struck; but, like most pirate gold, it has never been found.

News of the wreck reached Justice Doane while he was still busy with the crew of the Mary Anne, but as soon as he had started them on their way to the Barnstable jail, he hurried to Cahoon’s Hollow, only to find that the bones of the Whidaw had been picked clean. He arrested Davis and John Julian, who joined the seven men of the Anne at Barnstable, whence all were marched under an armed escort to Boston and tried for piracy--all but the Indian, that is, who vanished soon after reaching the city. Davis was acquitted; the others were hanged.

As soon as word came to the ears of Governor Shute that a pirate ship was ashore at Wellfleet, he did two things, both of them proper and both futile. First he issued a proclamation to all His Majesty’s subjects whom it might concern, to seize all ‘money, bullion, treasure, goods and merchandises,’ from the wreck, that they might swell the royal exchequer. Second, he ordered Captain Cyprian Southack to sail to the Cape, collect the loot, and return with it to Boston. No man ever tried harder to achieve the impossible than Southack did. He anchored in Provincetown Harbor five days after the wreck, searched the town in vain for a horse, dispatched a detail of two men to Truro with orders to hire a pair there and proceed overland to the scene of the wreck, where they were to post themselves as a guard over the valuables on board her! Meanwhile, he himself set out for the spot in a whaleboat (with which the town was better supplied than it was with horses), skirted the Bay shore as far as Boat Meadow Creek in Orleans, and made his way across the Cape to the outer beach via this waterway, Jeremiah’s Gutter, Town Cove, and Nauset Harbor, a feat which could have been accomplished even at that early date only on the very top of the spring tides.

All that was left of the least value on the Whidaw had been taken home by the citizens. The men whom Southack had sent to watch over the treasure had found nothing but fragments of the hull to guard. The cold rains of May, for which the Cape is famous, did nothing to improve the Captain’s temper. It was a dour mariner who began knocking at the doors of the Wellfleet inhabitants, most of whom had a barn full of plunder from the wreck, and demanding that they hand it over. He was greeted variously. Some, with expressions of blank astonishment, asked him to what wreck he referred--they had heard of no wreck. Others laughed and bade him try to get it. Samuel Harding, at whose door the angry minion of His Majesty knocked loudest--for it was he who with Davis had skimmed the cream of the cargo--assured Southack that he was holding the goods for Davis until after the trial. It would be a breach of trust to give them up, even to so well authenticated an official as the Captain. In short, Southack returned to Boston with nothing but some second-hand rigging for his pains, convinced that all Cape-Codders were villains.

From the official point of view he was right, for the law expects men to do what it demands of them. But from the point of view of the observer of human nature, who realizes that temptations are sometimes too strong for mere man to resist, these same Cape-Codders appear as average samples of our race. Many an honest man has robbed the Crown who would not take so much as a stick of firewood from a neighbor. One may sympathize with Southack, without being prepared to denounce the men of Wellfleet. Even so there is danger that the Cape beachcomber is beginning to look like a more desperate fellow than he really was. It is time to reverse the canvas and contemplate a few of his virtues. He often had to open his doors to shipwrecked men. In December, 1820, Freeman Doane, of Eastham, boarded and lodged the only three survivors of the ship Rolla for ten days and refused to take a cent. The wreck of this ship, which was a total loss, kept local treasure-seekers tramping the beach for weeks when it became known that a chest containing thirteen thousand dollars in cash had gone down when she went to pieces. Shipowners, it seems, knew rather more about human frailty than legislators did, for the owners of a Virginia coaster, which was wrecked on Nauset Beach in the winter of 1799, wisely offered one fourth of the cargo of tobacco to the citizens if they would salvage it. Even allowing for an occasional illegal pipeful, this arrangement must have proved more profitable to the merchant, and was surely a lighter burden for Eastham consciences, than a less intelligent attitude on the owners’ part would have been.

Again Easthamers showed restraint when the brig Java, on her way from the East Indies to Boston, was wrecked outside Nauset Harbor in the winter of 1831. Not content with bringing the crew safely ashore in dories, the citizens salvaged her cargo of coffee and nutmegs and were well paid for their exertions by the owners. The Java’s hull soon went to pieces, furnishing, like the hulls of so many other vessels, legal spoil in firewood and building material for any one who would take the trouble to harness his oxen and drive to the beach for it.

Underwriters and owners usually found it more economical to employ Cape men as wreckers than to send crews of their own to the scene. In every town below Yarmouth experts were to be found whose principal occupation was salvaging cargoes, transshipping them to their own schooners, and sailing them to their destination. Sometimes, if there was a chance of floating a wreck whose hull was not badly damaged, the same men would patch her up, work her off the bar, and sail her to port, jury-rigged under her own canvas. The great difficulty in this business was the weather. As long as the sea remained calm, all was well, but a single blow often was enough either to smash the vessel to pieces or to drive her so hard aground that she could never be floated. A job of this sort, therefore, was gambling with the elements for high stakes, but oftener than not it succeeded.

In 1829, Messrs. Doane and Knowles, two well-known Eastham wreckers, took a contract to float the brig Creole, which had stranded near the entrance to Nauset Harbor, and sail her to Boston. The cargo of cotton was first lightered ashore, carted across the Cape, and transshipped to Boston. Then Doane and Knowles set to work on the hull, got her off by means of anchors and cables, and sailed her round the Cape to Boston, where they collected $1150. On another occasion the same two men landed a mixed cargo from the brig Massachusetts, hauled it across to their schooner on the Bay shore, and delivered it undamaged to the consignees in Boston. Provincetown wreckers were employed to do the same with the cargo of the cotton ship Jenny Lind, which was wrecked in 1857. ‘Our village,’ writes a reporter for the Provincetown Banner, ‘has presented quite a cottonish aspect during the present week, the cargo of the Jenny Lind, which came ashore on the back side of the town, being conveyed across to our port to be reshipped to Boston.’ Between times the wreckers kept busy dragging for lost anchors and cables, a steady industry until well into the eighties. Coasting schooners that lay at anchor waiting for a good chance to sail round the Cape were often caught by a sudden blow and forced to slip their cables and make an offing in a hurry. By dragging for this lost ground-tackle in heavy sloops, the wreckers made enough to keep them going between storms.

The only flaw in the character of wreckers was that they sometimes forgot their humanitarianism in their zeal for a profitable job. In this respect, indeed, they furnish the last echo of the triumphant yells which in earlier and robuster years had accompanied the plunderers of wrecks in their pell-mell rush to the beach. Emerson writes under the date of September 5, 1854, ‘Went to Yarmouth Sunday 5th, to Orleans, Monday, 6th; to Nauset Light on the back side of Cape Cod. Collins, the keeper, told us he found obstinate resistance on Cape Cod to the project of building a lighthouse on this coast, as it would injure the wrecking business. He had to go to Boston, and obtain the strong recommendation of the Port Society.’ In fairness to the Cape it should be said that in 1854 three quarters of her best citizens were at sea as shipmasters, and could therefore have had no share in the business. It is certain, too, that those who were at home between voyages would, as sailors, be the last men in the world to object to lighthouses. For the miserable remainder no defense is offered.

The statement was made early in this chapter that Cape-Codders were valiant amateur life-savers. A glance at some of their exploits in this highly special form of Christianity will help to obliterate the unpleasant recollection of the anti-lighthouse faction. They had plenty of chances to practice it, too, for only after wrecks had been coming ashore for years, did the Government see fit to establish a Life-Saving Service. In the mean time the citizens had to make shift to get as many sailors off wrecks as they could with a boat and a pair of oars.

Early in April, 1849, the British ship Josephus, bound for Boston, went aground at Truro in an easterly blow about a mile north of Highland Light. She was a wooden vessel and immediately began to break up. Most of the townspeople were on the beach, but they could only watch helplessly while spar followed spar into the surf and was whirled ashore. Two fishermen, Daniel Cassidy and Jonathan Collins, who had just arrived on the scene, caught sight of a dory which lay high up under the bank. Without a moment’s hesitation they dragged it to the water’s edge, where, heedless of their friends’ protests, they performed the apparently impossible feat of launching it through the surf, and were off, rowing into the breakers toward the Josephus. For a few minutes all went well. Then a wave of such size tore in upon them that before the little boat could rise on its crest, they were buried under tons of water. The last that was ever seen of them was two heads--black dots against the foam--that appeared for an instant and vanished under the next wave. Cassidy, who had been married only a few weeks, left a widow who had already lost a father and a brother in the great gale of 1841. These were not the first men of Truro to perish thus. Fourteen years earlier Elisha Paine lost his life in the same way in an attempt to row off to the Russian brig Emeline Charlotte before she went to pieces.

The day after Christmas, 1873, brought with it a gale that at times approached hurricane violence and sent two vessels to their graves on Cape beaches. One, the American ship Peruvian from Calcutta to Boston, was doomed the moment she struck, for the Peaked Hill Bars off Provincetown held her a mile from shore where there was never a chance for her crew to be taken off, even if any one had happened to be on the beach in such a storm and had been able to see her through the snow. Bit by bit she went to pieces through the night; all hands perished, and only three bodies were ever washed ashore.

The other vessel fared better, at least as far as loss of life was concerned. She was the iron bark Francis flying the German flag, and had left Calcutta within a few days of the Peruvian. She came ashore about three miles south of Peaked Hill, where there was water enough to let her pound over the outer bar with hull intact; she fetched up not more than a couple of hundred yards from the beach at North Truro. The rescue of her crew by volunteers from the village was undoubtedly the most laborious ever undertaken on the Cape. There was no boat on the beach, none in fact nearer than the Bay shore. Nothing daunted, the citizens dragged a whaleboat from the Bay to a pond; skidded it across the pond on the ice; hitched a pair of horses to it, and began the real journey across the Cape to the point on the outer beach where the crew of the Francis were wondering how long her hull would hold together.

Finally the rescuers topped the last ridge and rushed the boat down the beach. She was safely launched through the surf, but it took more than one trip to bring the officers and crew of the Francis ashore. No one was lost except the Captain, who had been sick for some time and who died in the Highland House, North Truro, four days after being taken from his vessel. The hull of the Francis, after remaining buried for half a century, was uncovered by a freak of wind and wave during the winter of 1927.

Again, in October, 1808, six Truro men whose names are unrecorded rowed off in a storm to the schooner Active, Portland for Boston, which had capsized several miles offshore the previous night. She had not struck, but was drifting helpless on her beam ends in deep water. The great distance the rescuers had to cover made their exploit a particularly hazardous one. They took off Captain Danforth and three passengers, whom they landed safely on the beach after a terrific row through a rising gale. They had contemplated making another trip, but it was too late. Darkness set in as they brought their first boatload ashore, and there was no chance of locating the drifting wreck until the next morning. When daylight came, no trace of the Active remained, but two months later, long after they had been given up for lost, it was learned that her crew had been picked up half frozen by the ship Alexandria, which had subsequently been dismasted and had put into Antigua under jury rig, thus causing the long delay.

The next adventure occurred farther up the Cape. After drifting dismasted for three days, the sloop Fox, which had sailed from Boston, November 29, 1820, with twenty-eight passengers, was sighted by some Chatham men. They put off to her in a fleet of small boats and brought every one of the passengers and crew ashore on Nauset Beach, half dead from thirst and exposure.

Almost sixty years later, the schooner Sarah Fort was wrecked in April, 1879, near Peaked Hill Bars. Government life-savers smashed their boat while trying to launch it through the surf. So Captain Isaac F. Mayo, of Provincetown, rowed off in a whaleboat with a rough-and-ready crew of local volunteers and brought a number of the schooner’s men ashore. And so it goes. Sometimes these amateur life-savers succeeded; sometimes they failed; but if there was the shadow of a chance for success, they tried.

Valiant and expert as the rescuers were, they realized more poignantly than any one else the need of an organized lifesaving service with suitable equipment on the spot. But ‘the march of the human mind is slow’--and it is particularly slow in the case of legislative bodies when they are asked to appropriate money for humanitarian purposes. Congress knew little of the surf on Peaked Hill Bars or of the shoals that stretch seaward from Monomoy. With comfortable philosophy, Senators concluded that a shipwreck was a shipwreck and that sailors must take their chance. Besides, were they not voting money all the time for lighthouses and coast surveys? [See notes to Chapter XI.]

But Massachusetts men knew something about shipwrecks and were ready to spend money to reduce the number of fatalities. As early as 1786, they organized the Massachusetts Humane Society--said to be the first of its kind in the world. Its goal was to supply boats and equipment to be kept ready at all times at dangerous points alongshore. They could not at first afford to place lifeboats wherever they were needed, but they did the next best thing. Relying for the moment on the willingness of volunteers to continue rowing off to wrecks, they began by building huts on remote beaches to shelter survivors who might get ashore unaided. This was a much-needed measure, for a shipwrecked man’s troubles had only begun when he dragged himself above the reach of the surf. In March, 1872, for example, John Silva, sole survivor of the wrecked schooner Clara Bell, was washed ashore on a plank shortly after midnight within two miles of Highland Light. A snowstorm hid the flash of the great lantern, and the wretched sailor wandered about until daylight, when he was found in a road, still on his feet, but unable to take another step or to utter an intelligible word. He finally recovered with some minor amputations.

Again, Peter Woodbury and John Low, of Beverly, after having dropped to dry land at Orleans from the bowsprit of their wrecked schooner, celebrated the early hours of New Year’s Day, 1802, by wandering on Nauset Beach until they fell exhausted in the snow. They were picked up later in the day by citizens of Orleans and Chatham, whose wives thawed them back to life with hot blankets. Zachary Lamson, acting captain, and other members of the crew, after a futile attempt to find a way off the beach, went back to the vessel drenched as they were and turned in all standing. They were saved from freezing to death by the same men who found Woodbury and Low. This was the same wreck which resulted in Lamson’s somewhat caustic remarks about Timothy Blank, of Orleans.

A hut with some dry straw would have been paradise to any of these frozen mariners, and if such huts were strategically located, there was a chance that shipwrecked men might stumble upon them. So, at any rate, argued the fathers of the Massachusetts Humane Society, and forthwith they set about raising the money to build them--no difficult task in a seagoing community like the Bay State. Before long, a scattering chain of huts appeared, oases in the bleak desert of the Cape sand hills. The first of them was put up in 1794, back of Provincetown, near the head of Stout’s Creek, but, owing to faulty construction, it was soon demolished by wind and blowing sand. By 1802, six properly built shelters had appeared between Race Point and Monomoy. To aid survivors in finding them, James Freeman in 1802 wrote a careful description of the whole outer beach of the Cape, with instructions how to locate each of the six shelters. His pamphlet was distributed in shipping circles and may have helped a little. As early as 1704, for example, the three survivors of the burned schooner Farmer were saved from perishing, after being half drowned in the Orleans breakers, by finding one of two huts which the Society had put up on Nauset Beach. Captain Schott and his two men spent a tolerably comfortable night in this shelter, buried in straw and listening to the fourteen-foot surf which pounded the beach outside.

But, as may be seen from the experiences of Silva and Lamson, the remedy was anything but sure. The trustees of the Society, therefore, kept developing the equipment, until by 1845 the huts were supplied with boats, and with mortars for shooting lines across the decks of stranded vessels. At last the Federal Government began to take notice. They had already begun, in fact, by paying part of the Humane Society’s expenses, as did the State Government as well. But when finally Congress took full charge, the result was appalling. The years between 1850 and 1870 were marked by waste and inefficiency, while as many wrecked men were drowned as ever. Not till popular indignation had been raised to the boiling point by repeated disasters along the coast with all hands lost, was the Government finally frightened into establishing an effective and disciplined service.

The Cape, for some reason best known to the politicians, was left till the last; but the year 1872 saw nine stations built and manned between Provincetown and Chatham. Four more have been added since. To-day they are models of comfort and efficiency, with sleeping-quarters for the crew, which in most cases consist of six or seven men and a captain, spare cots for rescued men, and the best and most complete equipment in boats and gear that can be obtained. Usually there are two surfboats. The crew live in the station and are on duty the year round. Telephone lines connect station and station as well as with the towns. Every foot of beach from Wood End to Monomoy is patrolled each night and, if the weather is foggy, by day as well. Throughout the week, drills of various sorts are held to keep the crews tuned up to concert pitch, and no more skillful or valiant boatmen can be found than those employed in this service. Until very recently nine out of ten were natives of the Cape, but within the last few years a Portuguese or two have been admitted to many of the crews. A few samples of their skill and courage will suffice.

The first rescue that suggests itself was in connection with the grounding of the old stone sloop Trumbull, that was sighted in distress by a patrolman from the Peaked Hill Bars Station on the last day of November, 1880. She was aground on the bar, with white water breaking all around her. Captain David Atkins, keeper of the station, took five of his crew with him in the boat, got safely through the first row of breakers, and arrived in due time close aboard the sloop. The sea was so rough in the shoal water that it was out of the question to bring his boat alongside; so he directed the crew of the Trumbull to jump overboard one at a time, that he might pick them up. The crew, three in number, obeyed orders and were promptly pulled into the lifeboat. The captain and mate, however, whether from lack of courage or from a proper desire to stay with the ship, refused to jump. It was not a time for argument. Captain Atkins swung his boat’s bow toward shore, and all hands were landed safely on the beach.

His duty was done, but Atkins was not satisfied. He looked off again to the spot where the Trumbull, her boom slatting and her hull pounding, threatened to go to pieces at any moment. Again he ordered his crew to launch the boat through the surf, and again they rowed off to try to induce the captain and mate to come ashore. This time a wave carried him too close to the rocking hull; the slatting sheet of the sloop was caught under the surfboat’s bow, a fierce gust carried the boom across to the other side, the sheet came taut with a jerk, and the lifeboat was capsized. Captain Atkins and two of the surfmen perished almost immediately. The three remaining men of his crew clung for a time to the bottom of their boat; then, kicking themselves out of what clothes they could, they struck out for shore. All three arrived and were pulled out of the breakers by John Cole, a surfman who had been detailed to stand by on the beach and help the boat in landing. The Trumbull floated clear of the bars on the next high tide, the wind moderated, and she continued her voyage to New York, manned by the captain and the mate. The quality of Captain Atkins and his men as exemplified on this occasion needs no comment.

If life-savers could count on intelligent coöperation from the crews of stranded vessels, a large part of the danger of their calling would be eliminated. So expert are they in handling their surfboats in all weathers, and so perfect is their discipline, that hardly a man of them need be lost even in the worst storms, if those whom they are trying to rescue keep their heads and obey orders. But too often they do neither. The Monomoy disaster of 1902 is a terrible instance of this sort. Like so many other tragedies, it involved no more impressive a vessel than the stump-masted coal barge, Wadena, which struck on Shovelful Shoal, south of Monomoy Station, on March 11 in a heavy northeaster. Captain Eldredge and his men of the Monomoy Station brought the crew ashore and supposed that the incident was closed. The barge lay intact during the next few days, giving Boston wreckers a fine chance to salvage the coal.

At the same time that the Wadena struck, another barge, the Fitzpatrick, stranded not far from her, and two Chatham wreckers, Captain Elmer Mayo and Captain Mallows, were engaged by the owners to float her. They planned to begin work on the morning of the 17th, and accordingly spent the night before on board, after making the final arrangements with her captain. Toward evening it breezed up from the southeast, but Eldredge and his men at the station felt no anxiety, because they supposed that a tug which the wreckers were using had brought all hands ashore from the Wadena. What was their surprise, the next morning, to see a distress signal flying from the barge’s rigging. Their surprise was mingled with concern, for the wind had increased during the night until it blew a gale which turned the water around the Wadena into a chaos of breakers.

Immediately Captain Eldredge, who had walked down to the end of Monomoy Point to look the situation over, telephoned back to the station for the lifeboat. When she arrived, he jumped aboard, and the crew, shipping a little water on the way, pulled off through the breakers to comparative shelter under the high leeward side of the Wadena and made fast. They found that five men had been left on board, all of whom had lost their nerve and were clamoring to be taken ashore. Worse still, they were in no sense of the word sailors, as appeared when their captain let go his hold of the rope by which he was lowering himself into the lifeboat and fell crashing aboard to the accompaniment of a smashed thwart.

Eldredge, ordering the five men to lie down in the bottom of the boat, braced himself for the return trip, and his crew shot the boat out from under the lee as he leaned against his long steering oar to head the craft into the seas. It was a beautiful piece of boatmanship; some water came aboard, but not enough to be dangerous. As soon as the trembling cargo in the bottom of the boat saw the top of the wave slop in over the side, however, they gave themselves up for lost, jumped to their feet, and seized the man at the oars around the neck--doubtless for the same reason that a drowning man winds himself around his rescuer.

In a second the boat was bottom up, with all hands in the water. Even now the Monomoy crew were calm. Twice they righted her, only to have waves capsize her before they could pull themselves on board. They had no strength for a third attempt, but clung to the bottom, determined to hang on till the last gasp. One by one, benumbed and battered, they let go and vanished, until the only man of that crew left was Seth Ellis, number one surfman of the station. Finding himself alone, he managed to wrap one arm around the centerboard which had floated up and protruded like a shark’s fin from the bottom of the boat.

Up to this point the whole disaster had been shrouded in fog. Mayo and Mallows on board the Fitzpatrick had not even seen the crew put off to the other barge. But at this moment a hole was blown in the mist and revealed to the Chatham men on the Fitzpatrick the white bottom of a lifeboat with a single black figure sprawled across it. Deaf to the protests of Mallows and the Captain of the barge, Mayo in an instant had stripped to his underclothes, got a twelve-and-a-half foot dory over the side, seized a pair of clumsy oars which he cut down to somewhere near the right size, and was pulling toward Ellis and the lifeboat.

For any man who had not spent his life alongshore, as Mayo had, the attempt would have been suicide. But Mayo had been cradled in dories, spent his youth as fisherman, anchor-dragger and wrecker, and had substituted from time to time at various life-saving stations on the Cape. Now, at the age of forty, he knew all that a man can know about dories and the Monomoy Shoals. He knew that the boat which carried him was a poor specimen of her class; but even an indifferent dory is a remarkable sea-boat when handled by an expert, and that is how this one was handled. Yard by yard he pulled her to the side of the lifeboat, where the most ticklish part of the exploit awaited him. If Ellis had been another Wadena wrecker, both men would have perished. But numb and exhausted as he was, Ellis made not a single false move while Mayo helped him into the bottom of the dory. Then he headed for shore, came through the surf with the help of the shore detail of one, whom Captain Eldredge had left there, and assisted Ellis to the station. Six weeks later, Ellis, who was soon as well as ever, became keeper of it. Mayo was given one medal by the Humane Society and another by the United States Government.

The disasters which have been mentioned are not those that involved the greatest loss of money; if such had been the intention, ships and barks would have taken the places of brigs and schooners. The famous triple wreck of the Crowninshield East-Indiamen, Volusia, Ulysses, and Brutus, which were lost at Provincetown in 1802, would have headed the list; the ship Confidence, Captain Isaiah Knowles, which in 1806 floated into the Bay on her beam ends without a living man on board, would have been a close second. The ships Franklin and London, both lost in 1849, one at Wellfleet, the other on Nauset Beach, would have been included. So would the ship Columbus, a total loss at Barnstable in 1851, and the Orissa, another full-rigged ship, which added her bones to the Nauset graveyard in ’57. All these and many more were wrecks of the first magnitude. A list prepared in 1864 shows that from the year 1843 to 1859 about five hundred wrecks occurred on the Cape. In 1903, the United States Engineer’s Office at Newport, Rhode Island, made a map showing the locations of five hundred and forty more between 1880 and 1903. But the disasters which have been recounted above are those which in one way or another revealed the mettle of Cape-Codders. And taken by and large these men have not done badly by the shattered ships and broken men that the northeasters of three hundred years have hurled upon their beaches. If there was looting sometimes, so was there heroism; if there was greed, there was charity as well; and it should be borne in mind that the community where all men are righteous must be sought for on some planet other than our own.

To-day, though storms still pound ships to pieces on the Cape as easily as ever, the Canal and the Life-Saving Service have made it possible for most honest citizens to remain potential heroes only. The wrecker, done out of his business by metropolitan firms, has thrown out a sheet anchor in the shape of a cranberry bog or a filling station; the mooncusser hugs his hearth or smuggles whiskey for a thirsty land.