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The Wreck of the Hesperus

Henry Wadswoth Longfellow


It was the schooner Hesperus,
That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper had taken his little daughter,
To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.
The skipper he stood beside the helm,
His pipe was in his month,
And he watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West, now South.
Then up and spake an old Sailor,
Had sailed to the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.
"Last night, the moon had a golden ring,
And to-night no moon we see!"
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the Northeast.
The snow fell hissing in the brine,
And the billows frothed like yeast.
Down came the storm, and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.
"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,
And do not tremble so;
For I can weather the roughest gale
That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat
Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,
And bound her to the mast.
"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,
O say, what may it be?"
"'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!"--
And he steered for the open sea.
"O father! I hear the sound of guns,
O say, what may it be?"
"Some ship in distress, that cannot live
In such an angry sea!"
"O father! I see a gleaming light
O say, what may it be?"
But the father answered never a word,
A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,
With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow
On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed
That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave,
On the Lake of Galilee.
And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Tow'rds the reef of Norman's Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side
Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!
At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
In the midnight and the snow!
Christ save us all from a death like this,
On the reef of Norman's Woe!

Lighthouse Gallery I

Antikythera in the sea

The Story

More in the NY Times

Tall ships in trouble

The wreck of the Royal Charter - the ship that never reached home.



HAVING safely travelled thousands of miles by sea from Australia, the passengers and crew of the steam clipper Royal Charter must have relaxed, knowing they would shortly land in Liverpool.

Many on board were former miners who had made considerable fortunes in the Australian gold rush and the ship was also carrying a cargo of gold.

After leaving Melbourne 60 days earlier (a fast journey in those days), her 371 passengers and 112 crew were more than ready to enjoy the next chapter in their lives. But it was not to be.

Having survived the Indian Ocean, Cape Horn, the long haul up the forbidding south Atlantic and with a call at Queenstown (now Cobh) behind her, terrible disaster struck almost within sight of home.

On October 25, 1859, as Royal Charter sailed along the north west tip of Anglesey, the barometer suddenly started dropping and severe weather was looming. It was claimed later by some passengers that the master, Captain Thomas Taylor, was advised to shelter in Holyhead, but decided to make for Liverpool, as the ship had ridden well through the stormy Southern Ocean.

Capt Taylor had failed to pick up the Liverpool pilot at Port Lynas, as the gales rose to Beaufort Force 10 and the sea was rising, whipped up by the wind.

Then Royal Charter was suddenly hit by an exceptional tempest: the wind rose to full hurricane force (Beaufort scale 12) and the wind suddenly changed direction, from east to north-east, then north-north-east, with nowhere for the ship to go but on to the rocky shore.

At 11pm Capt Taylor anchored the ship, but at 1.30am on October 26 the port anchor chain snapped, followed by the starboard chain an hour later. In spite of cutting the masts down to reduce the wind-drag, Royal Charter was driven inshore with her steam engine unable to make headway against the gale.

The ship initially grounded on a sandbank, but in the early morning the rising tide drove her onto the rocks at a point just north of Moelfre on the eastern coast of Anglesey.

She was battered against the rocks by huge waves, whipped up by winds roaring over at more than 100 mph.

Incredibly, just 10 yards of boiling angry water lay between ships and shore. A Maltese seaman, Joseph Rodgers, got a line ashore for a bosun’s chair with help from Moelfre villagers. But conditions were so rough that only about 16 passengers and 29 others survived.

Others were said to have drowned, weighed down by the belts of gold they were wearing around their bodies. No women or children survived. Some 459 lives were lost, the highest death toll of any shipwreck on the Welsh coast.

Most were not drowned, but were crushed or pounded to death when the ship broke up, or when the waves swept them off rocks.

This shipwreck was the worst of some 200 ships wrecked that night in what’s known as the Royal Charter Storm.

Much gold was rumoured to have washed up on the coasts near Moelfre, making some families literally rich overnight.

The gold bullion cargo was insured for £322,000, but the total value of the gold onboard must have been much higher.

Many of the bodies recovered from the sea were buried at Llanallgo churchyard nearby, where their graves and a memorial can still be seen. Another memorial is set on the Anglesey Coastal Path, on the cliff above the rocks where the ship struck.
Almost immediately, salvage teams went to work on the wreck. The ship’s carcass lies close to the shore in less than 20ft of water.

The remains can be seen in the form of iron bulkheads, plates and ribs which are revealed and then immersed again in the shifting sands.
Gold sovereigns, pistols, spectacles and other personal items have been found by divers and more serious salvage attempts searching for treasure have taken place in the last couple of years.

A Dickens of a disaster

The Liverpool Daily Post
June 29, 2008

Lost in the North West

Inuit oral stories could solve mystery of Franklin expedition

Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008

More than 150 years after the disappearance of the Erebus and Terror -- the famously ill-fated ships of the lost Franklin Expedition -- fresh clues have emerged that could help solve Canadian history's most enduring mystery.

A Montreal writer set to publish a book on Inuit oral chronicles from the era of Arctic exploration says she's gathered a "hitherto unreported" account of a British ship wintering in 1850 in the Royal Geographical Society Islands -- a significant distance west of the search targets of several 19th- and 20th-century expeditions that have probed the southern Arctic Ocean for Canada's most sought-after shipwrecks.

Dorothy Harley Eber, author of the forthcoming Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the Explorers, says the new details about Sir John Franklin's disastrous Arctic voyage in the late 1840s emerged from interviews she conducted with several Inuit elders at Cambridge Bay, Nunavut.

The Inuit account -- passed down from 19th-century ancestors who witnessed the British expedition's failed attempt to find the Northwest Passage -- describes "an exploring vessel" that anchored off the Royal Geographical Society Islands during the winter of 1850 because "they were iced-in and had no choice."

Evidence of the expedition's presence on the islands, according to Inuit oral history captured by Eber, can still be seen during the summer months in greasy deposits along the shore where "the ground is soiled by rendered seal oil blubber" used by stranded crewmen to fuel fires for cooking and warmth.

"When I recorded it, and first heard the information, I didn't have a map with me and I wasn't actually quite sure what I was hearing," Eber told Canwest News Service on Wednesday. "But I later had the material translated two or three times and I realized it was very important."

The Royal Geographical Society Islands lie between Victoria Island and King William Island where the Victoria Strait reaches the Queen Maud Gulf north of mainland Nunavut.

The location of the iced-in ship described by the Inuit is nearly 100 kilometres to the northwest of a stretch of water between O'Reilly and Kirkwall islands -- close to King William Island and the mainland Adelaide Peninsula -- that has emerged as the prime search area for Franklin shipwreck hunters.

University of Toronto Press, which is publishing Eber's book this fall, is billing the book as a must-read for Franklin aficionados, in which "new information opens up another fascinating chapter" on the tragic Arctic voyage.

Franklin himself died in June 1847, with the two ships at his command frozen in sea ice somewhere west of King William Island. The 105 surviving crew members battled bitter cold and ice-choked seas before succumbing to hunger and disease over the following few years.

A series of searches in the 1850s gripped the British nation and its Canadian colonies, and much of the Arctic archipelago was mapped and claimed for the British Empire as a result.

Various artifacts from the Franklin Expedition and the remains of several crewmen have been discovered over years, but the ships have eluded searchers -- including those on a major Canadian government-sponsored expedition in the 1990s.

The man who headed that search -- Robert Grenier, chief of marine archeology for Parks Canada -- said he discussed the new account of the Franklin ship earlier this week with Eber, calling the Montreal author's findings "very interesting."

Copyright © 2007 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.. National Post - Canada

http://www.victorianweb.org/history/franklin/franklin.html

http://www.mysteriesofcanada.com/Nunavut/franklin_expedition.htm

Thoreau on Shipwreck

(21) The verses addressed to Columbus, dying, may, with slight alterations, be applied to the passengers of the St. John:

"Soon with them will all be over,
Soon the voyage will be begun
That shall bear them to discover,
Far away, a land unknown.

"Land that each, alone, must visit,
But no tidings bring to men;
For no sailor, once departed,
Ever hath returned again.

"No carved wood, no broken branches
Ever drift from that far wild;
He who on that ocean launches
Meets no corse of angel child.

"Undismayed, my noble sailors,
Spread, then spread your canvas out;
Spirits! on a sea of ether
Soon shall ye serenely float!

"Where the deep no plummet soundeth,
Fear no hidden breakers there,
And the fanning wing of angels
Shall your bark right onward bear.

"Quit, now, full of heart and comfort,
These rude shores, they are of earth;
Where the rosy clouds are parting,
There the blessed isles loom forth."

Cape Cod - Henry David Thoreau

Complete accounta at:
The Shipwreck (St. John)

Interesting references to Thoreau in Cape Cod at:
"Why Thoreau came to Cape Cod"

Much more on Shipwreck of the St. John

Sunk

Deep, deep down in the dark of drunken water,
in the swirling wine of a pirate’s last wish,
lies a treasure box lost for a thousand years.
Full of gold so soft,you can squeeze sunlight
from bubbles of rainbow coins
as they tumble droplets of pearls
into an ocean of diamonds
where emerald waves crash
on a world of shipwrecked secrets.

The sea in its salt sorrow
cries crocodile tears for
the foolishness of divers
that never resurface
and there is no map or compass
that can take you there,
only the wind whispering through the sails,
the mocking laughter of mermaids
murmuring in the deep, deep belly of a whale,
on the other side of Atlantis,
where all plank walkers finally wake.

by Aoife Mannix

For Applecart, a colloboration between Oily Cart and Apples & Snakes, commissioned by Theatre Is
http://www.applecart.wordpress.com/
http://www.aoifemannix.com/

Apple bounty

A big bite of history

May 10 2008 by Rhodri Clark, Western Mail

Shipwrecks around the coast of Wales have yielded all sorts of relics. But experts now believe that a glamorous ship owned by one of America’s most successful families in the early 19th century left a legacy that still survives on a windswept Cardigan Bay hillside today. Rhodri Clark reports

TWO centuries ago the people who lived along the coast north of Barmouth were used to searching the shore for booty from shipwrecks. A treacherous reef, known as St Patrick’s Causeway, stretches out to sea for about 14 miles.

Hundreds of ships were torn apart there over the centuries when the Irish Sea was a principal trade route between Britain, Ireland, France, Spain and further afield.

When an American ship called the Diamond crashed onto the rocks on January 2 1825, red apples were among the cargo washed ashore.

Enterprising locals spotted an opportunity to make this gift last longer than the short-lived gain depicted in Whisky Galore.

Local legend has it that seeds from the apples were planted and the trees nurtured to feed local communities. There may even have been orchards of these American trees in the area.

A tree which may be a descendant of the shipwrecked apples was recently tracked down – still bearing a good crop of apples each year. Experts say the tree’s fruit has no close relative in Britain but resembles an old US apple variety.

The Diamond was no ordinary ship. It was built in Manhattan for the Macy family, which subsequently achieved fame with its New York department store – said to be the biggest in the world. Other Macys had previously founded one of the world’s first oil companies, processing the carcasses brought ashore by whaling ships.

The entrepreneurial family had new ideas about trans-Atlantic passenger and cargo shipping, and the Diamond embodied new technology and practices to put the business plan into action. Instead of accepting the standard wooden hull of the age, the Macys paid to have it reinforced by the addition of metal.

Instead of taking a month or six weeks to cross the Atlantic, the Diamond could cross in just 21 days. The Macys ran their ships to schedules, breaking with the tradition of ships waiting in port until the holds and cabins were filled.

The Diamond had limited passenger accommodation, the rest of the ship being given over to precious cargo.

“The people who travelled on the Diamond were the people who today would fly first class in a jumbo jet, or on Concorde when it was operating,” says marine archaeologist Mike Bowyer, who has spent more than 30 years researching the wreck.

When the ship left New York on its last voyage on December 12 1824, the passenger list included cotton barons from Yorkshire and Lancashire returning from striking deals with American cotton growers to keep English textile mills in full flow. Others were travelling home after making a fortune in the US. In all 28 passengers were recorded as having embarked. Reports of the accident say that of the crew and passengers, nine survived and 10 drowned.

The loss of the Diamond was a personal tragedy as well as a financial setback for the Macys.

Mr Bowyer, who lives in Bangor, says the ship’s regular captain, Josiah Macy, was replaced for the voyage by his brother Henry, who drowned in the accident aged 33.

The story of the Diamond is also a story about food miles. Today sea and air transport are so safe our main concerns are over the greenhouse gases emitted in carrying fruit and other foods over hundreds of thousands of miles.

Back then the main problem was the loss of life, on countless ships.

The apples in the Diamond’s hold were a premium luxury food. Modern consumers are used to buying apples at any time of the year. In 1825 it was impossible to store fresh apples for long, and importing them was difficult because the fruits would rot.

By guaranteeing a faster crossing, the Diamond opened new trading possibilities for farmers in the US who could grow apples and other produce later than was possible in the UK.

In the event it wasn’t the English aristocracy that benefited from the fruits the Diamond carried over the Atlantic at such great cost, but people on the Meirionnydd coast.

The canniest among them planted the seeds. Local folklore tells of apples from the shipwreck being grown in orchards and sold at markets in the area. In the early Victorian era people on Wales’ western coasts bought local produce not to assuage their consciences over “food miles” but out of necessity. The bright red apples grown from the Diamond’s cargo would have made a refreshing change from the usual varieties grown locally.

Eventually the secluded way of life in Meirionnydd was overturned as railways crept deeper and deeper into Wales. The Cambrian Railway, brainchild of Welsh industrialist David Davies, laid a track along the coast, audaciously striding on a trestle bridge across the mouth of the Mawddach estuary to reach Barmouth and Harlech.

Mass tourism quickly transformed the area. The trains also heralded a trend towards greater centralisation and standardisation of production, a trend which continues today.

Apples have been subjected to that process as much as anything else. A handful of varieties has dominated supermarket shelves for the past decade or more. The fruit sections of garden centres have also focused on a few popular sellers, but with apples so plentiful and cheap in the shops many people have forgotten about growing their own. Many native Welsh apple varieties, resistant to the local climate and diseases, have probably been lost for ever.

Commercial apple growers have also been affected. Kent, perfect for apple cultivation, has lost 85% of its orchards in the past 50 years. Herefordshire has lost even more. When British apple trees groan under the weight of fruit in late summer, supermarkets stock imported apples.

One man determined to fight back is Bangor-based Ian Sturrock, who has brought several native Welsh fruit species back from the almost dead.

When the tale of the Diamond and its apple cargo reached his ears, he set off across Snowdonia on a detective’s mission. By then, however, supermarkets and food imports had taken their toll and there was no sign of unusual apples in the Barmouth area.

For three summers he searched the land and questioned people. Mike Bowyer joined the quest. A wreck which was thought to be that of the Diamond – and was even protected by Cadw – had turned out to be the remains of another ship.

The two men had almost given up hope when, one Sunday morning, they happened to look over somebody’s garden wall in Dyffryn Ardudwy.

That somebody was Guy Lloyd. “The house that I live in belonged to my grandmother and two maiden aunts previously,” he says.

“My elderly aunt, Marian Lloyd, had always talked about this tree as being descended from the Diamond. When she moved into this house in the early 1950s there must have been some story handed down then about the tree.

“It was always said that there were one or two trees in this immediate area, because the Diamond went down near here.

“It’s quite a hardy tree. It produces quite a heavy crop of fruit most years. The fruits are two or two-and-a-half inches across. They look very attractive.

“They’re quite nice eaten fresh from the tree, but I don’t care much for them a few days after they’ve been picked.”

That remark suggests that the apple would not have travelled well, especially on an ocean voyage lasting weeks. On the other hand, the climate on the windswept coastal foothills of Snowdonia is a long way from the American climate that ripened the apples placed in the Diamond’s hold.

Mr Sturrock was delighted to hear Mr Lloyd’s story, having realised that the fruit on the tree was out of character for Gwynedd. However, some form of proof was needed. He sent some of the bright red apples for analysis to the National Fruit Collection in Kent.

“None of the national experts has recognised it as being anything else,” says Mr Sturrock. “Its most likely relative is Baldwin.”

The first Baldwin tree is thought to have been identified in about 1740 in Massachusetts. It produced vivid red apples that were popular for eating and cider making for decades. Mr Sturrock believes apples of this type were exported from New York to Britain in the 19th Century.

The fact that the Dyffryn Ardudwy apples are unlike any native British species but closely related to an American one is perhaps the closest anyone will ever come to connecting the old tree with the shipwreck.

It was good enough for Ian Sturrock, who has started selling the tree’s young offspring – an apple variety newly named Diamond.

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/

The Garifuna : Rebels of the Caribbean

"... Honduras remains after Haiti the second poorest country in the hemisphere. The Central American staples of chronic insecurity, massive migration and economic precariousness bedevil the country. And in a nation saturated by Pepsi Cola culture, McDonalds, shopping malls, and all things tacky USA bent on homogenizing everything into consumer conformity, the Garifuna stand out as fantastically different.

About 100,000 Garifuna live in small fishing communities hugging the Caribbean coast, speaking their own Igñeri dialect which is a combination of Arahuaco, Swahili, and Bantu.

Theirs is a vibrant living culture born of an utterly unique history. Between 1640 and 1670, two slave ships coming from West Africa ran aground of the tiny island of St. Vincent, in the lesser Antilles. So began the story of the people who came to be known as the Garifuna - born of a shipwreck, and never enslaved. Their fate should have been to labor to death on the colonizers’ cotton and cane plantations, but instead they find themselves - a couple of hundred castaways - on a tropical island populated by a hostile indigenous population known as the Red Caribs. This is character building stuff for sure.

The Red Caribs rescued the shipwrecked but any goodwill ended there. The indigenous attempted to enslave the newcomers and the Africans, as was to become characteristic of them, resisted. The Africans retreated to the western mountains of the island, forming a Maroon community that in time, was sought out by other runaway slaves and fugitives. So a liberated territory was consecrated and a kind of pirate utopia blossomed, an anti-capitalist autonomous zone in the age of seventeenth century capitalist expansionism. Conflict with the Red Caribs was constant and occasionally brutal, but somewhere along the line love (or maybe just cupid) overcame differences and the flowering of the union became known as " karibena galibina" - child of the Caribe, indigenous galibi - a name which underwent some morphological fine tuning until eventually becoming Garifuna. (British colonialists who had trouble with the preponderance of foreign names confronting them as they plundered about the region just called them Black Caribs.)

Resistance was the leitmotif of this Maroon community. At the dawn of the 18th century, the Red Caribs sought support from the French to defeat them. But using intrepid guerrilla tactics, the Garifuna fought the French forces back. The sword failed, but the cross had more success, and missionaries were able to penetrate the communities. But as the Garifuna converted, their spiritual resistance was to retain their African gods within the catholic paradigm: this syncretistic religion remained, not imposed, but their own.

At the dearth of the 18th century, they fought the next colonizing force – the British - to stand-still. Facing annihilation from the sole superpower of its day, the British Empire, the Garifuna negotiated and underwent a forced deportation. Exodus brought them to the uninhabited island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras. Many died at sea, but against all odds, the rebellious Garifuna survived once more. "...

Article extract – view complete story at:

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1195/1/

Waves

Cuchulain stirred,

Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard

The cars of battle and his own name cried;

And fought with the invulnerable tide.

Yeats

Death of a Sailor...

---

THE DEATH OF A MYSTERIOUS MARINER

HARRY D. SLEIGHT

Buried in a shady nook in Oakland Cemetery at Sag Harbor lie the remains of Favieco Maeceia, a Portuguese sailor from the Western Islands. A quaint inscription marks the grave, as follows:

"Tho' Boreas' winds and Neptune's waves,
Have tossed me to and fro.
By God's decree, you plainly see,
I'm harbored here below."

The Portuguese sailor has been dead many years, but a story is associated with the death of the mysterious mariner.

In September 1858, seven Portuguese sailors arrived in Sag Harbor. Their appearance, taken together with their movements, their lavish display of Spanish coin, the refusal to give an account of themselves, excited suspicion, and soon the village was rife with rumors of mutiny, shipwreck, and slave traders. Various and vague were the conjectures indulged in.

The strange seamen obtained good counsel and warm friendship in the person of some of their own countrymen resident of Sag Harbor. Night came on, and in the morning it was found that with but one exception, they had been taken to the Connecticut shore and safely landed by one of their own countrymen.

On the same day the strangers came to Sag Harbor, a deputy marshal from New York City passed down to Montauk. He learned that the sailors had landed on Montauk in a boat belonging to a clipper ship, and had told a story of shipwreck.

Favieco Maeceia, the man left behind, was sick unto death and passed away the following day. He left plenty of money to pay his funeral expenses, and by many it is still believed that he left a large sum of gold to the countrymen who took him in and cared for and administered to him.

Later on, it developed that a clipper bark had been sold to New York and then to a well-known Spanish house, fitted for the slave trade, and sailed to the west coast of Africa, having on board her complement of officers and crew, and two captains - one an American, the other a Spaniard. The vessel cruised off the west coat for 40 days, taking on 1,133 Negroes, and then sailed for the island of Cuba, eventually making the port of Cardenas, where two Spaniards came aboard and purchased the remaining slaves, about 200 having died on the voyage.

The bark then stood out to sea, and the captain called the crew aft and paid them off, saying the vessel had no papers, and asked what was to be done. It was decided to go to the east end of Long Island, for "we will be safe there." It was also decided to scuttle the bark.

After making Montauk Point, holes were bored in the vessel's bottom and were then plugged up. As soon as it was dark and when five miles to sea, the plugs were drawn and the officers and crew took to the boats. The bark soon sank.

One boat made for the Connecticut shore, and was picked up by a pilot boat and taken into New London. The occupants told a sorrowful tale of shipwreck and suffering, readily securing a free passage.

The other boat landed on Montauk, as told above.

From "The Whale Fishery on Long Island," published in 1931.

Awash with mystery

By Mark Baker The Register-Guard

Published: February 17, 2008 09:56AM

NORTH BEND — Sandi Long takes a long, feet-first tumble down the jagged sandy cliff, her camera and bag and laughing voice sliding along with her as gravity pulls her to the beach below. “How do you get back up?” she hollers to her friend, Jim Martin, still standing on the cliff above.

“You gotta go that way,” Martin says, pointing north up the beach. “I’ll meet you in Coos Bay.”

No, you can’t just walk up to the mysterious shipwreck that the sands of time recently unveiled on the southern tip of Coos Bay’s North Spit.

To get there, you need to go west on Trans Pacific Parkway (the exit is just north of the Highway 101 bridge over Coos Bay). After about three miles and after the road has veered south, turn right and off the pavement onto a beach access road.

Then you need an orange-flagged, 4-wheel drive vehicle that can maneuver along the bumpy, twisting, turning, sandy road for a few miles. Then you need to park and walk a few hundred yards — before tumbling.

Or you could drive down on the beach at low tide, or ride there on a horse or an ATV or a motorcycle.

Thousands of curious visitors have come to see the wooden bow of the ship that could be 100 years old, maybe older. They have arrived with digital cameras and video recorders and binoculars.

Shipwrecks fascinate us.

Why?

“It’s a part of our past,” says Long, of Vancouver, Wash., who made the trek last week with Martin. “And it’s just important to remember the people who came before us and struggled. Our lives are so easy today.”

Unless you’re trying to find an old shipwreck.

“Oh, wow — a lot,” says Barb Dunham of the North Bend Information Center when asked how many people have called or stopped by, asking about the shipwreck and how to find it. “It’s just been shocking.”

Three tour buses from Portland carrying mostly senior citizens arrived recently, only to be told they couldn’t drive down there, Dunham says. “They were not very happy from what I understand,” she says. “They thought it was something you could just drive by and see.”

Visitors have until March 15 to view the wreck before the beach closes for the snowy plover breeding season.

Crowds are not what they were for the New Carissa — which, ironically, is scheduled to be dismantled by the state beginning in March — in 1999, but people are still coming from all over the state, California and Washington to see what Debbie Freeman of Salem says is “a boat. That’s all. It’s an old boat.”

Freeman may not be all that impressed but her boyfriend, Paul Smith, can’t stop running around the 35-foot-long exposed wooden bow that sits about 2½miles south of the New Carissa wreckage — nor stop wondering about it on this sunny, unseasonably warm Monday.

“It don’t look like no lumber carrier to me,” he says, referring to speculation by the Oregon Department of Parks & Recreation and the United States Bureau of Land Management. “Those square holes look like gun holes.”

Identity crisis

What this ship is, where it came from and how it got here are questions that researchers, historians and Coos Historical & Maritime Museum staff here are busy trying to answer.

“The process of narrowing down the candidates continues,” says Anne Donnelly, executive director of the museum that has erected a display of photographs of ships similar to this one, which was a steam schooner.

Could this be the 275-foot C.A. Smith, built by Kruse and Banks of North Bend in 1917, the ship that was carrying 1.5 million board feet of lumber when it ran aground on Coos Bay’s North Jetty on Dec. 16, 1923?

Or is it the George L. Olson, a ship built in San Francisco as the Ryder Hanisy that was stranded on the South Jetty in 1944?

The latter was a thought last week, but probably not since it’s been confirmed that the mystery ship was made of Douglas fir and most likely built north of San Francisco, Donnelly says.

Jack Long, 86, of North Bend (no relation to Sandi Long), says the ship is the same one he saw here on the beach in the 1950s. Then, he and his father, Les Long, and his uncle, George Long, rowed across the bay and hiked over the dunes and came upon the bow of the wooden ship that Jack Long swears had “George E. Long” carved into it, the same name as his uncle. What are the odds? “It stuck in my head,” he says. “If it had been Harry Long ...”

Asked about a George E. Long ship, Donnelly can only mention the George L. Olson.

The exposed bow of the ship here, revealed after some of the harshest winter winds and rains in years, appears to be the same ship that appeared in 1948 and 1960, says Steve Samuels, a cultural resource specialist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Identifying the ship is a matter of searching through the thousands of photographs of ships built in the area between 1850 and 1950, says Samuels, who is working with Donnelly and Calum Stevenson, coastal coordinator of the Oregon Department of Parks & Recreation. They are also looking at construction records of ships, with help from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Heritage Program, Samuels says.

The ship was most likely a lumber carrier, he says, because it appears that decking on the back of the bow disappears into the sand, indicating that it’s a lower deck that would have been used to slide logs off at ports.

And what happens when, or if, it is identified?

“Then it will have a name and a story to document,” says Samuels, who adds that in his 11 years with the BLM, he has not seen an old ship reveal itself like this before. But he suspects the sand will cover it up again and it will be exposed again some other time for another generation.

“It’s nice that people are interested in its history,” he says. “They should go out and respect it. But they should only leave their footprints. Regardless of which (ship) it is, it’s tied back to a lot of history in Coos Bay.”

“Lure of the unknown”

Giant nails stick out of the reddish-brown schooner’s bow. Big, rusted metal pipes sit within it. There are two old, skinny metal bed frames.

It’s early afternoon and the tide is rolling in, closer and closer. White, foamy waves crash against the ship’s remains. A mast, which looks like an old, dead tree trunk that’s been struck by lightning, sticks up in the middle.

“I’ve lived here my whole life,” says David Laird, 62, staring down at the shipwreck from the newly formed cliffs of jagged chunks of receding sand and logs. “I didn’t know it was here.

“The mystery of it all,” he says, explaining what has brought him out on this day. “The lure of the unknown. What happened?”

Don Hall has finally found his way here, after driving up and down the sandy road.

“I’ve always been interested in shipwrecks,” says Hall, of North Bend, a commercial fisherman who spends half the year in Alaska. He says he worked for a salvage company in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. “I don’t think we ever saw anything this old,” he says. “Everything we worked on was steel.”

Hall guesses the ship was built between 1860 and 1890. “I don’t know, I’m just guessing,” he says.

A group of ATVs and motorcycles zooms up, including a Coos County Sheriff’s deputy on an ATV. A Sheriff’s Department beach ranger appears in her white pickup.

Six men appear and dance upon the bow.

Two young women arrive on the edge of the cliff, cell phones in their hands. They slide down. One of them, a blonde wearing a black Billabong T-shirt, runs to beat the tide. She touches the wooden bow, then sprints back to a log near the edge of the cliff.

“You didn’t even get your picture taken!” her friend says.

“I don’t care!” the woman says. “I just wanted to touch it — that’s all!”

Wooden ships out of water

Could one of these Coos Bay-area shipwrecks be the one found recently on the North Spit?

Jan. 3, 1852: The Captain Lincoln took on water and ran ashore north of the bay entrance. It was bringing supplies to military outposts in the Oregon Territory.

Oct. 20, 1896: This 207-foot, 947-ton ship built in San Francisco in 1885 to haul coal was stranded on the Coos Bay bar after it struck a submerged portion of the jetty and sank. Thirteen of the 37 aboard died. Originally called the Emily, it wrecked in the same spot in 1891 with one fatality.

1907: The four-masted schooner Novelty, launched from San Francisco in 1886 as the world’s first four-masted bald head schooner, navigated the globe before running aground on Southern Oregon sand dunes. The crew, captain and his family all walked ashore.

March 23, 1909: The four-masted schooner Marconi, built in North Bend in 1902, sailed the world’s oceans before running aground on the South Spit as it attempted to leave for Chile.

Feb. 16, 1913: The three-masted, 431-ton wooden schooner Advent was stranded on the South Spit of the bar. A crew of eight was rescued.

Nov. 2, 1915: The schooner Santa Clara was on its way from Astoria to San Francisco when it got caught in a storm and washed onto Coos Bay’s South Spit. Fourteen people died when a lifeboat capsized while the passengers were trying to make it ashore.

Dec. 16, 1923: The 1,878-ton steamer C.A. Smith, built by North Bend’s Kruse and Banks in 1917, ran aground on the bar. Four members of the crew of 14 died.

Sept. 7, 1932: The 912-ton steamer Fort Bragg was stranded at the bar.

1940: The four-masted schooner North Bend II was the last tall ship built in Oregon about 1920. It was abandoned on Peacock Spit at the Columbia River’s entrance in 1928. Thirteen months later it floated away and sank off Guana Rock at Coos Bay.

Sources: www.shipwreckregistry.com; www.tallshipsofsanfrancisco.com

Danger

Not only can it be treacherous to view the shipwreck on Coos Bay’s North Spit because of sneaker waves, the Coos County Sheriff’s Office and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management remind visitors to admire it and respect it, but do not climb on it or take pieces from it. It’s against the law to remove, damage or deface any archaeological resource found on public land, according to the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979. You must also have an orange-flagged, 4-wheel drive vehicle to drive along the dune access road, or an off-road permit to drive on the beach.

---

Copyright © 2007 — The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA

SHIPWRECK NEWS

Whatever happened to ... the sailor who survived the Marine Electric disaster?

Bob Cusick is "still kicking." That's no small feat for any man about to turn 85. It's especially notable when you are one of only three sailors to survive what was among the nation's worst maritime disasters.

Tuesday will mark the 25th anniversary of the sinking of the coal ship Marine Electric in a blizzard off Chincoteague. Thirty-one sailors died.

Cusick was the ship's chief mate. He still has nightmares about how the rusted relic of World War II rolled before the crew could launch its lifeboats. He can still feel the water swallowing him and hear the men screaming for help in the darkness.
But the nightmares aren't as frequent now.

"It's really been a long time," he said from his home in New Hampshire. "And evidently, a lot of good came from that ship's sinking."

Most of it because of Cusick and the other two survivors' testimonies.

As a result of this accident, and the detailed records of neglect Cusick kept, the Coast Guard launched its renowned rescue swimmers program. Ships sailing in cold waters are required to provide survival suits to their crews; safety inspections are more rigorous; lifeboats must have better launching systems; and rafts must have boarding platforms to allow freezing sailors to climb inside.

The Marine Electric was what mariners call a rust bucket. Its huge cargo hatches were warped, wasted away and patched cosmetically with putty and duct tape. The deck was cracked, and the hull even had a hole punched through by a bulldozer.
Still, inspectors cleared it to sail, and it routinely hauled pulverized coal from Norfolk to a power plant near Boston.

Its last trip was into the teeth of a violent nor'easter. The aging ship was no match for the weather. For more than 24 hours, the Marine Electric was battered by swells that stretched 40 feet from trough to crest.

For part of the trip, the ship had been diverted to escort a trawler into Chincoteague.
Not long after resuming its course, the Marine Electric started taking on water.
Seas crashing over those corroded decks rushed inside the hatches, mixing with the powdered coal to create an unstable slurry.

The water couldn't be pumped out, because the ship's owners had welded covers over the drain holes.

Cusick was lucky. He had just come off watch and was wearing an insulated coat his wife had insisted he buy and a raw wool cap she had knitted for him. They would eventually make the difference between life and death.

Cusick swam for an hour in the tempest before finding a swamped lifeboat. He climbed inside and wedged himself beneath the seats, slipping under the 37-degree water, to escape the howling winds. He gasped for breaths between waves.

Cusick found strength in a song about the shipwreck of the Mary Ellen Carter, and folksinger Stan Rogers' refrain to "rise again, rise again."
Cusick would spend 2 hours and 45 minutes in the frigid water, nearly double what Navy survival charts claimed was possible.

It was after dawn when a Coast Guard helicopter from Elizabeth City, N.C., running on fumes, dropped a basket into his lifeboat and Cusick was hoisted to safety.
After testifying against his company, Cusick spent four more years at sea, then moved to New Hampshire and sold real estate. Recently he's had circulation problems, even lost a few toes.

His wife Bea is sure it's related to the time in the frigid ocean.

On Feb. 24, The Weather Channel will tell the Marine Electric's tale as part of its series on storms that changed history.

As for Cusick, the lifelong mariner said he steers clear of small motor boats and large ships, and "I wouldn't make a cruise for all the tea in China."

Tony Germanotta, (757) 222-5113, tony.germanotta@pilotonline.com

Published on HamptonRoads.com | PilotOnline.com (http://hamptonroads.com)

up from under

Wrecked schooner drifts ashore and into mystery

Wooden pegs lined The ribs on the remains of a 19th-century schooner that washed up onto Newcomb Hollow Beach on Cape Cod. (Boston Globe Photo / Vincen Dewitt )

By Andrew Ryan and Jonathan Saltzman Globe Staff / February 1, 2008

WELLFLEET - The 50 feet of hand-cut oak ribs had probably been swallowed by the sea more than a century ago, the remnants of a schooner lost with some 1,500 other ships that have sunk in the unpredictable waters off Cape Cod.

But a violent storm this week churned history up off the sandy, ocean floor, spitting the remains of the 19th-century shipwreck onto Newcomb Hollow Beach.

The timbers and planks, held together by wooden pegs, offer a glimpse of the golden age of the schooner, when hundreds of sails dotted the horizon here as ships transported lumber, granite, and coal. Poking up like the bones of a mighty whale, the wreckage has become a magnet pulling the curious onto the frigid beach, where frozen sand crunched underfoot.

"It's unbelievable," said Anneliese Barrio, 74, who brought her 4-year-old grandson, Jack, bundled in mittens and a knit wool cap. "The storm had to be wicked rough to bring this in."

The wreckage has set this sleepy beach town abuzz with speculation about the name of the vessel and the story behind its demise. Was it a majestic, three-mast schooner that sailed shortly after the Civil War? Or a worn, wooden barge, stripped of its masts, brimming with coal that sank in the late 1800s?

"We don't even know whether the crew was rescued from the ship," said Helen Purcell, the town historian who has lived in Wellfleet for nearly 50 years.

These questions will probably never be answered.

The National Park Service, which has jurisdiction over the schooner because it landed on the Cape Cod National Seashore, has examined, photographed, and mapped the wreckage.

Like the remains of most old ships that are blown ashore, the debris will now be left to the whims of the tide.

"It will probably either be buried by sand or get washed out again," said William Burke, a historian with the Cape Cod National Seashore who examined the remains. "Theoretically, it could be gone tomorrow."

The same storm Monday that pushed the schooner ashore sent a 9-foot rudder that had been embedded in the sand off Truro back to sea.

But even if the ship raises more questions than it answers, it helps foster interest in the region's maritime past.

"This is exciting for the people who live here now," Burke said. "It is kind of a chance to connect with shipping history. It's evocative."

Newcomb Hollow, empty most winter months, saw as much activity as it would on a balmy, summer day.

The lot was full, children peered at the wreck, and dogs scampered along the sand.

Les Greenberg heard about the find on his car radio and drove straight to Wellfleet.

"I'm really interested in this stuff," said Greenberg, a 57-year-old from Orleans who had his hands jammed in his jacket pockets.

He toyed with the idea of grabbing a souvenir, but thought better of it. "It looks like someone would scream," Greenberg said.

Jack Barrio, the 4-year-old who had come with his grandmother, did not have the same inhibitions. He grabbed an 18-inch piece of timber and handed it to his grandmother, who tucked it under her arm as the pair trudged back up the dune to their car.

Ranger Stephen Prokop met them in the parking lot and took back the souvenir, causing Jack to burst into tears.

"These artifacts represent history," Prokop explained later. "The wood peg and the timber here indicates that this is probably over 100 years old."

That is why Charles Frazier, a burly firefighter from Eastham, made the trip to see the wreckage. "I wanted to check it out before it was gone."

Ryan can be reached at acryan@globe.com; Saltzman at jsaltzman@globe.com.

© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

Yet another gallery of SW