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...

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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.

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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.