Chapter VI
LANTERNS ON THE BEACH
I
It is now the middle of March, cold winds stream between earth and the serene assurance of the sun, winter retreats, and for a little season the whole vast world here seems as empty as a shell. Winter is no mere negation, no mere absence of summer; it is another and a positive presence, and between its ebbing and the slow, cautious inflow of our northern spring there is a phase of earth emptiness, half real, perhaps, and half subjective. A day of rain, another bright week, and all earth will be filled with the tremor and the thrust of the year’s new energies.
There has just been a great wreck, the fifth this winter and the worst. On Monday morning last, shortly after five o’clock, the big three-masted schooner Montclair stranded at Orleans and went to pieces in an hour, drowning five of her crew.
It had blown hard all Sunday night, building up enormous seas. Monday’s dawn, however, was not stormy, only wintry and grey. The Montclair, on her way from Halifax to New York, had had a hard passage, and sunrise found her off Orleans with her rigging iced up and her crew dog-weary. Helpless and unmanageable, she swung inshore and presently struck far out and began to break up. Lifted, rocked, and pounded by the morning’s mountainous seas, her masts were seen to quiver at each crash, and presently her foremast and her mainmast worked free, and, scissoring grotesquely back and forth across each other, split the forward two thirds of the vessel lengthwise—“levered the ship open,” as Russell Taylor of Nauset said. The vessel burst, the two forward masses of the ship drifted inshore and apart, a cargo of new laths poured into the seas from the broken belly of the hold. Seven men clung to the rocking, drifting mass that was once the stern.
It was a singular fragment, for the vessel had broken as neatly crosswise as it had lengthwise, and the seas were washing in below deck as into an open barrel. Dragging over the shoal ground, the mass rocked on its keel, now rolling the men sickeningly high, now tumbling them down into the trampling rush of the seas. The fall of the two forward masts had snapped off the mizzen some twenty-five feet above the deck, and from the stump cracked-out slivers swung free with the rolling. Bruised, wet through, and chilled to the bone, the unfortunate men dared not lash themselves down, for they had to be free to climb the tilted deck when the ship careened.
Five clung to the skylight of the after deckhouse, two to the stern-rail balustrade. Laths filled the sea, poured over the men, and formed a jagged and fantastic wall along the beach.
One great sea drowned all the five. Men on the beach saw it coming and shouted, the men on the deckhouse shouted and were heard, and then the wave broke, hiding the tragic fragment in a sluice of foam and wreckage. When this had poured away, the men on the afterhouse were gone. A head was visible for a minute, and then another drifting southward, and then there was nothing but sea.
Two men still clung to the balustrade, one a seventeen-year-old boy, the other a stocky, husky-built sailor. The wave tore the boy from the balustrade, but the stocky man reached out, caught him, and held on. The tide rising, the stern began to approach the beach. A detail of men hurriedly sent over from Nauset Station now appeared on the beach and managed to reach and rescue the survivors. The Montclair had chanced to strand near a station classed as “inactive”—coast guard stations are discontinued if there is not enough work to justify their maintenance—and the two or three men who garrisoned the station could do little but summon instant aid. Men came from Nauset, circling the Eastham lagoon and Orleans cove in local automobiles, but the whole primitive tragedy was over in a moment of time.
As the vessel was breaking up, men came to the beach and helped themselves to the laths and what wreckage they fancied. Later on, there was a kind of an auction of the salvaged material. The other day I saw half-a-dozen bundles of the Montclair’s laths piled up near a barn.
A week after the wreck, a man walking the Orleans shore came to a lonely place, and there he saw ahead of him a hand thrust up out of the great sands. Beneath he found the buried body of one of the Montclair’s crew.
I can see the broken mast of the schooner from the deck of the Fo’castle. Sunday last, I walked over to the ship. The space under the after deckhouse from which the men were swept—officers’ quarters, I imagine—is an indescribable flung mass of laths, torn wood, wrecked panelling, sopped blankets, and sailor’s clothing. I remember the poor, stringy, cheap ties. In the midst of the débris a stain of soppy pink paper caught my eye: it was a booklet, “If You Were Born in February.” I have often seen the set of twelve on newsstands. The scarlet cover of this copy had seeped into the musty pages. “Those who are born in this month,” I read, “have a particular affection for home”; and again, “They will go through fire and water for their loved ones.”
Who brought this thing aboard? one wonders. Whose curious hands first opened it in the lamplight of this tragic and disordered space? The seventeen-year-old boy is dead of the shock and exposure; the stocky, husky-built man, the only survivor, is going on with the sea. “He says it’s all he knows,” said a coast guardsman.
The wreck lies on the edge of the surf and trembles when the incoming seas strike its counter and burst there with a great upflinging of heavy spray.
II
To understand this great outer beach, to appreciate its atmosphere, its “feel,” one must have a sense of it as the scene of wreck and elemental drama. Tales and legends of the great disasters fill no inconsiderable niche in the Cape mind. Older folk will tell you of the Jason, of how she struck near Pamet in a gale of winter rain, and of how the breakers flung the solitary survivor on the midnight beach; others will tell of the tragic Castagna and the frozen men who were taken off while the snow flurries obscured the February sun. Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and at a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner. When the coast guards returned to the Castagna on the quiet morning after the wreck, they found a grey cat calmly waiting for them in the dead captain’s cabin, and a chilled canary hunched up upon his perch. The bird died of the bitter cold while being taken ashore in a lifeboat, “just fell off,” but the cat left a dynasty to carry on his name.
Cape Codders have often been humorously reproached for their attitude toward wrecks. On this coast, as on every other in the old isolated days, a wreck was treasure trove, a free gift of the sea; even to-day, the usable parts of a wreck are liable to melt away in a curious manner. There is no real looting; in fact, public opinion on the Cape is decidedly against such a practice, for it offends the local sense of decency. The gathering of the Montclair’s laths during the wreck really upset many people. They did not like it here. When men are lost on the beach, the whole Cape takes it very much to heart, talks about it, mulls over it; when men are saved, there is no place where they are treated with greater hospitality and kindness. Cape folks have never been wreckers in the European sense of that dark word. Their first thought has always been of the shipwrecked men.
Forty years ago, a winter nor’easter flung the schooner J. H. Eells on the outer bar of Eastham. Water-logged, leaking, and weighted down with a cargo of railroad iron, the ship remained on the outer bar, snow flurries hiding her now and then through the furious winter day. So swift and powerful were the alongshore currents that a surfboat could not approach the ship, and so far offshore had she stranded that the life-saving gun would not carry. All Eastham was on the beach, the women as well as the boys and men, and all day long villagers and surfmen fought to reach the vessel. They were powerless, however, and when darkness and continuing snow closed the winter day, they had to watch the Eells fading away in the squalls, her dying men still clinging to the shrouds.
To give these men heart, to let them know themselves remembered, the villagers that night built great fires of driftwood on the beach. Men and women shook the thin snow and sand from ancient wreckage and tossed it on a wind-crazed heap of flame. All night long they fed these pyres. With the slow return of day, it was seen that two of the men had already died and fallen overboard. At ten o’clock that morning, the storm having somewhat abated, the survivors were pluckily taken off by a lone tug which approached the wreck from seaward. Every once in a while, the rusty, shell-fouled iron uncovers, and above it, the yellow-green waters of the outer bar turn blue-black in a strike of summer sun.
Eighteenth Century pirates, stately British merchantmen of the mid-Victorian years, whaling brigs, Salem East India traders, Gloucester fishermen, and a whole host of forgotten Nineteenth Century schooners—all these have strewn this beach with broken spars and dead. Why this history of wreck and storm? Because the outer Cape stands a full thirty miles out in the North Atlantic, and because its shelterless eastern beaches flank the New Englander’s ocean lanes for fifty miles. When a real nor’easter blows, howling landward through the winter night over a thousand miles of grey, tormented seas, all shipping off the Cape must pass the Cape or strand. In the darkness and scream of the storm, in the beat of the endless, icy, crystalline snow, rigging freezes, sails freeze and tear—of a sudden the long booming undertone of the surf sounds under the lee bow—a moment’s drift, the feel of surf twisting the keel of the vessel, then a jarring, thundering crash and the upward drive of the bar.
Stranded vessels soon begin to break up. Wrecks drag and pound on the shoals, the waves thunder in-board, decks splinter and crack like wooden glass, timbers part, and iron rods bend over like candles in a heat.
Ships may strand here in dull weather and fog. The coast guards then work at full speed to get them off before a surf rises; a coast guard cutter comes to aid.
A few mornings ago, when I walked the beach to Nauset Station, I followed close along the dune wall to see the wreckage uncovered since the storm. North of the Fo’castle, along a broken mile, the new seaward cliff of the dunes stands at least twenty feet west of the former rim, and all the old wreckage once buried up in the region washed away is now lying on the beach or tumbling out of the wall. Being young, the twelve-foot cliff is still sheer, and the wreckage lies solidly packed in its side like fruits in a sliced pudding. In one place, some ten feet of a schooner’s mast is jutting from the wall like a cannon from a fortress; in another, the sand is crumbling away from the fragments of a ship’s boat, in another appears the speckled and musty yellow corner of a door. Root tendrils of beach grass, whitish and fine-spun as open nerves, have grown in the crumbled and sand-eroded crevices.
Some of this wreckage is centuries old. High course tides carry débris up the beach, sand and the dunes move down to claim it; presently beach grass is growing tall in sand wedged between a ship’s splintered ribs and its buried keel. A few laths from the Montclair are whitening on the beach.
Two miles down the beach, its tiny flag streaming seaward in the endless wind, stands Nauset Station, chimneys, weathered roof, and cupola watchtower just visible above the dunes.
III
From Monomoy Point to Race Point in Provincetown—full fifty miles—twelve coast guard stations watch the beach and the shipping night and day. There are no breaks save natural ones in this keep of the frontier.
Between the stations, at some midway and convenient point, stand huts called halfway houses, and stations, huts, and lighthouses are linked together by a special telephone system owned and maintained by the coast guard services.
Every night in the year, when darkness has fallen on the Cape and the sombre thunder of ocean is heard in the pitch pines and the moors, lights are to be seen moving along these fifty miles of sand, some going north, some south, twinkles and points of light solitary and mysterious. These lights gleam from the lanterns and electric torches of the coast guardsmen of the Cape walking the night patrols. When the nights are full of wind and rain, loneliness and the thunder of the sea, these lights along the surf have a quality of romance and beauty that is Elizabethan, that is beyond all stain of present time.
Sometimes a red flare burns on the edge of ocean, a red fireworks flare which means wreck or danger of wreck. “You are standing in too near to the outer bar,” says the red light to the freighter lost in a night’s downpour of March rain. “Keep off! Keep off! Keep off!” The signal burns and sputters, the smoke is blown away almost ere it is born; the glassy bellies of the advancing breakers turn to volutes of rosy black, the seething foam to a strange vermilion-pink. In the night and rain beyond the hole of light an answering bellow sounds, ship lights dim as the vessel changes her course, the red flare dies to a sizzling, empty cartridge, the great dark of the beach returns to the solitary dunes. The next day it is all entered quietly in the station log: “Two thirty-six A.M. saw freighter standing in toward outer bar, burnt Coston signals, freighter whistled and changed her course.”
Every night they go; every night of the year the eastern beaches see the comings and goings of the wardens of Cape Cod. Winter and summer they pass and repass, now through the midnight sleet and fury of a great northeaster, now through August quiet and the reddish-golden radiance of an old moon rising after midnight from the sea, now through a world of rain shaken with heavy thunder and stabbed through and through with lightning. And always, always alone. Whenever I rise at earliest dawn, I find the beach traced and retraced with footprints that vanish in the distances, each step a chain forged anew each night in the courageous service of mankind.
Night patrols go between the stations and their halfway houses. Under certain circumstances and at special times of the year, the last patrol in the morning may end at a key post placed on some commanding height above the beach. While on patrol, the men carry a stock of red flare cartridges—the Coston lights—a handle to burn them in, and a watchman’s clock which they must wind with a special key kept at the halfway house. In summer, the beaches are covered twice every night, in winter three times, the first patrol leaving the station soon after dark, the second at midnight, the third an hour or so before the dawn. The average patrol covers something like seven miles. Only one man from each station is on the beach at any given time, so north and south patrols alternate through the night.
Day patrols are maintained only during stormy or foggy weather. The men then have to walk the beach night and day with not much chance for proper rest, mile after mile of a furious winter day on the heels of a long and almost sleepless night. The usual day watch is kept from the towers of the stations.
A surfman who has discovered a wreck or found some sort of trouble on the beach first burns the Coston light I have already mentioned. This warns his station that there is something the matter, and at the same time tells men aboard a wreck that they have been seen and that help is coming. If the wreck lies near the station, the guard returns with his news; if it lies near the halfway house, he telephones. At the station, the man on station watch gives the alarm, everybody tumbles up, and in the quickest possible time the crew and their apparatus are on the beach hurrying through the darkness to the wreck. Each station has now a small tractor to draw its apparatus down the beach.
The crew of a stranded ship may be taken off either in the lifeboat or the breeches buoy. Everything depends on the conditions of the hour.
The life-saving cannon and its auxiliary apparatus, its powder, lines, hawsers, and pulleys, are kept in a stout two-wheeled wagon called “the beach cart.” The “shot,” or projectile, fired from this gun resembles a heavy brass window weight with one end pulled out into a stout two-foot rod ending in a loop.
When a wreck lies offshore in the surf, the end of a very light line called the “shot line” is attached to the eyelet in the brass projectile, and the gun aimed at the wreck with particular care. One must place the shot where the men in the rigging can reach it, and yet avoid striking them. If all goes well, the shot whizzes into the very teeth of the gale and falls aboard, leaving the shot line entangled. Should the wrecked men succeed in reaching and hauling in this first cord, a heavier line is sent on, and when the mariners haul in this second line, “the whip,” they haul out to their vessel the lifebuoy and its hawser. Pulleys and cables are so rigged as to permit the buoy to be hauled in and out to the wreck by the coast guard crew.
After everybody has been taken off, an ingenious contrivance is hauled out to the wreck which cuts the hawser free. The crew then gather up the apparatus, station a guard, and return.
The crew return, the little group of men in black oilers and the men they have saved trudge off, tunnelling into the wind, the surfboat on its wagon-cradle leading the way, the hum-rhythm of the tractor dissolving in the gale. Ridges and piles of broken, twisted wreckage rim the breakers’ edges, new wreckage is on its way ashore, strewings of old weathered planking, a hatchway, sops of sailors’ clothing. A maze of footprints traces the desolate beach; the air is full of wind-flung froth and breaker spray; the gale screams unceasing. Just offshore, in the mile of surf, the wreck lies flat—utterly forlorn, and helpless as a toy ship neglected by a giant’s child. The guard left behind walks to and fro, rubs his mittened hands, and watches the breakers cover the wreck under mountains of surf, overflow, and sluice off in spouting masses and cascades ... breaking up.... Fishing schooner, rigging frozen up, one of the men with both his hands frozen ... yes, got ’em all.
IV
I call at Nauset Station several times a week, usually late in the afternoon. Packages and mail are delivered near by, and every once in a while I call there for a message sent on to me from Eastham.
The station stands on the mainland of the Cape just where the dunes begin; it is a white wooden building built snug and low like a Cape Cod cottage; indeed, it rather resembles a Cape cottage in its design. On the ground floor is the boat room, a kitchen-dining room, a living room, and the captain’s quarters; on the floor above are two dormitory spaces. From the west dormitory, a ship’s ladder leads through a trapdoor to the tower.
My neighbours of Nauset live there much as men might on a small vessel. They have drills and duties, their definite enlistments—the first enlistment is for three years—their pay days, their service discipline, their uniforms, and days of leave. Breakfast at seven, drills in the morning—surfboat drill to-day, resuscitation drill or blinker and flag drill to-morrow—dinner at eleven, tower watch in turn through all the day, sleep and recreation in the late afternoon, supper at four-thirty, then sundown, night, and the long miles of loneliness and ocean. In winter the guards wear a uniform of dark navy blue and a blue flannel shirt; in summer they shift into sailor whites, broad collar, white hat, and all. Officially, the men are known as “surfmen” and are ranked by number according to their standing and length of service.
A fine group, these wardens of the Cape. Into the worst storm they go—without a question, with never a hesitation—a storm in which life would seem impossible. The door clangs behind them, the sleet screams at the windows, the very earth of the old Cape shakes to the thunder of the seas, but they are already on the moors, fighting on into the gale; fighting on, crawling on, for seven dreadful miles. Yet the men make nothing of it and scarcely ever talk about it—they simply take their black oilskins and rubber boots from a locker, get into them by lantern light, and go.
I owe the Nauset crew a very genuine debt. Without their friendly interest and aid, without their hospitality and continuing good-will, my experiment might well have been both over-solitary and difficult. Those long winter nights in the lamplit domesticity of my house, the rising wail of the wind on the dunes, the flash of the surfman’s light in the whirls of snow, the moment’s reunion with mankind, the pause on the beach, the moment’s talk by the fire—all that is written deep. The winter long, in foul weather, I kept a night lamp burning in a window and a pot of coffee a-simmer on the hearth. Sometimes I heard steps on the little deck of the Fo’castle, sometimes no one came, and the light guttered out unvisited in the dawn.
The majority of my neighbours are of Cape Cod stock. Born of Cape blood and reared in the Cape atmosphere, even men who have never been to sea have an instinctive turn for the sea and the ways of ships. But these wardens of the Cape are not sailors ashore; they are “surfmen.” The name is a wise one—men of the great beach, inheritors of a long, local tradition concerning surf and all its ways. These men have heard the roar of the great beach sounding about their cradles. As I have already written, the sight of the surf in a great gale on the Cape is a spectacle of mingled exaltation, magnificence, and terror, while to venture it in a boat would strike any landsman as a lunatic performance. On such occasions, the sound, traditional surf knowledge of Cape men comes into play. Captains of coast guard crews here choose their launching ground, choose their moment, choose their wave. All together now, go!—and out she runs, the captain standing astern, facing the breakers and steering, the men pulling for their lives.
V
Five o’clock in the afternoon, and I have arrived at Nauset Station after a walk up the beach in a cold head-wind. I slip my pack from my back and stand my beach staff in a corner of the little entry way outside the kitchen door. The great storm tore down so much of the bank that the water in the kitchen well now has an odd taste to it, and the men have had to bring drinking water from the village; a ship’s cask and a spring-water bottle stand on the entry floor. In the pink-buff walls are various locker doors.
The four-thirty supper is drawing to a close, but my neighbours are still at table, for I can hear voices and discussion at the board. I know each familiar tone. Having an ancient prejudice against disturbing friends at meals, I wait a little while ... the minutes pass ... I knock at the kitchen door.
Come in! I find my friends still at their long table at the kitchen’s farther end. Supper is just about over. Somebody went fishing yesterday, and on the table a great tureen, once full of good fish chowder, stands at dead low tide.... Sit down and have a cup of coffee with us.... Thanks, I’d love to.... Follows a shoving about of chairs to make room, and presently I am seated at the board, talking beach gossip, eating coast guard doughnuts, and sipping brown-black coffee from a giant white coffee cup of the armour-plate variety. The good hot “mug-up” of coffee, thus hospitably poured, is pleasant after my long, cold walk. My table mates are all young men, some of them scarce more than strapping boys on the threshold of the twenties. Here are the names of my hosts: Captain George B. Nickerson, Commanding Officer; Alvin Newcomb, Surfman No. 1; Russell Taylor, No. 2; Zenas Adams, No. 3; William Eldredge, No. 4; Andrew Wetherbee, No. 5; Albert Robbins, No. 6; Everett Gross, No. 7; Malcolm Robbins, No. 8; Effin Chalke, No. 9. Other old friends have finished their enlistments or been transferred—Wilbur Chase, John Blood, Kenneth Young, and Yngve Rongner, who gave me my swordfish sword.
The captains of the various stations are well-known men and rank high in the community. When I first came to Eastham, Nauset was under the command of my kind friend Captain Abbott H. Walker, an expert among surfmen and boatmen, and one of the best liked and most respected men on all Cape Cod. Two years ago, after having been in command of Nauset for twenty-six stirring years, he retired to his pleasant house on Orleans Bay. The station was fortunate in having as his successor a distinguished younger officer, Captain George B. Nickerson of Chatham. Nauset is a busy station, and Captain Nickerson has already added new laurels to its splendid history.
The table talk is good, the speech racy and vigorous. Sipping coffee, I hear of a battle at sea fought that very morning between some large unknown fish and unseen enemies—“right off the station”—the fish leaping clear, a great wound or spot visible in its side.... Here, have another cup....
“No, going out in a gale isn’t as bad as facing ‘the sand.’ Rather face a nor’easter any time.”
Every once in a while, usually in autumn, a dry gale will descend upon the beach and stir up a sandstorm worthy of the Sahara. I chanced to see such a storm three years ago. The simoon began, I remember, with a sunset of fiery rose deepening to smoky carmine, the sky being empty save for a few thin, sailing wisps. With the smouldering out of this strange sky and the arrival of starlight, a north wind which had blown vigorously all day was taken over by a devil. It shifted its quarter, began to blow directly down the beach, and increased enormously in force. Within half an hour, the whole world of beach and dune was one screaming, smoky, inhuman arabia of flying sand. Sucking up the sand from strewn miles of driftage, tearing at the roots of everything movable, the wind torrent rushed along the beach as down a channel. Presently pebbles, sticks, barrel staves, sides of old fruit crates, hoops, tufts of whipped-out beach grass, clots of breaker spume, and a world of nameless dark lumps joined the general rush through the demoniac and smothering gloom. I myself sailed before the storm, my head turtled down into the very shoulders of a canvas coat, my eyes blinking and painful from the stabs of sand, my nostrils hot and dry with the breathing of it, my mouth much occupied in spitting out grits. And I wondered who was on north patrol that night—walking into it, his head turned sideways and down, and a board held up before his face.
Once upon a time, so runs a service story, a surfman was walking the beach on one of these nights of sand when he heard behind him a strange and uncanny moan. Startled, he turned round, squinted for a second into the gale, and saw coming toward him a great, dark, bounding thing which moaned as it ran. The surfman ran. The thing followed, gaining every instant and sounding its ghostly cry. Out of breath at last, the fugitive fell flat, caught hold of the sand, and gasped out this valedictory, “If ye want me, come and git me.” A moment later, an enormous empty cask rolled over the prostrate figure and disappeared down the beach toward Monomoy. The bung halfway up its side was open, and every time the hole had rolled up into the wind, the whistling moan had terrified the night.
Who goes first south to-night? Malcolm Robbins, he goes first south, and Long, he goes at two-thirty.
Time to tidy up. Each man carries his plate and cutlery to the sink, the cook of the day puts on coal, there is talk, the vigorous clank of the kitchen pump, the sound of a dish pan filling, a smell of pipe tobacco. The surfman who has been on watch in the station tower during the meal comes in and eats alone at the cleared-off and deserted board. Clatter of dish and spoon ... voices. Baseball prospects? Radio news? Station happenings? Somebody opens a window on the last of the chill spring afternoon, and suddenly, in an unexpected instant of quiet, I hear the thundering overspill and ebbing roar of a single giant sea.