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.
[Illustration: _The Wreck of the_ Montclair.
_Early Afternoon_]
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.