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.