The first watch down that night from eight to twelve was Osborne F.
Chase. At eight o’clock he stepped out into that raging, smothering
storm and disappeared. At twelve o’clock he hadn’t returned.
The watch from twelve to four was Seth Linwood Ellis. Captain Tuttle
called him out. He put on his oil clothes, boots and sou’wester,
strapped his time clock on his back and stepped out into the storm.
That night part of the beach was flooded, so he walked up in the center
of the beach. He went down in the darkness and the storm guided by the
tremendous roar of the surf, and in the utter darkness he missed the
little shanty. He heard the surf roaring all around him so he knew he
was down on the end of the beach. He went back a little way, found
the shanty, punched his time clock, and started back. The wind was
blowing from sixty to eighty miles an hour with a smothering, blinding
snow storm and it was so dark that it was impossible to see a thing.
After a while he ran into something, looking up he saw the glimmer of
a light, it was the old Monomoy Lighthouse. He ran into the broad-side
of the old Monomoy Lighthouse and didn’t see it. He edged out by it
and started up in the teeth of the wind, following the roar of the
surf. Unless you have been there you cannot imagine the tremendous
sickening roar of the surf combined with the shrieking of the wind in
a storm like the “Portland Blizzard.” When the roar became deafening,
Ellis would edge inland. When the roar deadened, he would edge back. So
he worked his way up the beach. Many years before surfmen complained
that in stormy thick weather they had trouble finding the station and
sometimes went by it. So they took some weir poles, dug them down in
the sand about ten or twelve feet apart extending from the station
down to the high water mark. This made a land mark, but even then men
sometimes would go between the poles and not see them. Coming up the
beach that night, Ellis ran into one of these poles, followed them
up to the station, and went in. Captain Tuttle took off the face of
his time clock and looked at it. It proved that he had been down to
Point Rip, punched his time, and returned one hour late. That was Seth
Linwood Ellis. Osborne Chase never returned until well after daylight.
He got lost--lost all sense of direction and wandered around the beach
all night with out finding the little shanty that had the key to his
time clock nailed to the wall. In the summer of 1887 Seth Linwood Ellis
sailed out of Gloucester with Captain Hanson Joyce, mackerel seining.
For the first time Captain Joyce went in a steamer instead of a sailing
vessel as was the custom in those days. He carried two seine boats
and two crews. He appointed Ellis captain of one boat, and he himself
took the other. One morning about five miles off Highland Light they
sighted a school of fish. Captain Joyce sent Ellis out after them in
his boat. He saw the fish, jockeyed into position, and gave the order
to go ahead and start throwing. In those days whenever a seineboat went
out for a school of fish it was always trailed by a dory. When they
started throwing the seine the dory would pick up the end and wait
until the boat came around, then pass the end to the boat, making a
complete circle. The captain stood in the extreme end of the boat on
a raised platform, steering with an oar. Captain Ellis was a powerful
man. Circling the school of fish that morning he gave an extra hard
pull on the oar and it broke. He fell over backward, splash, into the
sea. The men in the boat stopped rowing, intending to back and pick
him up. He came to the surface, shook the water out of his face, and
shouted “Don’t stop, go on around the fish, never mind me.” The men
obeyed, the seine boat circled the fish the dory passed the end to the
boat, then went back about half a mile and picked him up. Even today we
don’t understand how he kept afloat with a pair of rubber boots and oil
petticoat on. But that was Seth Linwood Ellis. Don’t lose sight of Seth
Linwood Ellis in the struggle that is about to follow.