LOSS OF THE MONTCLAIR ON ORLEANS BEACH
The beginning of 1927 was a season which resulted in many disasters along the North Atlantic coast, and especially on the outer coast of Cape Cod. It is a matter of record that not since the terrible disaster of the loss of the steamship Portland in 1898, had so many people gone to their deaths in the cold waters of the gale-swept sea from Nantucket to Boston.
On the second day of February the three masted schooner Montclair of New Jersey, from Bangor for New York, with a cargo of lumber, after battling a fierce gale for forty-eight hours, drove ashore one-fourth of a mile from the Orleans Coast Guard Station.
She struck the bar at low water and instead of driving over she held fast and the waves poured in awful force over the doomed craft’s decks from stem to stern, tearing away her deck load of laths which were piled high above her rails and scattering them into the wild sea that ran racing towards the shore.
Soon her deck houses yielded to the terrific pounding of the storm-borne waves. The strings that held the laths in bundles were soon broken and these little strips of wood a quarter of an inch thick, an inch and a half wide and four feet long, were being smashed into kindlings, thrown about in the surf until they formed a great stack of broken stuff, and a short distance away looked like a huge hay stack.
Her crew consisted of a captain and six seamen. Into this mass of broken and jumbled sticks the vessel’s crew were hurled by the never ending rush of the driving sea.
Two of the crew were fortunate enough to get hold of a bit of floating wreckage and were swept clear of the tangled mass of laths and thrown to the shore where rescuers succeeded in pulling them from the surf. Not so with the other five members of the crew. The onrushing current swept them from the deck of the fast breaking up craft and threw them directly into the surging mass of broken and piled up laths, practically cutting off nearly every possible chance of escape. Had the lumber been of boards and timbers the chance for the sailors to reach shore would have been much better.
The Coast Guard from Nauset and Chatham reached the scene as promptly as they could, but they were a long distance from the wreck, and the nature of the cargo made it practically impossible to send a line over the vessel, and the distance from the shore where the craft lay still further operated against the rescue of the unfortunate crew.
Sometimes the Government has fits of economy, but the Coast Guard service is a poor place to begin the practice of it. Some time before the Coast Guard Station at Orleans had been abandoned, that is, the crews had been withdrawn and the station locked up.
Another case of the irony of fate that under these conditions this schooner should be thrown at the very doors of the station that had been abandoned.
Had this station been manned it is quite probable that every man of the crew of this craft would have been saved.
After this experience the Government made haste to reopen the Orleans station and a full crew went on duty December 1st, 1927. This seems to be another case of locking the stable door after the horse has been stolen.
