FATE OF THE CASCO
by
Francis Dickie
Forty miles from Nome, Alaska, breaking under the Arctic winter on the shores of bleak King Island, lies the skeleton of a wrecked top-mast schooner.
Early in June, 1919, a small crew of adventurous spirits had turned her nose out through the Behring Sea, headed for the Lena River and Anadyn—and gold. She was small and old, this yacht, but what are thirty-three years when a craft has the proper tradition for daring, hazardous adventure?
September storms swept upon the Casco, pounding her teak sides with unfamiliar Northern blasts. Fog, cold, night—and she lay shuddering on the rocks, snow-beaten, ice-broken, abandoned by her crew.
So ships pass and become smooth driftwood on scattered beaches. But sometimes the magic of long adventure will gather around an abandoned hull, and form a rich memory to tempt the eternal wanderlust of man. What is an old ship but a floating castle built upon the memories of the men who have helmed her? Sometimes she plies the same dull course throughout her existence. Sometimes she changes trade with surprising chances. So it was with the Casco—now a glittering pleasure yacht, whim of an old millionaire, now stripped of gaudy trappings and bent to the grim will of seal hunter and opium trader.
In the opening of Robert Louis Stevenson's novel, "The Wrecker," with red ensign waving, sailing into the port of Tai-o-hae in the Marquesas, the Casco takes her place in fiction. But she is far more romantic as she has sailed in fact.
"Winged by her own impetus and the dying breeze, the Casco skimmed under cliffs, opened out a cove, showed us a beach and some green trees, and flitted by again, bowing to the swell ... from close aboard arose the bleating of young lambs; a bird sang on the hillside; the scent of the land and of a hundred fruits or flowers flowed forth to meet us; and presently"—
Presently they sailed among the Isles of Varien, sunny and welcoming in the South Seas.