THE SANDS OF CAPE COD
“Beyond the broad swath of churning breakers lies the North Atlantic, most masculine of seas.”
THE FACINATING AND DESOLATE DUNES
That furnish the stinging ammunition for the artillery of the wind
A WRECK UPON THE CAPE
Ever since the early days of European exploration, the back shore of the Cape has been feared by mariners. The vast shoals to the south, the off-shore bars to the north, the blizzard nor’easters that blow ships directly on the land, all these have strewn the outer shore with wrecks. To this day the sands hide and reveal and hide them again. It is an easy enough thing to say that the day of the great wrecks is over. Yet one of the greatest disasters in modern maritime history occurred on the Cape as recently as the first year of the war, and the winter of 1922 to ’23 saw wreck follow wreck upon the shore. But coast guard crews have seldom been called to such a battle as was theirs on that bitter winter morn of February 17, 1914.
On the night of the 16th a nor’nor’west wind, the wind which brings the snow and cold, had been blowing squally gales, and a heavy fall of powdery snow was blowing about upon the moors. The sea was running high, running to the very foot of the frozen bank, and the broad beach was but a mass of breaking waves and foam. Through the wild night, fighting his way through the thickets of beach plum, the bitter wind, and the snow smother whirling in the dark, went the patrol, Joseph Francis, a surfman from Cahoons. The dawn began to pale, and presently Francis made out a large square-rigged bark stranded in the breakers some two hundred and fifty feet from shore. The vessel was thick with ice, the seas were breaking over her, flinging spray as high as the crosstrees, and this spray was freezing where it fell. In the main rigging were the indistinct figures of the crew.
The wreck was the Italian steel bark Castagna bound for Weymouth, Massachusetts, with a cargo of fertilizer from the Argentine.
An ill chance of the sea had dogged her. Twice had she picked up Boston Light, twice had nor’west gales blown her out into Massachusetts Bay. Lying off the coast bewildered in the flurrying gale, her barefooted Italian crew exhausted and ill-prepared for our northern weather, the second storm had wrecked her on the Cape. Her anchors and anchor gear were iced solidly in, her rigging was a mass of ice, and the sails she displayed were but glassy gray sheets of ice solid as so many boards.
Doomed, and so tragically helpless that she made neither sign nor sound, the great bark lay in the thunder of the breakers, now vaguely glimpsed, now lost in the snow squalls blowing from the moors.
A little after five o’clock the news of the disaster reached Cahoons, and from there the tidings were telephoned to the Nauset station eight miles to the south. The Castagna lay at the southern end of the Cahoons patrol, close to the halfway house used by Nauset and Cahoons. Realizing that the life-saving apparatus would have to be carried overland along the moors, Captain Tobin of Cahoons and Captain Walker of Nauset arranged to divide the load. The wreck lay a good four miles from either house, four miles of nor’west squalls, and deep, unbroken snow upon a wild, uneven waste.
Each station kept a horse to pull its heavier apparatus to the beach, and these poor creatures were presently harnessed to their loads and urged to their hard but necessary task. Tugging, pushing and trudging on as best they could, the crews arrived by seven at the wreck. The snow squalls were petering out, but the buffeting wind still shrilled under the ragged sky, and the ebbing sea was still a vast width of rollers, seething white with foam. Fierce currents of tide, stirred by the long-shore wind, were moving underneath the surface fury; it was a sea in which no boat could be launched, or being launched could live.
Sea after sea burst and poured from the Castagna’s deck. There were faint yells from aloft as the greater seas swung in out of the storm and came rolling down upon the ship.