The Wardens of Cape Cod

by Henry Beston

Working as fast as they could in the tumult, the coast guards set up their life-saving apparatus on an edge of the beach left bare by the ebbing tide. Then, like the opening crash of a battle, the life-saving cannon fired its first thin line across the width of sea.

The shot was a good one and passed well aboard, but the men in the rigging strangely made no attempt to get the cord. The fact was that the barefooted men on the mast were clad only in cotton trousers, shirts, and thin coats, and that the hands and feet of those who were not dead were but lifeless and unwieldy clods of ice. With the sailor’s instinct “to get out of the water,” the crew had scrambled aloft the minute their vessel struck. A second charge remained likewise unattended. Two men suddenly dropped “like ripe plums” into the confusion of the sea.

A figure moved in the rigging and a great powerful giant of a young seaman, Nils Halverson his name stands on the book, was seen to work off his coat, and wrap it round the mess boy who was dying in the cold.

The cannon now crashed a third defiance at the sea, and this third line fell nearer to the men. Frozen as they were, the giant and one or two others descended to the breaker-beaten decks, and managed to secure the line. But knots cannot be made with frozen fists big as boxing gloves, and all stood as it did before.

More than ever now all depended upon the guards. The crew of the wreck were unable to help themselves in any way.

It was now nine o’clock and the sea had dropped enough to permit an attempt at the launching of the boat. The task was one of crudest difficulty, and it was only after several hard battles and a show of finest courage and boating skill that the coast guards’ vessel was tugged to the Castagna’s pouring side. Two of the crew of thirteen had perished overside, two were dead in the rigging, their faces and bodies glassing over in strange mummy shrouds of ice, a third lay dying in the racing waters of the deck. The eight left alive, forlorn, swarthy Giovannis, Giuseppes, Angelos, and Carlos were in terrible condition. But to this day they tell of how the big man, refusing aid, walked to the near shelter on his frozen feet, his great frozen hands held out a little from his sides. The lad he had tried to help was dead.

After receiving skillful first aid from their rescuers, the crew of the Castagna were hurried to a Boston hospital, one to die there, others to suffer amputations. And from the hospital and the kindly care of the Sisters of Mercy, these tragic children of the sea disappear into the world again, Heaven alone knows where.

On the following morning those who went aboard the ship found the Captain’s cabin to be reasonably secure and dry. Had the crew taken refuge there, instead of in the rigging, they might possibly have all been saved. The fire was out in the stove, but a tiger cat was waiting for its rescuers, and a silent, wet canary stood in a tarnished cage. The bird soon died, but the cat lived out the rest of its eight lives on a Truro farm.

The captain of the vessel had been one of the two figures to drop into the sea. His body, curiously preserved in some unaccountable manner, suddenly appeared two years later, twelve miles away in the marshes of Orleans. And this is one of the mysteries of the Cape. The rescue of the men of the Castagna by the crews of Cahoons and Nauset does honor to the great traditions of the guard. It was a feat which called not only for daring and skill, but also for resourcefulness, perseverance and endurance. Toward the end of the struggle Captain Tobin of Cahoons, overcome by the long strain, toppled into the waves and was himself in gravest danger. At low-course tides, the wreck may still be seen. Being built of iron, her sides have rusted and fallen in, but bow and stern rise twisted and black above the waves. Her steep spars lie beside her where they fell. On a sunny summer day when the rollers advance up the beach in the face of a southwest wind, and the sharp, musketry-crack and deep-voiced roar of the breakers travel down the empty sands, nothing remains to tell of the Castagna and her men.