For miles along the shore front at Provincetown the beach was littered with wharf logs and debris by the ton. Cottages were undermined, boats were wrecked and driven ashore, buildings damaged, cellars flooded, and the whole harbor front presented a scene of desolation. The loss to property ran into thousands and thousands of dollars.
In the Congress of the December Session of 1927, a bill was introduced to obtain money to reimburse the fishermen for the loss of their boats in the mad voyage of the Morrill.
From 1845 to about 1870 was the period of the highest efficiency in this type of sailing craft and the full rigged ship sailed upon every sea and navigated every ocean of the civilized world, and with their great white sails spread in the sunlight, were pictures of delight upon every sea.
Shortly after the Civil War steam propelled vessels began to assume a place in the passenger and freight carrying business of the sea somewhat to the exclusion of the sailing ship. Slowly but surely they were forced back and driven from the sea, growing less and less in numbers until this year of 1928 it is doubtful if there is one vessel of this type on the Atlantic coast of this country today, and very few on any ocean of the world. Steam and electric power have driven them into the discard.
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.