In the early morning of the 10th, the three masted schooner Charles Whittemore, with a high deck load of piling (logs), bound from Portland to New York, encountered a strong gale and rough sea when a few miles east of Highland Light and her entire deck load of these big logs was swept from her decks. It has been quite generally believed that the Tracy, steaming up the coast in the darkness and storm, ran directly into this mass of floating logs, and the fury of the sea drove one of them through the steamer’s side and sent her to the bottom in a very few minutes.
On the ship were thirty-one officers and men. No man or message ever came back to tell how, why and where it happened. No wreckage came to the surface or the shore, but this is readily explained because of the fact that this was an iron ship, with very little material that could be washed from her decks, so the ship carried everything with her when she went to the bottom of the sea.
WRECK OF THE ROGER DICKY
On the first day of January, 1927, one of those fierce easterly gales which frequently sweep the North Atlantic coast and the outside of Cape Cod from Chatham to Boston Light, caught the fishing schooner Roger Dicky in a dense fog and drove her hard and fast on the outside beach a short distance beyond the Cahoon’s Hollow Coast Guard Station, within the boundaries of Wellfleet.
ROGER DICKY
Wrecked on Cape Cod, January 1st, 1927
She was coming in from the fishing grounds bound to Boston with 20,000 pounds of cod and haddock. The Coast Guardsmen from Cahoon’s Hollow Station were promptly on hand and brought the entire ship’s crew of fifteen men safely to shore.
The Dicky was a staunch craft, only a year old, but the terrific seas soon made a complete wreck of her. She was a very modern boat and quite up to date in equipment of electric lights, hot and cold water, and the most valuable piece of her expensive furnishings was a $12,000 electric engine.
When it was seen that the vessel must speedily break up, preparations were made to strip from the hull everything of value that could be moved.