Soon the fury of the sea tore the vessel to pieces, carrying away her deckhouses and all movable things from her deck. Soon the masts fell with a crash into the sea, and sails, rigging and spars mixed in a jumble of wreckage, and then was scattered along the sands of the beach. The boat was carrying a fair catch of fish, all of which was mixed with the wreckage and scattered in the sea.
Soon the men from the village came to the beach and gathered up such material as had not already been swept far down the coast, and a few days later only a protruding bit of broken spar or a bit of rope dangling from some buried anchor marked the spot where the Elsia stranded.
This again was another fortunate escape of the crew from the deck of a wrecked vessel; only a little difference in the conditions might have sent sixteen men to untimely deaths.
A TERRIBLE DISASTER
For several years the Pacific Mail Steamship Company has been operating a fleet of several large ocean liners, each bearing the name of a President of the United States. These ships had been making around the world trips, and in 1927 one of these ships, the Presidente Wilson, was under charter to the Cosulich Line, an Italian company.
In the autumn of 1927, the Presidente Wilson was returning from an all around the world trip, with a large passenger list and tons of freight from Europe and the Far East, to Boston. She had left Seattle quite a number of days before, passed through the Panama Canal, touched at New York and on to Boston, which would end the trip.
The weather held good until she had reached the vicinity of Nantucket Shoals, where she ran into a dense fog, making it necessary to slow down and pick her way through the fog that enveloped her and covered all the coast.
She left New York on the morning of October 28th, and on the morning of the 29th, at four o’clock in the morning, she had reached a point four miles directly east of Highland Light. Out of the thick mist not a hundred yards away, directly in the ship’s path, loomed the masts and faint outlines of a fishing schooner, which later proved to be the Avalon, a vessel of about a hundred tons, with home port at Gloucester, bound on a fishing trip to the banks. She had left Boston the afternoon before and was jogging along under short sail waiting for the fog to lift. She was under such small amount of sail that she could not have moved had she made the attempt.
The oncoming great ship, towering many feet above her, had no chance to swing clear of the fishing craft and amid the clanging of bells, the blast of steam whistles, and the shouts and screams of those both on the big ship and on the fishing boat, they came together with a crash. The momentum of the huge craft carried her right on over the Avalon and sent her, broken and wrecked, to the bottom of the sea, carrying with her nearly all of her crew, who were imprisoned in her cabin. From the time of the crash until she had disappeared beneath the sea, there had been no time for the crew to escape.
The Avalon had a crew of sixteen men and only three of them escaped with their lives, these three being the deck watch at the time. The other thirteen were in their bunks and had no chance to get to the surface before death overtook them.