Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (31 page)

On the morning of the sixth day, now Friday, they awoke to find themselves drifting within sight of the Cape Henry lighthouse at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay outside Norfolk. But they still remained sixteen miles away, and the brig was weakened and listless in the absence of wind. A tug captain, upon hearing of their misfortune, announced that they could remain at the mercy of the wind, unless they paid his five-hundred-dollar fee for a tow into Norfolk. Captain Burt explained that in the storm and the confusion of loading the lifeboats, everyone had left what money they had on the sinking steamer. Most had lost everything they owned, and Captain Burt was down to the last day he could provide food and water for them. But the tug captain demanded his fee before he would tie on. Eventually, the passengers scraped together three hundred dollars, which the captain accepted.

Nearly a week had passed since the lights of the
Central America
had suddenly disappeared in the distant dark and the bos’n had returned with the tidings that she had gone down and taken all hands with her. The passengers rescued by the
Marine
had seen no one else since the sinking, and they knew nothing of the fate of the men they had left behind.

As the
Marine
rounded Cape Henry and entered Chesapeake Bay under tow, a harbor pilot boarded to guide them safely across the bay and around to Hampton Roads to the docks outside Norfolk. He brought with him the first news they had heard: Forty-nine survivors from the
Central America
had arrived in Norfolk aboard a bark that very morning. That meant that for every ten men who had remained with the ship, only one had survived, and the harbor pilot knew none of the names.

“I felt very sad and downcast and scarcely spoke,” wrote Addie Easton, “for I knew my hopes were soon to be realized or I must yield to despair.”

C
APTAIN
M
C
G
OWAN HAD
the firemen and coal passers stoke the fires of the
Empire City
and ordered her into the bay. He knew the fate of the
Central America
, but no one knew what had happened to the brig
Marine
. Within an hour he encountered the
Ellen
and the other forty-five men who had survived the sinking. After transferring most of them to his ship to continue their voyage to New York, he steamed across the Chesapeake.

About noon, as he approached the mouth at Cape Henry, the men spied the
Marine
in tow behind the steam tug and recognized her stormtorn profile. Many of the women on the
Marine
also recognized the
Empire City
, and as the two ships came closer and closer, the women realized that the men lining the rail were the survivors of those left behind on the
Central America
. The purser for the
Empire City
looked down on the
Marine
’s low decks and saw them “swarming with wretched-looking objects, many of them women and children, wringing their hands, and weeping and laughing, by turns, hysterically.”

A ship reporter watched how frantically the women looked up and searched the faces of the men who now lined the rail of the
Empire City
. “The eager scanning of each face in agonizing fear and expectation, the joy or grief manifested as recognition or disappointment awaited the gazer, was touching in the extreme, straining the heart-strings.” Two dozen women had left their husbands behind, but only two recognized a face among the bearded men. Mary Segur found her husband, Benjamin, and another woman saw her seventeen-year-old son, Henry O’Connor.

McGowan boarded the
Marine
, where he was “caressed, embraced, and indeed half strangled by the poor women, who threw themselves upon him as he reached the deck.” His first inquiry was for Mrs. Easton.

“Her husband is awaiting her arrival in Norfolk!” he sang out.

“I scarcely knew what I did for a few moments,” Addie later wrote. “A number of ladies threw their arms around me and kissed me while the captain and other gentlemen, and even the rough sailors, shook me heartily by the hand, and congratulated me for the safety of my dear husband.

“As the captain came aboard he took me by the hand and we both felt too deeply to speak for some minutes. Then he said: ‘Let us sit down here, for I must tell you all about it. He is safe and as hale and hearty as ever, only very anxious about you.’”

McGowan transferred to the
Empire City
most of the passengers rescued by the
Marine
, and after raising eight hundred dollars to present to Captain Burt and his crew, they continued the last leg of their journey to New York. The remaining passengers, including Addie Easton, remained on board the
Marine
and spent the afternoon crossing the Chesapeake behind the pilot boat. They reached the quarantine ground at Hampton Roads just after dark, and crewmen in small boats then rowed them several miles from the docks to the city. From there, “the forlorn little procession,” as Addie described it, walked up to Norfolk’s principal establishment, the National Hotel. Addie still wore the nightdress and wrapper she had worn as Ansel and Robert Brown had helped lower her to the lifeboat for the trip to the
Marine
almost a week before. News of the disaster by now had reached the city, and by the light of the gas lamps, the townsfolk recognized the shipwreck survivors trudging through the streets. “A perfect crowd,” wrote Addie, “followed us to the hotel.”

When she reached the hotel, Addie looked quickly from face to face, expecting to see Ansel, but he was not among those there to greet the survivors. He had discovered that the
Marine
was at quarantine, and in his impatience to find Addie, he immediately had left the hotel with Captain Johnsen, and in a small boat the two men had rowed out to the brig, unwittingly gliding by Addie in the dark. Another hour passed before Ansel returned to the hotel, and there he found his bride of four weeks in the immense parlor, she and the other women surrounded by the proprietor and maids ministering to their needs and by citizens aghast at the stories they had to tell. They embraced and did not speak,
and whatever thoughts ran through their minds during those moments they either could not remember or chose not to reveal.

“Our meeting, I will pass over,” Addie wrote. “We wept together as well as rejoiced and for several nights after we could neither of us sleep, so vivid were the scenes before us that we had passed through. My watch, my beautiful ring, wedding presents and many other things I valued from their associations were all lost. Though I shall never behold them again I still have the blessed privilege of preserving them in memory and I have my darling husband, the most precious jewel of all.”

O
N
F
RIDAY MORNING
via telegraph, news of the disaster had hit the streets of New York. The
New York Times
announced in headlines as big as it had ever printed:

CENTRAL AMERICA FOUNDERED
FIVE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE LIVES LOST
ONLY SIXTY SAVED

When the
Empire City
arrived in New York on Sunday morning, nearly one hundred survivors disembarked. For two days, the citizens of New York had read about the shipwreck in articles telegraphed up from Savannah, Charleston, and Norfolk. Hundreds of people had waited all night Friday and Saturday at the telegraph office for more news of the disaster. Speaking in the parlor of a hotel, survivor Jane Harris reminded reporters of what had happened. “The ladies that you see around here were all passengers on the
Central America
. We do not appear in such good condition now as when we started. We have all suffered much, and the sufferings of some are not yet at an end. Many of these ladies have been made widows, and many of these little children have been made orphans by the loss of that steamer.”

Of the nearly 600 souls aboard the
Central America
, 149 were saved: 30 women, 26 children, and 44 men taken on board the
Marine
, and 49 rescued by the bark
Ellen
. Besides the Eastons and Mary and Benjamin Segur, Thomas Badger and his wife, Jane, met at a train stop in Baltimore; and Billy and Virginia Birch found each other in New York.

But the stories of happy reunions were few. Mary Swan, whom Captain Herndon had promised to see safely to New York, arrived with a baby less than two and her husband recently lost to the sea. When the
Empire City
docked in New York, she burst into tears. “Where shall I go after I go ashore? I have no friends in New York, nor in all the world, now that my husband is lost.”

Winifred Fallon, seventeen, had gone to California with her father and younger brother in April, after her mother had died. Four months later, they returned east on the steamer. “We saved nothing but our lives,” she told a reporter. “I have not heard from my father since I left him on Saturday. I saved not a cent—nothing but one shawl and a dress.”

Several of those interviewed said, “I have lost everything but my life.”

Ansel and Addie Easton repaired to the Metropolitan Hotel, where Addie wrote a detailed letter of everything that had happened since they set sail from San Francisco. Family had awaited their arrival in New York for a week, one day mourning their loss, the next in receipt of a dispatch from Ansel in Norfolk announcing they both had survived.

“You never saw such a rejoicing as there was when we arrived,” wrote Addie. “For one week after we did nothing but receive calls and congratulations. A perfect crowd all the time, and we were real live curiosities. I can’t go in a store without hearing a whisper ‘There goes Mrs. Easton.’ I must now close hastily, without giving you particulars since our arrival. I have had so many interruptions, and spent so much time on this letter, that I shall not be able to write even to brother Edgar. So please after reading this to sister Fannie enclose it as soon as you can to my dear brother. It has been a severe task to me to recall those trying times, and I feel that I cannot even set down to write this all again.”

With those words, Addie Easton concluded her account of the disaster in a letter to her friend Jenny Page of San Francisco. The Eastons later returned to their home in California, where after the Civil War Addie gave birth to a son and then a daughter. Eleven years after the sinking, Ansel was thrown from his beloved racehorse, Black Hawk, and died of his injuries. He was forty-nine. When their daughter Jenny died giving birth to her third child, Addie raised the three grandchildren
and lived to be eighty-six. Still residing in the collection of the San Mateo County Historical Association is the little blue note Ansel penned to Addie, safe aboard the brig
Marine
, as the
Central America
lay sinking beneath him.

S
URVIVORS AND VICTIMS
of the
Central America
tragedy hailed from twelve foreign countries and every one of the thirty-one states. Within hours after the news arrived in Charleston, disaster headlines appeared on the front page of virtually every major newspaper in the country, from New Orleans to Boston, and as far inland as Dubuque, Iowa. For the next three days, reporters met rescue ships landing in Savannah, Norfolk, and New York. Newspapers could hardly satisfy the public’s appetite for the lurid details of the sinking. Many ran over ten thousand words on the incident in a single issue, rife with poignance, some featuring woodcuts depicting disaster scenes as described by the survivors. Nearly sixty survivors gave statements to reporters, and many of them spoke more than once with the press. In all, 212 newspapers ran over fifteen hundred articles on the disaster from its first reporting to the official investigations into the causes of the tragedy.

The
New York Times
later reported, “The full horror of their position is not unparalleled indeed in the desolate annals of the ocean, but … no story so clear and so appalling has ever before been brought to the firesides of the land.” The praise for Captain Burt of the brig
Marine
and Captain Johnsen of the bark
Ellen
was effusive. “The conduct of Captain Burt was noble in the extreme,” wrote a reporter for the
Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin
. “Like a noble-hearted sailor, and a true and gallant man, he bore down with his half-wrecked brig to the aid of those whose dangers and necessities were greater than his own.” For his efforts, Captain Johnsen received a gold pocket chronometer from President James Buchanan.

But the praise was greatest for the captain who did not return. A survivor reported that when the final moment of the sinking came, he saw Captain Herndon standing upon the wheelhouse, his trumpet in hand. Then Herndon had disappeared into the waves, and no one had seen him again. Everywhere, his loss was mourned. The
New York Times
wrote of the “calm, deliberate, enduring courage of a truly brave man.”
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated
said, “There cannot be a doubt about the fact that the name of Captain Herndon will ever be held in grateful remembrance among all the heroes who have achieved triumphs upon the sea.” In England, the
Liverpool Post
noted that in Captain Herndon “the finest part of chivalry appeared”; indeed, the conduct of every man, woman, and child aboard the
Central America
testified “irresistibly in favor of the high tone of the American mind. Their country ought to be proud of them.”

Captain Herndon’s cousin and brother-in-law, the father of modern oceanography, Matthew Fontaine Maury, wrote Herndon’s eulogy to the secretary of the navy. He wanted the world to know that a man had stood flatfooted at his post and lived an oath taken on a calm sunny day that he would not leave his ship regardless of the danger. “A cry arose from the sea,” wrote Maury, “but not from his lips. The waves had closed about him, and the curtain of night was drawn over one of the most sublime moral spectacles that the sea ever saw…. Forgetful of self, mindful of others, his life was beautiful to the last; and in his death he has added a new glory to the annals of the sea.”