The Finest Hours (6 page)

Blindly, Webber pointed the boat back toward the oncoming wave. When the wave hit, Livesey had the sensation that the little lifeboat was being consumed by the wall of salt water. He could feel that the boat was on its side, and for a sickening second, he wondered if it would right itself.

The wave freed the boat from its grip. Webber used every ounce of strength and again straightened the vessel. He gave it throttle, advancing a few more precious feet. Seconds later, another wave slammed into the vessel, again sending it careening on its side at a 45-degree angle.

Webber managed to get the lifeboat back under control. Then, despite the crashing of the ocean, each man realized one sound was missing. The motor had died, and the next wave was bearing down on them.

 

7

CHATHAM MOBILIZES

In an odd coincidence, the front page of the February 18, 1952, edition of the
New York Times
ran an article about World War II tankers. It had nothing to do with the drama that was unfolding off the coast of Chatham. The article described how “nationally known individuals turned a $100,000 investment into a $2,800,000 profit by buying and chartering five World War II tankers.” The Senate investigations subcommittee would begin public hearings involving the tankers and corruption in government.

The days of instant reporting had not yet arrived, and so far the only people who were well informed of the double tanker disaster were those in the coast guard and the private citizens of Chatham.

*   *   *

Ed Semprini finished a long day in the broadcast booth at Cape Cod radio station WOCB. He had just returned home when he received a call from fellow journalist Lou Howes. “Don't bother sitting down for dinner,” Howes advised his friend. “We've got a tanker that went down off Chatham.” Before Semprini could respond, Howes added to the graveness of the situation. “There's not one tanker,” he said. “There's two of them! I'm heading to the Chatham Lifeboat Station right now.”

“How about giving me a ride?” Semprini asked. “I'll go down with you.” Semprini hung up the phone and then called his engineer Wes Stidstone. “Gather your equipment and meet me in Chatham,” Semprini told him. “I think we've got a big story on our hands.”

Semprini's wife, Bette, overheard the conversation and looked out the window at the driving snow illuminated under the streetlight. “You've got to go out on a night like this?” she asked with worry in her voice. Semprini nodded wearily and then put on his wool coat and hat, wondering what the evening had in store.

*   *   *

Lou Howes pulled up in front of Semprini's home and honked the horn. The horn and the engine seemed to be the only instruments that were in good working order in the battered old Chevrolet. Semprini heard the blare of the horn and trudged through the snow toward his ride. He climbed into the passenger side and rubbed his cold hands in front of the heater, which he quickly realized was broken.
This trip better be worth it
, the newsman thought to himself as the jalopy pulled away from his house and into the blinding snow.

While the blizzard wailed outside, Cape Codders stayed in their warm homes and huddled around the radio as news of the rescue missions began to spread. Those with shortwave radios could listen in real time to the dramatic dispatches between the coast guard station and the rescue crews.

Chatham's town fathers found out about the drama that was unfolding off their coast during their annual budget meeting that night. Members were slowly filing in and had had just enough time to shake the snow off their winter coats before they were told of the dire situation involving the seamen. The town's business would have to wait. Professional photographer Dick Kelsey immediately realized the importance of what was happening. He raced home and grabbed his old 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, #2 flashbulbs, and several film holders and headed for the fish pier.

If the rescue crews somehow made it back alive, they would be cold, hungry, and possibly very sick. The call went out to the town clothier to gather up warm clothes. The local representative of the Red Cross was also alerted. Ordinary men and women went home and began cooking warm meals for the seamen in hopes they would return. The people of Chatham had been raised on the sea, and they knew what needed to be done.

*   *   *

The town's dependence on the sea went back to its founding father, who had purchased the land that would later become Chatham with a boat. William Nickerson, a weaver from Norfolk, England, was the first to settle here. In 1665, Nickerson offered a shallop boat to the Monomoyick sachem Mattaquason in exchange for four square miles of rugged land on which to build his homestead. To seal the deal, Nickerson also threw in 12 axes, 12 hoes, 12 knives, and 40 shillings in wampum, among other items.

This was a harsh land, with strong, howling coastal winds. The settlers built their dwellings with low roofs to withstand hurricanes and blizzards and faced the structures south for maximum exposure to the sun. They insulated the walls with dried seaweed.

By the time of the Revolutionary War, many of the men of Chatham had begun fishing in the waters off the coast. With fishing came shipwrecks. The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts was the first organized group to offer aid to shipwrecked men, building huts along remote sections of the coast to provide shelter for survivors once they made it to shore.

In 1847, Congress finally took action to better protect seamen by appropriating thousands of taxpayer dollars to build permanent lifesaving stations along America's vast coastlines. It would take another 27 years before the first government-authorized lifesaving stations were erected on Cape Cod. In all, nine stations were built from Race Point in Provincetown to Monomoy Island in Chatham. Chatham Station was one of the original nine lifesaving stations built on Cape Cod, its patrol covering more than four miles north and south. The station was equipped with four surfboats, a dory, two beach carts, and a horse named Baby that was used to haul lifesaving equipment down the beach toward disabled vessels.

The Chatham coast was as busy as it was dangerous. Mariners had to concern themselves not only with deadly shoals but also the tricks of men looking to steal their goods. These men were called mooncussers, and they set out to disorient captains and ground their ships by aggressively waving a lantern from the dunes. The mooncussers wanted the captains to think the waving lantern was a legitimate beacon so they would steer their ships into dangerous waters. They hoped that the ships would crash and their goods be strewn about the shore—so they could be easily scavenged. The mooncussers cared only about themselves, and their actions put the lives of many sailors at risk.

The mooncussers got their nickname because they “cussed” the moon on moonlit evenings. They could pull off their dangerous treachery only when the sky was near pitch-black. The writer Henry David Thoreau became fascinated by the mysterious mooncussers during several trips he made to Cape Cod between 1849 and 1857. “We soon met one of these wreckers, a regular Cape Cod man … with a bleached and weather-beaten face, within whose wrinkles I distinguished no particular feature. It was like an old sail endowed with life,” Thoreau wrote. “He looked … too grave to laugh, too tough to cry; as indifferent as a clam.… He was looking for wrecks, old logs … bits of boards and joists.… When the log was too large to carry far, he cut it up where the last wave had left it, or rolling it a few feet, appropriated it by sticking two sticks into the ground crosswise above it.”

The scavenger tradition, though not the deliberate shipwrecking, continued for another hundred years. By the 1950s, the wooden bones of old wrecks could still be found on the beaches of Chatham, disappearing and then reappearing in the shifting sands. One local resident, 82-year-old “Good” Walter Eldridge, had built himself a cottage with wood taken from the wrecks of 17 different vessels that met their fates on Chatham Bar.

And now the citizens of Chatham hoped and prayed that the
CG 36500
carrying Bernie Webber and crew would not add its wooden ribs and planks to the debris on the sands of the bar.

 

8

“HE CAME TO THE SURFACE FLOATING”

About the same time that Chatham was mobilizing and Bernie and his crew were being hammered at Chatham Bar, the
Eastwind
was pounding north toward the broken halves of the
Fort Mercer.
Darkness was closing in, and the violent motion aboard the ship was unlike anything radioman Len Whitmore had experienced.

Len wondered if the broken sections of the
Mercer
would remain upright or even stay afloat until his cutter arrived. He had not left the cramped confines of the radio room since eight
A.M.
, and the stress was mounting with each hour. But even in the anxious situation, there was a lighter moment. The cutter's captain was in the radio shack attempting to call the owners of the
Mercer
, when suddenly a pigeon strutted out from behind one of the transmitters and walked casually past the incredulous captain. Len was mortified—it was his pigeon. While the cutter was in New York, Len had found the pigeon with its wing broken, and he snuck it on board, where he planned to nurse it back to health. The captain looked at each man in the room, and they all remained quiet. Len waited for the captain to demand who had brought the bird onto his ship, but instead he went back to his task of connecting with the
Mercer
's owners. Len let out a silent sigh of relief.

Len wondered how the
Mercer
's men were holding up. He knew that they were encouraged to learn the coast guard had heard the Mayday and were responding, but that alone did not mean salvation.

*   *   *

By 6:30
P.M.
, the cutter
Yakutat,
commanded by J. W. Naab of Yarmouth, Maine, arrived at the bow section of the
Mercer.
In addition to the seas, wind, and snow, the rescue was now hindered by darkness. Overhead, an airplane from the naval air station at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, New York, dropped flares, doing its best to provide a little light for the men working below.

Captain Naab's men tried to shoot lines across to the tanker, but the wind made it nearly impossible.
Yakutat
crewman Gil Carmichael later recalled how bitter cold it was as he assisted in trying to get a line to the tanker. “The hood of my parka kept blowing off my head as we tried to shoot those lines over to the
Mercer.
At one point, my head felt so numb I rubbed my hand over it and felt something. It was a big clump of ice, and when I pulled on it, a big patch of my hair came with it. But it was so cold I didn't even feel it.”

As the lines fell short of their target, Captain Naab and his crew began a dangerous dance of positioning the cutter nearer to the bow of the
Mercer.
As the cutter maneuvered closer, however, Naab realized that the
Mercer
's bow was surging so wildly that both vessels could collide, killing them all. The captain decided to edge away, hoping the storm would soon subside a bit before trying another rescue. For the next five and a half hours, the
Yakutat
stood by the bow of the
Mercer
, keeping a close watch for any sign of change.

*   *   *

While the
Yakutat
had made it to the scene of what it hoped would be a rescue, the 36-foot motor lifeboat skippered by Ralph Ormsby, which had left Nantucket at noon, was having no such luck. “We couldn't see anything,” said Ormsby. “There were snow squalls, and the seas were tremendous.”

When night fell, their orders changed once again, and they were told to seek safety. Ormsby steered his vessel and its frozen crew to the Pollock Rip Lightship. He was entering some of the most treacherous waters on the East Coast, the shifting labyrinth of shoals between Nantucket and the elbow of Cape Cod. The tides play havoc in the shallows here, creating rip currents of churning, sand-filled seas that can be frightening even on calm days. And now with monstrous waves, wind, and current colliding, Ormsby's small lifeboat was tossed about like so much flotsam. Should the boat capsize amid the breakers at the rip, he and his crew would be dead within minutes.

Somehow Ormsby navigated through the maze of shoals and pulled up alongside the lightship. Crewmember Alfred Roy stood on the bow of the lifeboat and attempted to throw a line with a weight at the end to the crew on the lightship. Just as Roy made the throw, the 36-footer was hit by a wave, and Roy went airborne, hitting his face against the oak planks of the bow. Ormsby tried to steady the wallowing vessel while Roy got back on his feet and hurled the line once again. This time, the lightship crew grabbed the other end, and the lifeboat was secured against the larger vessel. The men climbed aboard, where Roy had the gash above his eye attended to.

The second 36-footer sent out earlier that day, skippered by Donald Bangs, was having an equally harrowing mission. Bangs and his crew almost didn't survive the first few minutes of their journey, because when they rounded Monomoy Point, they were assaulted by a huge breaking sea. The skipper thought that if he tried to maneuver the boat over the waves, his vessel stood a good chance of having its bow go straight up and then over the stern, capsizing the lifeboat. He only had a minute to make a decision, but he gunned the engine and forced his tiny craft to punch
through
the waves. When he and his men came out the other side, they were completely airborne and then, free-falling, slammed into the trough below.

So far his mission had been one not only of danger but of frustration as well. He and his crew were originally sent to aid the
Mercer.
When they reached Pollock Rip Lightship, however, they were told to turn around and head back toward Chatham because the two halves of the
Pendleton
had been spotted there.