Golden Dreams and Ocean Graves–Postscript

Postscript

The most extraordinary, the most mind-bending story to come out of the Central America saga arrived on the newsstands on October 5th. Three more survivors were picked up at sea in an open boat on the 21^st, nearly nine days after the hurricane disaster, and 478 miles N.E. of the spot where the steamer went down. The brig Mary picked them up, on her voyage from Cuba to Ireland. Mary carried them eastward seven days, when she met Capt. Wilhelm Wilmsen and the bark Laura, going from Bremen to New York with a load of German emigrants, and transferred the survivors to her.

George W. Dawson, 35, a black hotel porter from Oroville, California who lived with his aunt, didn’t speak much to the press on disembarking the Laura. Newspapers did give details of his woe-begone appearance. Sea boils had broken out all over his body, which were fast opening into painful ulcers. Flesh peeled off his hands. He had sunken cheeks, bruised limbs, a large sore on his forehead, and was so weak he could barely stand. Dawson did mention that a few hours after the bark Ellen made her appearance, and commenced picking up the wrecked passengers from the water, he repeatedly shouted out for help, but “nobody seemed to notice or care for him,” and very soon the bark disappeared, leaving him, and many others with him on the surface of the water to their fate.

George politely excused himself from the clamoring press saying that he wished to go in quest of some person from whom he could raise sufficient funds to get home, as he was very sick. The New York Daily Herald wrote, “It will be a long time, if ever, before he recovers his pristine vigor. He is a wreck of humanity at present, and requires great care and nursing to bring him round.”

Curiously Dawson had been employed on the SS Crescent City, another ship in the United States Mail Steamship Company fleet, when she was wrecked on the Mantilla Reef at the west end of the Little Bahama Bank two years earlier.

The two other survivors were crew members on the Central America. Mr. John Tice was an engineer’s assistant and appeared to have suffered somewhat less than his two companions. His feet and legs were covered with boils and blisters and his face was badly bruised. His ankles were swollen and peeling, so he was given some easy cloth slippers a great deal larger than his feet. He was met by the knave Ashby, his superior on the seas, perhaps to be debriefed on company policies, in a carriage that took him to the Battery Hotel at Castle Garden in New York. Tice, as an officer on the ship, was compelled to tell his compelling story.

John Tice, aged 25, occupied the position of first assistant engineer of the George Law/Central America from her first trip until she sank. Just before the ship went down, John leaped into the water with a piece of board. He immediately made his way leeward in order to get out of reach of the hustling crowd. During the Battle of the Drowning Men, he tried to swim out to the Marine and later made it to within a quarter mile of the Ellen but wasn’t spotted by either. During the remainder of the night, he encountered seven persons, who, like himself, were drifting about on fragments of the wreck.

Tice continued drifting to leeward for three days without seeing a single person or object. He constantly struggled with fatigue. When Tice found himself disposed to sleep and would almost lose his consciousness, he would suddenly awaken with his hands buried deeper into the plank which, for the time being, was his only hope of salvation. Hunger and thirst then made their stealthy approaches. Water was around and beneath him, and coming in waves, yet only to tantalize and not quench him. The surface of the sea was one vast salt desert. While on the plank he was ever on the alert for sharks but saw none, although large numbers of dolphins were playing about him at various times. Tice’s mantra that kept him afloat and alive was “while there is life there is hope.”

On the morning of the third day, after floating with his plank for 61 hours, John, a native of Newburgh, NY, fortuitously, miraculously, discovered one of the lifeboats two or three miles away which had belonged to the Central America, but which was swamped in being launched before that vessel went down. The boat had come to the surface without bearing any serious injury, her air chambers in perfect shape. It was half filled with water, and contained, beside three oars, a pan, a pail, and three old coats.

On Thursday, September 17th, the mariner saw a piece of the wreck—a portion of the hurricane deck of the ill-fated steamer—upon which were two men, George Dawson and Alexander Grant, one of the firemen of the Central America, who had been floating for nearly five days on the open sea.

Unlike his bachelor comrades in misery, 26-year-old Alexander Grant had a wife and one child who lived on Vandam St. in New York. The news of Mr. Grant’s resurrection fell like a thunder clap on his wife who, “swooned away, and continued from one fainting fit to another, for several hours, before she could command sufficient strength to resist her feelings.” What was supreme joy to her, however, proved to be utter grief and woe to another poor woman living on the same floor with her, named Wilson, whose husband was one of those lost by the wreck.

Grant’s most shocking traces of suffering were in his eyes, according to the press. “Naturally large, they were now preternaturally distended, and wore a fixed, straining, sleepless expression, as though still looking from the frail raft along the dreary horizon for a friendly sail,” wrote the Tribune.

Grant was a “Bluenose” born in the Gut of Canso, in the British province of Nova Scotia. He was among those on the SS Central America who were not submerged by the maelstrom she created in sinking. About fifteen minutes before the steamer sank, Grant, with about fifteen others including George Dawson (all labor to save the steamer having been abandoned), set to work to cut away a part of the hurricane-deck to use as a raft. Third engineer George Buddington, fellow fireman Patrick Carr, five coal passers including John and Patrick Baule, ashmen John Banks, John Keirnelly and Patrick Evans, and the engineer’s mess boy Richard Gilbert initially occupied the makeshift raft some twelve feet square.

They couldn’t see a man in the water over 100 yards on that dark, stormy night, but they heard cries for help all around them up until daylight.

On Monday morning they floated near a piece of plank, on which was George Dawson. He attempted to get on the hurricane deck, but they remonstrated, as the weight of those already on it sank it so low that the sea washed clean over it at every wave. He would not part company with them, however, but clung fast to a side.

About eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning, the first death occurred on the raft. Ashman John Banks sank under severe exhaustion and swallowing sea water. Before night three more persons died, and were thrown off the raft. Dawson then climbed on board.

Without food or water, on a few frail planks in the broad Atlantic, these men began to endure unutterable sufferings. Sharks and dogfish began circling the deck waiting to be fed. The water was warm, around 70°, which, with the heat of the sun, made it very oppressive. The sleepy men became troublesome, because they had to be so often roused. Grant surmised that he imbibed a certain quantity of water through the pores of the skin—being constantly wet—and thus saved himself from the fever which a week’s thirst would naturally produce.

On day five only four of the men remained alive on the hurricane deck. That evening, the two other raft mates Buddington and Gilbert–famished, thirsty and sleep deprived–began suffering from deranged hallucinations and flashbacks that became uncontrollable. Though Grant and Dawson did all they could to soothe them, their efforts were ineffectual, and soon after dark, deep in delusion, they simply swam away from the raft and into the abyss.

On September 17th, Grant saw a boat about three miles off and resolved to somehow find the stamina to reach it. He jumped into the sea, and, fueled by adrenaline, swam towards it with all his might. It was John Tice’s lifeboat. Together they immediately pulled the boat as fast as possible to the hurricane deck raft and took the weakened Mr. Dawson in.

Monday the 21st at dawn, for the first time in eight days the painfulness of thirst was most unexpectedly abated. The scorching sunny skies were closed in on by rain clouds and a brisk shower fell from what beforehand appeared to be the burning heavens.

Hardly had the last drops of the shower disappeared, when there was a second miracle. A few miles distant appeared a brig coming quickly towards them.

Grant, Tice and Dawson matched this seemingly supernatural blessing with the superhuman strength needed to row to deliverance by the Mary, then sailing from Cardenas, Cuba, with molasses, bound to Cork, Ireland. Shortly after five o’clock they came near the vessel’s side; a line was thrown by Capt. Colin Shearer, and caught by the emaciated men, and one by one they were raised upon the deck of the rescuing ship. They were saved—saved after enduring sufferings unparalleled in the history of shipwrecks—sufferings from hunger, thirst and madness for nearly nine days—sufferings which seem incredible for human nature to bear, and continue to live.

Less than two years earlier, Alex Grant, was, like George Dawson, a crew member of the Crescent City, of the U.S. Mail Steamship Co. Pulled off coarse by a strong south eastern current, the steamer struck on Little Bahama Bank about 20 miles east of the western portion of Mantilla Reef with a tremendous crash, and “bilged.” She was lying fast on the bottom and began taking in water.

Signal guns were fired. They began throwing the freight overboard to lighten her; the pumps were manned and rigged, but found to be wholly out of order. The 130 passengers and crew were then called on to form bucket brigades. The captain sent one of the four lifeboats to Sandy Bay, 42 miles distant, which returned with the wrecking schooner Defiance. She took off a portion of the passengers and carried them to Nassau. Captain Gray, with the balance of the passengers and the crew, followed shortly after in the Star.

Grant’s story of puzzling coincidence about being onboard two wrecked ships with George Dawson, became one quite mind-boggling. Flabbergasting. He experienced four shipwrecks.

The first was when he was 16 years of age as a deck hand on the brigantine Atlas, of Windsor, bound to Fall River, Massachusetts with a load of coal. Alex abandoned her in a sinking condition off the East Coast of Nova Scotia and was then taken by the Amazon, of Holland to the Marine Hospital in New Brunswick to treat his various injuries. The second shipwreck was monumentally devastating…

SS Arctic

The loss of the Central America had no parallel in the annals of American steamship navigation in the 19th century. The nearest approach was the disaster which befell the steamship Arctic, by which over three hundred lives were lost. Alexander Grant was, stunningly, also a survivor of that horrific–and notorious–disaster. Only 86 were saved—70% crewman, 30% passengers, and not a single woman or child. It was at the time the highest American flag death toll on the North Atlantic.

The press called the SS Arctic “the most stupendous vessel ever constructed in the United States”–the biggest, fastest and most luxurious on the Atlantic. She was a 284 feet long paddle steamer, with two 1,000 horsepower side lever steam engines. Her wooden hull made her lighter and faster than competing steamers in the Cunard line. She could cross the Atlantic from Liverpool to New York in just 10 days.

The Arctic sank on September 27, 1854, 40 miles from Cape Race, Newfoundland after a collision with the Vesta, a large iron bark rigged propeller from St. Pierre, bound for and belonging to Grenville France and transporting fisherman. The Arctic was running at a fast clip in the midst of a dense fog. Vesta’s iron anchor-stock had been driven through the bows of the Arctic about eighteen inches above the waterline, and at the same instant the fluke of the anchor had made an immense hole two feet below the waterline, raking fore and aft the planking.

Both Capt. Luce and the Vesta’s Capt. Duchesne sent out lifeboats to help each other. Several sailors on the Vesta lifeboat were killed by the Arctic’s paddlewheel in a tragic accident within an accident episode. Luce ordered pumps activated, holes plugged from the inside with mattresses and cargo, and a canvas sail lowered from the outside to cover the hole. Unlike the Central America, this damaged vessel began sinking rapidly. Within 30 minutes of the collision, lower fires were all put out by the sea water. Forty-five minutes later the water reached the grate-bars of the upper furnace on the port side. She originally had four lifeboats hanging on davits and two stowed on the deck. Luce began the process of launching all of his remaining lifeboats at the same time so that they could stay together in a flotilla.

In a mutinous, law of the jungle operation, an uncourageous, ignoble mob of firemen, engineers, waiters and crew scrambled for the boats, abandoning their posts and their duties and the helpless women and children to the mercy of the deep. All the officers, except Luce and the third mate, left the ship at an early stage of the mayhem.

The captain managed to load one boat with women, children, and passengers on the larboard side of the ship, near the wheelhouse. At the moment of lowering this boat, one of the pulleys gave way, the other was entangled. All but three men who were in it were thrown into the sea and drowned.

When a sailor asked Luce about getting his young, crippled son on board one of the lifeboats, he announced, “My son will share his father’s fate.”

After four hours, the great ship, treacherously stabbed, and drinking in the ocean at its wounds, gave her final plunge.

Two days later only two of the lifeboats made it safely to the shore.

Before the Arctic sank, a ramshackle forty-foot raft was constructed out of the two foreyard arms and launched on the larboard side. In minutes, there were about seventy people clinging to it, four of whom were women. Several other rafts were made, but none of them were as large. Doors, barrels, anything that floated, came into use. One by one, as with the Central America, passengers lost their grip or fell asleep and drifted into eternal slumber in the frigid sea.

With one of his messmates Grant seized the fore-hatch and threw it overboard a few moments before the Arctic sank. Happily, he was far enough away from the sinking ship that he avoided the catastrophic whirlpool as she darted downwards.

Gradually the shipmates drifted away from the other parts of the wreck, and they were alone, both expecting every hour would be their last. “I thought then that I had suffered as much as mortal man could,” Grant reported. He floated fifty-two hours in the cold waters, yet he somehow found the motivation, the love of life to remain hopeul. It was six in the evening—six hours after the shipmates had first seen her—when the Cambria sailed up and took them on board.

Little did Alex know that he was training for a marathon with the foundering of the Central America coming in less than three years.

Grant discovered that Capt. Luce had already been picked up by the Cambria. When the paddle box of the Arctic shot up to the surface of the sea after the ship sunk, a treading Luce was hit and injured; his son was killed. He then climbed on board with a few others. Grant, Luce and seven other men were well cared for on the Cambria until their arrival at Quebec, when they then made their way back to New York. The sorely battered but iron constructed Vesta, half the size of the Arctic, succeeded in safely reaching port. Out of her 147 passengers and 21 crew, the Vesta lost 13 men, who, seized with fear, either threw themselves into the sea, or were in the boat destroyed by the Arctic.

Henry Ward Beecher spoke to his Brooklyn congregation about the sinking of the Arctic as the consequence of a “secret, uncontrollable and imponderable force” that allows or disallows the abject, non-discriminating cruelty of nature:

One cannot help shuddering at the remorseless calm of nature. How are men devoured! How are all alike devoured! In the heart of nature is no pity, no discrimination, no sympathy for worth, no scorn for cowardice, no sorrow for innocence, no feeling for youth. Is the same unfeeling master to good or bad. It is cold, calm, persistent law. Those whose God is nature, worship an idol harder than stone. In such an hour how inexorable, how cruel, how unendurable is it, if nature is God, that we have such a God!

Ward acknowledged that the chances of recovery and restoration were slim for those that knew that terror of the bestormed seas and experienced the depths of human anguish on the Arctic off the coast of Newfoundland. He implored Americans to pray for the wretched that lived to mourn the dead, whose life would be one long watch of grief, they’re terrified imaginations periodically reenacting the scenes, the awful prelude, and the final catastrophe.

All that were involved were turned into beggars, according to Beecher. “In the morning the waiters served the titled and the rich. In the evening the lusty strength of the waiter or engineer was a greater title and wealth then money or coronets.” He taught his followers to look squarely at life and its various treasures, to pass through nature, beyond imagination, to “the precinct of eternity” in peace, in hope, in conscious satisfaction:

There is no experience of the soul more noble, and even grand, then its power of setting aside the senses and material things and of realizing the invisible; Of lifting itself up, and its most desperate extremities, to repose upon the presence and strength of a being, who is not obvious to the senses, but only to the spirit. That hour, in which the soul rests in God, in such a way as to despise all natural human fears and the trembling of the body, is the hour of its glorification. The spirit triumphs over its clay. The soul is supreme; The body subdued.

There was no follow up to Grant’s story by the press. What happened to the sailor with the preternaturally large eyes, who survived the terror and anguish of the two deadliest shipwrecks of the 19th century and four foundered ships in total? How did he navigate the economic recession of the late 1850s? Did he return to his job as a fireman for the United States Mail Steamship Company? Or did M.O. Roberts the president put him safely in the mail room because no one would sail with him again? Did he lose his sea legs forever and seek work on dry land instead? Were the superhuman abilities that he possessed put to good use in another field? Did he take the overland route to the gold fields of California with his wife and baby. Did he find a rainbow in El Dorado and a pot of gold? Or did he retreat to his Canadian homeland and lead a quiet life? So many questions. Did he stay in contact with Tice and Dawson, his fellow tortured compatriots of the Central America disaster? Did he fight against slavery during the Civil War?

Did Alexander Grant, survivor of the Atlas, the Arctic, the Crescent City, and the Central America, in his next chapter, or any of the succeeding chapters of his life, unravel and find words to express his unspeakable sufferings? Did he find Faith? Wisdom? Madness? Or perhaps some bewildering combination of the three?