256 pp., 61/8 x 81/2, 38 illus., 2 maps, chronology

$24.95 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2749-5

Published: Fall 2002

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Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals
The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering

by Bland Simpson

Copyright (c) 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Part One: The Shoals
January 31-late February 1921

Watch
Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
Monday, January 31, 1921
6:30 A.M.

Off Carolina, where the great warm river of the Gulf Stream flirts with the cold southbound current from Labrador before spurning it and heading for open ocean, three great capes sculpted by the Stream's eddies ripple seaward and reach just beneath the waves for miles in shoal waters known the sailing world 'round and long called Frying Pan, Lookout, and Diamond. Over the sands of the Outer Banks this dawning long ago, billows of foam came rolling and boiling in. The fabric of the Atlantic Ocean's woof and warp unraveled and laid its bright strands out loose and shaking in airy, vaporous ropes that were nothing at all but oxygen, hydrogen, and salt, ocean spindrift strung out like white and ghostly hawsers from great mythic ships and flung in the wind all along the way of the wet, gravelly seabeaches from Cape Hatteras to Currituck. Yet more than spindrift was out there this morning, more too than the ever-threatening curl and pound of a disturbed and angry sea.

Just down the strand a ways from the black-and-white whorl of Hatteras Light, nearer to Cape Point and behind a white plank fence lay the U.S. Coast Guard's Cape Hatteras Station No. 183, a two-story cedar-shake building with gable ends, the tallest point for miles around except for the great lighthouse itself. Astride the roof's ridge sat a tall, square cupola with a pyramidal roof, two sets of doublehung windows constituting most of each wall.

From this lookout's perch Surfman C. P. Brady kept the 4:00-8:00 A.M. watch.

The winter wind was blowing ten to fifteen, and Brady heard it whistling lightly up under the eaves and around the cross-braces of the gables, watched in the dim but gathering morning light as it blew the tops off the waves cresting and breaking three hundred feet out. And all the while, in Brady's line of sight, the laughing, cawing gulls went flapping, circling, and wheeling by, at times hanging in place three or four akimbo, holding still in the cold air as if they had been placed or even painted there, and whether these avian forms that seemed more molded soot than bird were floating or flying, who could ever tell? He would see them for a few moments at a time, and then they would fade back into the smoky sky the way deer vanish into woods.

There was just now light enough for Brady to see all this, but the surfman dared not stare too long at those white spindrift lines on the seabeach, lest his tired eyes cross and get lost in a vanishing point in the mist and spray to the north. He rose from his post in the cupola of the cape station, climbed down the stairs to the mess for coffee—he had an hour and a half left on his watch. Regarding the jute bag of beans in the corner, the plantation name in Spanish faintly stenciled upon it and the shipping label still stitched into one of its rabbit ears, he then lifted a blue-speckled enamel pot from the small stove and poured scalding coffee into the blue tin cup with his initials on the bottom: C.P.B.

Then he made his way back up top, for he was the shepherd of Diamond Shoals, and they were his fields over which to watch by night. He closed his left eye and put his right to the small aperture at the near end of the station's great telescope, a prize possession of this outpost. Fully extended, the old glass, one of three the federal government had bought for use during the War of 1812, came to a length of seventy-one inches, and it took every bit of that power to allow one's eye to roam all over these twelve-mile shoals. Though Brady now stared out from the peak of his station, and this height gained him great range, still, as he slowly coursed the glass over Diamond Shoals he found he was mostly gazing out into the shoals's ever-shifting, heavy morning mist. There in the confine of the cupola Brady could feel the whole of the lifeboat building below him tremble before the wind, could feel it snap in a gust almost as a sail does when it fills fast. Almost as—

My God! Can you believe what you just saw?

Set the cup down, man. Rub your eyes, check yourself—nothing was there when you went below to the stove. Do you believe it now? You must, for the wind has parted the morning mists for real and there she stands before you, and you can only wish she were the apparition that she appears to be.

In the dawning mists, clouds of spray exploded from high, dark-gray rollers that marched in over the shoals and then rose and piled into each other and blew apart, and on these shoals most feared and dreaded by mariners the world over, there rose the five tall masts of a ship fully rigged with all sails set, a schooner upon the shoals—up on them—lodged and foundered. Whose hand was it that presented this craft to Surfman Brady, laying this enormous schooner into the mistshroud of Diamond Shoals sometime during the long dark night?

Mother and lover of men, Brady thought, the Sea—see now what she brings. And sound now the alarm and shout the word, for wherever that ship hails from, she stands fast on the Outer Diamond. Say the word—shout it—the very worst word of the sea:

Shipwreck!

The Men Who Lived There Then
Hatteras Island, North Carolina
Eighty to a hundred years ago

Shipwreck! How often it came as a cry in the night, or a howling against the wind at dawn.

A few handfuls, just clutches of men, set down every so often in stations along the sandy strand, were all that stood between the maritime pilgrims on a ship gone aground and death by drowning, pounding, or freezing—or all of these. The same waves that have beaten a boat from deep waters onto shoals will then beat her to pieces, and to the indifferent sea those persons aboard a craft in ruin are nothing more than a few timbers to be rent and rendered into splinters, shreds, and flinders.

The men who lived there then, the lifesavers, were among the bravest in the world, and their names should be writ large. Writ upon what, though? The very sand they all but slept upon, as Hatteras was nothing more than a sandbar twenty miles out in the Atlantic? The ocean herself, for what was their life if not water? Like those who plied the sea, whose lives they were pledged to protect and, if called upon, to save, most of the surfmen's names are writ only in the ledgers that enrolled them in their trades. A couple of initials, a surname like Etheridge or Meekins or Midgett.

In awe and nothing less, sing of Rasmus Midgett who swam out and back and back again to the wreck of the barkentine Priscilla, one of seven ships that fell victim to the fabled San Ciriaco storm of August 1899, swam back through the still-raging surf ten times all told and single-handedly saved ten men from that wreck. And in awe and nothing less, sing too of his marvelous son John Allen Midgett, keeper of the station at Chicamacomico, who through fire on the waters led a rescue of the crew of the British tanker Mirlo, mined off Wimble Shoals during World War I, not even three years before this schooner that now foundered upon the Diamond.

Of course they would hurl themselves at the sea, and into it, for it was death's gauntlet and therefore the chance, the repeated chance, for the descendants of castaways to cheat death even as their forebears had, to cheat him of themselves and those afloat in the Atlantic shallows and seeking the grasp and safety of the shore so near. To go out into the roiling sea over which no human agency has ever held sway, or ever will, and save man woman and child, perhaps many, and have it be all in a day's work and worthy of a note—assistance rendered, job well done—and in so doing saving one's own life, necessarily and repeatedly, as a given part of that process, and have that be not noteworthy at all.

The job said they had to go out. Nothing on earth said they had to come back.

They were men enough to meet the sea and whatever pilgrims she tossed about and in her passion loved or merely trifled with—maybe shipboard, maybe overboard—and then set forth upon the seabeach, soaked and bedraggled and whether living or dead nothing to her, but to them who lived there then, everything.

A Surfboat at Cape Hatteras
Cape Point
Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
January 31, 1921

So Surfman Brady, aloft at the station, and Surfman Gray, on foot patrol along the beach, both saw the schooner seemingly fixed out on Diamond Shoals. Brady immediately alerted the keeper of Cape Hatteras Coast Guard Station, Baxter B. Miller, who went up into the cupola himself and took a look of his own.

Keeper Miller was fearless hereabouts, a real son of the shoals. For helping rescue the entire crew of thirty-five from the German steamer Brewster when it foundered on the Outer Diamond in November '09, he had won a gold medal from the U.S. government and, from Germany, a silver watch inscribed with the Imperial Eagle. And he'd earned a silver medal two years later for saving the son of former Cape Hatteras keeper Benjamin Dailey when he was swept off the deck of his boat by heavy seas.

In the cupola now Baxter Miller cupped his left hand around the big telescope and pulled the shaft toward him with his right. With Surfman Brady's help for direction, he could see whenever the curtain opened for a second or two that miles away over the waters there lay a great schooner before them—now present, now disappearing, like a phantom, a specter, a will-o'-the-wisp, and he thought:

Smoky over the shoals.

Spectral she may have appeared, but she was real enough, too. At quarter past seven Miller telephoned the neighboring stations, Big Kinnakeet (No. 182), Creeds Hill (No. 184), and Hatteras Inlet (No. 186), to notify them and request they stand by for action. After another trip aloft, a second effort at reading or trying to read the truth of the moment through a veil of vapors, he telephoned those stations again at 7:30 A.M., telling each in turn:

"I am quite sure the schooner is aground on the southwest point of outer Diamond Shoals, and I am proceeding to the scene of the wreck."

First the Cape Hatteras surfmen, all slickered and sou'westered, stood by the long, white, lapstrake power-surfboat in the station, hands to the gunwales, and one of them threw open the big double doors. Once outside, they hitched the drayhorse, a tawny Belgian sixteen hands at least, to the caisson and Keeper Miller stood in the sharp, uprising bow and held the great horse's reins and down the ramp and into the sand seaward of the station they all went.

The gusting January wind blew spray and sand at them, and the damp sand gathered and caked upon the three-foot, wooden-spoked wheels, and the sea oats and grasses around them bent seaward, as the men and their boat slowly dragged through the dunes and over the open seabeach, the half-dozen men and the one beast drawing forward as if they next intended, like Poseidon of old, to plough the very sea itself. They had drilled weekly for this and knew this routine cold, yet they usually drilled on light days and not when the wind was blowing twenty from the west and freshening. The Belgian wore blinders—if the mare in her pulling and striving could have looked laterally and, instead of merely seeing the swath of gray-green-and-white boiling surf straight before her, could have seen how endless were her maritime fields, and how fierce and lathered they were this morning, the preposterousness of the vast work might have occurred to her and stopped her in her tracks.

There was neither stop nor pause, though. To the south hook of the cape the surfmen hauled the station's power boat, found the sea running very high, and thought perhaps it might be better for them to attempt to launch from the north side of the point. There, they found the sea ran even higher, so they returned to the south side, where now they were joined by the crews from Kinnakeet and Creeds Hill, the sea also being too rough for those men to launch from their stations farther north and farther southwest of the cape.

In the wet sand below the tideline the men halted and unhitched the front set of wheels from the boat carriage and led the mare forward into the shallow surf that was sheeting rapidly beneath them, till the wheels were clear and the front fell into the water and made a skid down which the boat would go, and then one of them walked the mare around and away, pulling now just the wheels, till she too was clear and unburdened and, standing alone and apart from the surfmen, looked away from them and their incomprehensible task.

This was a bold affair, but a humble one, too, this trying to put a vessel into the surf and get past the breakers and, in the parlance of the lifesavers' reports, "render assistance." Who awaited them out there on the outer Diamond in that great schooner? Who knew? But bring aid these men must—their mighty nation had placed them here at the edge of the world for just this purpose and no other. Of all the millions of people on the face of the earth, the only ones who might save that schooner's crew were these few surfmen, with their horse, their ropes and lines, and their very small craft.

Keeper Miller picked seven of the surfmen, along with boatswains C. R. Hooper of Big Kinnakeet and J. C. Gaskill of Creed's Hill, and these ten men, beginning at ten that Monday morning, threw themselves repeatedly into the roaring, boiling surf of Cape Point. The seas, coming hard, repulsed them any number of times before they succeeded, with both power and oars, in getting past the breakers and crossing the off bar and heading shoalward.

After a hard struggle the men had gotten to sea.

By 11:30 A.M. Miller's craft approached the scene of the shipwreck, but the angry and unpredictable shape of the seas—these shoals engendered great, high-rising, hollow-backed breakers the likes of which had slammed into each other since the first moments of time—kept them at a considerable distance from the huge schooner itself. As if it were nothing at all, the breakers out on the shoals flew about from every which way, crashing into each other and surging explosively to the heights of two- and three-story houses. Bos'n Hooper saw how the ship was driven high upon the shoals, lying in a boiling bed of breakers, and he thought with all sails standing she seemed to have been abandoned in a hurry. All the surfmen could see that the schooner's two boats were gone and the davit falls were hanging. They witnessed no movements, no signs of life on board, though they could come no closer to her than five hundred yards, not near enough to read through the breakers' spray and mist her name and home port. After several more attempts to move in on the distressed vessel, the Cape Hatteras surfboat came about and headed back in to the shore.

Men from the U.S. Navy's nearby radio-compass station had come down to the seashore to watch the Coast Guardsmen. The pharmacist's mate, the one they called Doc Folb, stood with the rest and thought, Look at her standing, sails all up, white and shiny way out yonder. Just look at her.

At 1:10 P.M., the surfmen returned, beached the boat at the south side of Cape Point, and Keeper Miller notified the Coast Guard's Seventh District superintendent and division commander of the results of his crew's efforts, which he then sat down and wrote out, longhand, in his Record of the Miscellaneous Events of the Day.

Nothing else they could do now, every one of them knew, until a larger craft arrived to help them out.

Telegram to HQ in D.C.
U.S. Coast Guard, Seventh District Headquarters
Pasquotank River
Elizabeth City, North Carolina
Monday, January 31, 1921
4:33 P.M.

COAST GUARD WASHINGTON D.C.
UNKNOWN FIVE MASTED SCHOONER STRANDED DIAMOND SHOALS SAILS SET BOATS GONE NO SIGNS OF LIFE SEA ROUGH STATIONS NUMBER 183 184 186 UNABLE TO BOARD SCHOONER 1630
SEVENTH DIST.

Wireless
Fessenden, not Marconi now but Reginald L. Fessenden who had been Edison's top chemist, with his fifty-foot towers, one at Roanoke Island's north end and the other in Buxton at the broad bottom of Hatteras Island, here made wireless telegraphy into radio telephony. And it was not wisdom or truth or plain words of any sort, not the first sounds beyond telegraphic dots and dashes that he sent right through the air, over the Pamlico Sound waves and surf, over those waves and out of the absolute blue.

No, it was music. Three watts sending music fifty miles!

That breakthrough, that piercing of the very spirit of the wind, had come to Fessenden in Dare County on the Carolina coast in April 1902, and behind Fessenden's work out here in Dare was the old and mighty question, symphonic even, all over again, and learning what he had done men and women asked it yet again in their hearts: What hath God wrought?

By the time of the Great War, the use of shipboard wireless was widespread, and so those who now wondered over the strange course of this schooner in '21 might well have asked another question, more particular and precise than symphonic, a quizzical air dancing upon the waves:

In this day and age, was there no wireless aboard that stranded ship?

The Cutter Seminole
At noon on Monday, January 31, 1921, the Coast Guard's Norfolk Division wired its cutter Seminole, then moored at the Cape Fear River wharf in Wilmington, North Carolina. From the log of the Seminole: "12:00, received following telegram—Proceed to assist five masted schooner ashore near Diamond Shoals." Her succinct reply to Norfolk was: "Sailed for Hatteras 1355. Seminole.

She was a worthy craft for the task, the 188-foot, steel-hulled Seminole, built at Baltimore, Maryland, in 1900. Her beam was 29 1/2 feet, her draft 11 feet 8 inches, and her displacement was 845 tons. Seminole's retrofitted boilers were only five years old, her hull had been repaired and improved, and she was judged by the Coast Guard to be in very good condition for a vessel her age. Wilmington was her home port, and her coastal patrol took her from Cape Hatteras to Charleston, South Carolina; she was armed with four rapid-fire six-pounders and fitted with a two-kilowatt wireless radio.

Keeper Miller's report made its course to the higher-ups in Norfolk by way of a relay from the Weather Bureau's station at Cape Henry, Virginia, and late Monday afternoon, Norfolk headquarters again wired the Seminole, now en route, and gave the cutter its first word of what to expect at Cape Hatteras: "Station crews report unable get within quarter mile of unknown schooner stranded southwest point Diamond Shoals No sign of life on board Schooner boat missing Inquire if crew is on lightship Obtain name of schooner."

Very early on Tuesday morning, February 1, the Seminole stood for Cape Lookout Light Vessel, passing her at 3 A.M., the lightship half a mile off the Seminole's port beam, noted Lieutenant Commander C. H. Dench. At 8:45 A.M., she cut her main engine and drifted while the crew repaired the cutter's boiler feed pump, and soon the Seminole was under way again, by noon telegraphing Norfolk that she was seven miles southwest of the Diamond Shoals Light Vessel. Then at 2 P.M. she stood for Hatteras Lighthouse, passing a northbound schooner, and steamed into Hatteras Cove, where she stopped and at half past two signaled to the Cape Hatteras Coast Guard Station: "Can you send a boat?"

"Yes I can," replied the cape station.

"What has become of wreck?" asked the Seminole.

"Towed in by . . ."

"This last was evidently in error," logged Lieutenant Commander Dench, "as Hatteras Radio Station almost immediately advised that schooner in question was stranded on Diamond Shoals, with most of her sails set." The men of the Seminole then realized they had steamed right past the shipwrecked vessel and, because of her sails all being set, had mistaken her for a ship under way.

"Send a boat," the Seminole again requested.

"Boat is going to you," the cape station answered, and late that afternoon, at 5:35 P.M., Keeper Miller led his surfboat crew out to board Seminole and spend the night.

At a quarter till three, Lieutenant Commander Dench wrote that the Seminole was "anchored in Hatteras Cove in 6 fathoms with 30 fathoms port chain, Station 183 (Cape Hatteras) bearing NE 3/4 E and Station 184 (Creeds Hill), NW W 1/4 W." A half an hour later, Dench wired Norfolk that he was sitting at anchor at Hatteras and further stated,

"Crew of schooner not on light vessel. Name unknown will attempt reaching wreck when sea abates."

Dench stood on the deck of his craft, regarding the thin island there before him, the longest of Carolina's barrier islands, an isolated and windswept fifty-mile strand of salt-sheared cedar and sea oats, gnarled oak and pine, with seven villages, seven Coast Guard stations, one lighthouse, and one navy radio and radio-compass station. Where the Seminole lay at anchor, one of the largest federal armadas of the Civil War had once lain in the early days of that conflict, waiting to bombard and blast the rebels out of Fort Hatteras down at Hatteras Village near the inlet. Twenty-five thousand troops had swarmed over Hatteras Island and its neighbor to the southwest, Ocracoke. But that was sixty years ago, and now there were only a few hundreds sparsely settled out here, many of them in the same government service as Dench; and, except for the all-black crew of the Pea Island station far to the north, all but one of the people living on Hatteras Island were white.

The wires were starting to cross, for Seminole's last telegram—relayed through U.S. Naval Communications—would not reach Norfolk till just past eight that night. Meanwhile, Norfolk wanted to know—wiring Seminole at 4 P.M. the same afternoon—if the cutter Manning might join the rescue effort. Again the navy relayed Seminole's wire, the cutter answering at 5:15 P.M., "If sea abates Manning can assist, otherwise no," and at 7:19 P.M. came Norfolk's reply: "Send radio when Manning can assist period Report immediately condition of schooner and if any trace of crew."

At 10:30 Tuesday night the Seminole sent the report Norfolk would not see till next morning: "No trace of crew schooner stranded about center of outer shoal apparently not badly damaged and all sail set unable approach closer than one mile in present sea As seas are breaking over her at present but not breaking up."

An Off-note from the Jersey Shore
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Tuesday, February 1, 1921

Coast Guardsmen watching the Atlantic coast around Absecon Light at two in the morning saw "a vivid flash of light at sea, followed by an explosion." Surfman Norris Smith of the South Brigantine station was surprised by this flood of light, which illuminated a calm sea over a very wide area. Then followed the long low roll of what he took for an explosion. Smith held his night glass trained on the spot whence came the great light, but there was no repetition of it.

Similar reports came from the Little Beach station twenty miles up the coast, as well as from the inlet patrol, and naturally the Coast Guardsmen wondered whether or not a vessel had blown up. Power boats put to sea at once but found no trace of wreckage, nor saw any signals of distress.

At dawn Captain Allen flew from the inlet in a Curtiss seaplane, went thirty miles straight out to sea and then climbed to 5,000 feet, using binoculars and combing the sea and shore for hours, but his search was fruitless.

For days both naval and amateur radio operators along the Jersey coast would keep their receivers up and open, all of them hoping to detect any distress call that might come through, or for some word from a sulfur steamer that had sailed from Sabine, Texas, about January 20, bound for Portland, Maine, the now-missing S. S. Hewitt.

But no word came, nothing washed ashore, and nothing was ever recovered.

Where and Why? The Working Press Wonders
Something all Norfolk would see the morning of the 2nd of February was splashed across the front page of the Ledger Dispatch: Ship Is Abandoned; Crew Is Missing; ALL SAILS ON SCHOONER ARE SET; Coast Guardsmen Still Can't Get Near Enough to Make Out Name.

"Where is the crew of the strange schooner wallowing helplessly in the seas off Diamond Shoals?" the morning paper asked.

"Why was the vessel deserted with all sails set?

"A Coast Guard crew that has been frantically trying for two days to reach the strange ship, whose name is still a mystery, are puzzled by the peculiar circumstances under which the vessel was abandoned."

The Cutter Seminole
Diamond Shoals, North Carolina
Wednesday, February 2, 1921

Seas ran heavy in the morning, the weather rainy and misty with a moderate northeast breeze. The Cape Hatteras surfboat boys who had spent the night shipboard took off from the cutter Seminole to see if they could get any closer to the wreck today than they'd been able to so far. But the crew of Station No. 183 was rebuffed yet again by the great waves and again had to give it up. The sailors on the cutter bade them godspeed and stood on deck and watched them as they made their way back to shore.

Having wired at noon a report to Norfolk from Hatteras Cove that the schooner was in the same condition today as yesterday and that there were strong northeasterly winds and heavy seas, Lieutenant Commander Dench, who hailed from the little Detroit riverport of Wyandotte, Michigan, headed on out around the shoals when the weather cleared a bit in early afternoon. At a quarter till three this winter's day, he found himself steering his command north by east half east toward the mysterious stranded schooner. He took soundings at regular intervals, and, as he logged, "kept the lead going when close to the shoals." Just before 3:30 P.M., he backed the Seminole to within three-quarters of a mile of the ship, stopping in six-and-a-half fathoms.

"The surf was running high over the shoals," he wrote, "and occasionally breaking over the schooner's poop. It was impossible to read her name but it appeared to be a long one, and the home port looked to be Bath, Me., however this could not be positively made out." Nowhere on the ship could he discern any sign of life. He declared the schooner "a vessel of about 3500 tons, painted light gray or white, with a black stern. Practically all her sails are set except the flying jib. She lies pointed about N W and on the S. Side of the outer shoal in about 35 degrees 0830 North, 75 degrees 28 West. She was not pounding so far as could be seen, and she is staunch as yet. No wreckage alongside of her was seen. She is listed to starboard 4 or 5 degrees."

Though her hull, masts, and sails seemed intact to Dench, even so, seas were breaking over her. How much more could she stand?

And how much could he? A few minutes later, Dench steamed southwest (3:35 P.M.), then turned west-northwest (3:47 P.M.), and at 4 P.M. sailed for Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on a bearing of N E 1/4 E, the beacon being then about eight-and-a-half miles away. Having been thwarted by Diamond Shoals, even failing to gain a positive identification of the vessel, and with his boilers now badly salted and his condenser leaking, with the whole mess acting up and deviling him again, Lieutenant Commander Dench came about.

The Seminole left the scene at 4:45 P.M. and stood for her home port, for the Cape Fear River and Wilmington's wharves.

Lula Wormell
57 Lawn Avenue
Portland, Maine
Wednesday, February 2, 1921

Overdue?

"Why, Mother," I said when she told me, "what's that but a word? A little late, that's all, Father's ship is just a little late." I lived in the house next door to Father's and Mother's place on Lawn, and she always came over and passed the time around here when he was away at sea. So she was the one who met the man at the door, and maybe she saw something in his eyes, his face, when he gave her the report from the shipping agents. Maybe she saw a little cloud that I couldn't yet see, or wouldn't. So I didn't argue with her.

"I'm going in the parlor to sit down for awhile," she said, shaking her head no when I asked her if she'd like tea.

As if nothing were wrong I lit the back burner and put the copper kettle on it, the one with the rattaan handle so you don't need a potholder. And I waited.

You want to keep busy, keep your hands occupied, when you feel your nerves slipping away from you, a little unraveling coming on. From the drawer next to the sink, where we kept the scissors and can opener, the whetstone and all of that, I fetched the teaball and dipped it into the special tin with the little twigs of dark, pungent tea inside and packed it tight and watched the blue flames lick the copper bottom of the pot.

Tea all the way from China, Father'd said when he came home with it last year. Of course, he didn't bring it all that long way, but he might have. For he's been all around the world and Lord knows he knows the way. A deep golden-colored tin, with Chinese figures all over it like some kind of dancing code--so mysterious, to us anyway, though a child over there could read it at a glance and take it all in, while I could sit here in this kitchen in Maine and stare at it the rest of my life and never know boo.

Well. Some things are lost in this world but most things aren't, so don't think about it, I kept telling myself. Or else Father's ship will be like the watched pot here that never boils, and she'll be always overdue, and where would—

Oh, there's the whistle, now!

The Cutter Manning, the Wrecker Rescue
Diamond Shoals, North Carolina
Friday morning, February 4, 1921
10:20 A.M.
Two ships—the Coast Guard's cutter Manning, a 205-foot, 1,150-ton veteran of both the Spanish-American War and the Great War just past, along with the salvage company's tug Rescue—had plied down from Norfolk on Thursday the 3rd. As they did, a man from the Associated Press wire service got aboard a Hatterasman's fishing boat and visited the shipwreck, which was then resting easy in a subsided sea.

The Manning anchored off Diamond Shoals lightship, and the Rescue reached her about 9:30 A.M. on Friday, and then together they approached the schooner in a relative calm Friday morning. To all the hails and halloes from the Coast Guard no answer returned, so the Manning stood back and let Rescue's Captain James Carlson, agent for the well-known Merritt and Chapman Derrick and Wrecking Company, approach the great sailing craft that—though they had come to float her if they could—now seemed fixed to the Outer Diamond as if she had grown there, or been planted there by the hand of God.

Now they could read her nameplate, and they confirmed the word sent out midafternoon the day before by the wire-service man to the Weather Bureau at Cape Henry, and all doubt as to her identity evaporated—the massive schooner, over 250 feet stem to stern, was the very one some days overdue at Hampton Roads, Virginia:

She was the Carroll A. Deering of Bath, Maine.

In the Rescue's yawl boat, Captain Carlson left the tug, and he and four of his men—engineer Olsen, wrecker foreman Samuelson, and wreckers George Snow and Angelo Real—motored to the schooner's port-side bow, the lee side, and with some trouble boarded her by climbing a rope that was hanging over, a task that would have been deadly, impossible any time in the preceding four days. The schooner, from the continuous pounding she took and from all the wind in her sails, had so wedged herself down into the sands of Diamond Shoals that her deck was now no more than six feet above the Rescue's boat, which floated in only eight feet of water!

She is too grand for such a fate, thought this new and momentary master on the deck of his ruined command, but this indeed is what she gets.

The schooner's deck undulated like a serpent, the seas breaking over her and water washing into the hold through windows and skylights and companionways. Carlson beheld a marvel, a ship whose stem and stern had been so twisted by several days in the waves that now she seemed to be simultaneously rolling in opposite directions. Carlson knew as soon as he saw how low she rode in the seas and how the seas filled her hold that she would never rise from this fix, not as anything more than a derelict, anyhow.

Only the flying jib was not set, and the wind had already blown out and shredded two topsails. The Deering's two large anchors were lost, along with one of her chains; on her second chain was a smaller kedge anchor, shackled in regular fashion and triced up with rope, hauled up well out of the water close to the forecastle head. By sounding, Carlson judged the ship's keel to be buried as much as fourteen feet deep in the sands of Diamond Shoals, found oceanwater in the hold level with the sea outside and within five feet of the upper deck, and saw that the midship halyards were out of place and had washed about loose in the seas.

Carlson and his wreckers did not go below into the lazarette between decks but only looked down into it, seeing some barrels, some ropes, and sails all wet. They removed nothing.

The Deering's forecastle was built partly above and partly below deck, the crew's quarters being portside, the engine room and engineer's quarters starboard, several steps down. Inspecting it, Carlson found the forecastle just about bare.

Someone had been fixing to eat. In the galley amidships lay a pot of pea soup, a pan with slabs of spareribs in it, and, on one burner of the stove, a pot of coffee.

But see here, thought Carlson as he wandered aft: Why was the steering gear ruined, the wheel itself broken, the binnacle box bashed in and shattered and a nine-pound sledgehammer nearby (to repair, or to destroy?), the rudder disengaged fifteen feet from its stock and the stock now slammed up through the deck? He couldn't say whether the steering gear had been wrecked before the Deering struck the shoals, or after. The soup and meat slab and coffee he had seen all made sense, but what sort of diet was all this?

The Deering's two boats—she had carried a common dory and a twenty-four-foot ship's yawl, equipped with a two-cylinder, six-horsepower Mianus motor—floated elsewhere or not at all. They were no longer with the ship. During the abandonment, the crew had simply sliced the boat falls, and both davits and falls were way out over the stern. The sidelights, the red and green running lights, were burned out, as were two red lights high aloft, signals of a ship in danger that no one anywhere had seen—unusual, thought Carlson, for all four of these lights to be up at the same time.

Aft, beneath the quarterdeck, Captain Wormell's cabin had but a few clothes strewn about in it, his bed was unmade (the bedding wet from the seas that had washed into the cabin), and the spare room gave Carlson the impression that it may have been occupied; curiously enough, the captain's trunk and grip and large canvas bag were gone. Upon a table in the chartroom lay the ocean chart, spread out. On the floor of a small side room, two or three pairs of rubber boots lay scattered carelessly about.

Yet where were the ship's nautical instruments, her chronometer? Her papers? Her log?

From the Deering that Friday, all that the Rescue's men salvaged were one foresail, one mizzen sail, two jibs, an American flag, a Union Jack, twenty-two code flags, three cabin chairs, a lounge, two sidelights, two riding lights, one red light, and one bell. Foreman Samuelson picked up Captain Wormell's Bible and carried it to Carlson, who would send it to the captain's family. In another small act of kindness, Carlson saved three nearly starved cats and took them back to the Rescue's steward, L. K. Smith, who adopted them.

No captain. No crew. Just a trio of ship's cats found and accounted for.

Some men and women read texts, books, and newspapers only; some read the tracks of animals—or men—in pathless barrens of the lowlands and remote laurel hells in the high blue hills; some read the soil, the lay of the land, for what it might grow and what its contours might hold fast, or loose; and still others read the skies, for weather, for omens, for hints of what may be in time future or what was in time long lost. James Carlson's skill, his very lot in life, lay in assaying all manner of craft in wrack and ruin and finding reason and meaning and value in remnants there, and if fortunes can be read in the palms of men and women, or in their eyes, or even in the small furled missives the Chinese enfold and cook within thin sweet crusts, then fortune too presented herself to be read without embellishment on such a deck as Captain Carlson now strode.

And what he read, what he heard in the salt-spray wind, was a series of simple questions that the odd scene of the unpeopled ship put to him, as well as the queries the very oak and pine, the rope and wires and canvas and spars, all in one sang to him in a moaning refrain:

Am I worthy? If I am not, can I be made so again? How came I to this end?

Lula Wormell
57 Lawn Avenue
Portland, Maine
Friday, February 4, 1921
4:30 P.M.
From the front bay window I stood watching, looking out, and so happened to see that towheaded boy not yet thirteen roll his bicycle up to the front gate of our big house in Portland. Letting it fall against the iron-fence pickets, he then rushed through the gate and came running up six steps to the porch and pounded with his hand upon our dark, heavy front door. When I opened it, I regarded the boy solemnly for a few moments and must have frightened him, for he backed up a full step as if he were withdrawing in fear of me.

Did I already know why he'd come? Didn't I? I reached proprietarily for the yellow envelope in his left hand, as if it were mine. The Western Union boys usually thrust their missives proudly forward, but this one just let me pull it from his grasp, like he had forgotten what to do, or why he was even there on Lawn Avenue.

"Who is it, Lula?" my mother called from the kitchen back down the hall, but I did not answer.

Instead I stepped onto the front porch, shutting the door quickly behind me—it was February and nearly sundown and there was a cold wind off the sea, after all—and tugging at the narrow strip of the envelope's flap that secured it. Now the boy smiled at me—but why? Did he think that this was a message from a beau somewhere, a sailor maybe, telling me he would be in Portland soon maybe, or maybe asking me to join him way off in the Berkshires maybe, and elope?

Oh, my, how I have remembered that boy. She will smile at me in a second, just another second, he must have thought, believing himself to be, if not Cupid, at least a Mercury bearing romance.

But I did not smile. I raised my head and gazed from the small yellow paper to the boy's happy and expectant face, and felt my eyes well up with tears. Boy, do you know how wrong you are? My sailor will not be in Portland soon—nor will there be any elopement, nor any romantic assignation, for he is my father.

"Go."

"I can wait for a reply," he said, reaching into his coat pocket and bringing forth a little tablet. "I can write it for—"

"Go!" I truly croaked that order at him, and he ran from me, stumbling on the lowest stair, catching himself, glancing up at me as he lifted his cycle away from the fence, wondering (I suppose) what was wrong with the telegram's message, what in those few moments he might have done wrong himself. He was escaping something, though he didn't know what. Fifty yards down Lawn Avenue he was, by the time I had read the paper again, and as I called after him "I'm sorry!" he disappeared around the chestnut tree at the corner, and must not have heard.

I am the captain's daughter, and the telegram the boy from Western Union brought had begged to inform Mother and me that there were "no signs of life" upon the ship, for five days now hard aground far to the south upon Diamond Shoals, and that it was now in fact confirmed this morning by the United States Coast Guard to be the schooner Carroll A. Deering, my father's craft.

Word Gets to the Kennebec
226 Washington Avenue
Bath, Maine
February 5, 1921
The G. G. Deering Company, builders and managing owners of the Carroll A. Deering, opened Saturday and awaited further word from co-owner William Merritt, the ship's original captain, who had left Maine Wednesday for Norfolk and arrived there yesterday.

Captain Merritt's night-letter showed up first thing—by dark Friday, there was still no trace of the Deering's captain and crew.

His telegram about the Deering herself reached the firm Saturday afternoon. It would be impossible, wired Captain Merritt, to save the vessel.

Lula Wormell
57 Lawn Avenue
Portland, Maine
February 7, 1921
Could there have been a collision? Mama and I wonder. Some piling into each other of the Deering and another craft, possibly the sulfur steamship Hewitt that we've heard was northbound that night, and in the very same waters as Father?

If the Hewitt struck the Deering in the darkness, that may have been cause enough for the Deering's men to abandon ship and go aboard the Hewitt--yes, it could've happened that way.

This mystery is nearly driving us wild--there's so much we need to find out, and, though my eyes are like a kestrel's on the papers, everything is so uncertain and unclear. Why, there were nine men from Portland in the Hewitt's big crew—and there may've been as many as fifteen! If we find them, will we also find Father and his crew?

Will we?

Who can know anything at all for sure?

W. O. Saunders
Offices of the Independent
505 East Fearing Street
Elizabeth City, North Carolina
Saturday, February 12, 1921
Been some couple of weeks in Betsy Town, I tell you what.

First shad of the season came in—William Tillett down at Big Flatty Creek caught them—couple of four-pound bucks and one five-pound roe-fish. Our fish dealers on the Pasquotank are really gearing up, buying here and selling to the Dock Street Fish Market in Philadelphia. Late March, if the wind pushes enough salt water into the sound, why, those Stumpy Point boys'll be just hauling them in. And we'll be shipping shad out of here by the boxcar load.

Monday the 31st they had a Toonerville comedy playing at the Alkrama Theater—"Skipper's Narrow Escape"—and then Friday they were showing "The Veiled Mystery." Missed em both—people don't pay a newsman to go sit in the movies.

And speaking of news, guess you heard about Mrs. Vanderbilt's speech.

Mrs. George Washington Vanderbilt—heiress to her late husband's rail and shipping fortunes, as well as to that little western Carolina chateau, that overblown cottage he called Biltmore—was just talking to the North Carolina General Assembly, met in joint session in Raleigh to hear whatever she, as the new chairwoman of the State Fair, might have to say.

"I don't know much about speeches," Mrs. Vanderbilt told the honorables, "but I do know that a speech should be like a skirt: long enough to cover the subject but short enough to attract attention." The legislature flat loved her, applauded her brief remarks long and hard.

Well, the way I see it, just being Mrs. Vanderbilt enables her to attract attention, skirt or no skirt.

The Local Salvors
Diamond Shoals, North Carolina
February 14, 1921

On Valentine's Day, four small sailboats went out to the shipwrecked Deeringfrom Hatteras, and these fifteen men boarded her: Elmer Stowe, Millard Stowe, Rube Stowe, Walter Stowe, J. I. Willis, Roscoe Burrus Jr., J. I. Stowe, Sam Stowe, Norwood O'Neal, Tyne Willis, Phil Austin, Roscoe Burrus Sr., B. F. Stowe, Fred Stowe, and Lon O'Neal.

They sailed out to her thinking their boats would not be able to carry back with them all the new rope that should have been on the Deering. And though they hardly returned to Hatteras Village empty-handed, still, when they got upon her and looked over the strewn-about and unkempt messes in the fo'c'sle and the captain's cabin alike, they all had but one thought and one thought alike: She had already been plundered.

Vendue
Hatteras, North Carolina
February 23, 1921

Everything Carlson and the Rescue wreckers had left aboard the Deering—and that the local boys from Hatteras Island had subsequently retrieved—now went on public sale at Hatteras Village, under the authority of W. L. Gaskill, wreck commissioner. First went the food: small quantities of beef, pork, ham, and bacon, of coffee and curry, peas, beans, pepper, and salmon, of mustard, yeast, hops, and tapioca, and of grits, pumpkins, tomatoes, peppers, molasses, mutton, milk, prunes, and lard. Most of it sold for anywhere from a nickel to ninety cents, though the ship's sugar brought three dollars, her flour five and a half. The buyers—all of them living between Buxton and Ocracoke—paid $44.05 for the Deering's groceries.

Furnishings out here at the edge of the sea were harder to come by than food, and these the bidding public valued much more highly. A table sold for $12.00, a chiffonier for $13.50, a set of chairs for $14.50, and a bedstead for $22.50. Lanterns went for two bits, though lamps got as high as $2.25. Eight mattresses were brought forth; Annie Austin made off with two for $1.75, but Irish Willis paid $12.00 for his. Brooms, buckets, doors, tables, pillows, blankets, linoleum, hoses, boxes, twine—everything must go! More than one of the six single-spaced legal pages listing the Deering's items was devoted to "rope." C. B. Foster paid $19.00 for his rope, but Commissioner Gaskill only paid a dime for his.

Irving Stowe bought some nautical charts for a quarter. J. C. Gaskill of the Creed's Hill Coast Guard station got the captain's trunk for $5.00, and A. J. Gray got his desk for $35.00.

The wrecked ship was sold to Lee Robinson for $25.00.

The total for material and food taken off the ship came to $841.75, less the wreck commissioner's 5 percent, less the cost of a watchman and advertising ($25.67), and then less the salvors' 60 percent—leaving a balance of $309.60. Commissioner Gaskill added in the vendue value of the wreck, again less his 5 percent.

To the faraway owners of the latest Outer Banks shipwreck, now relieved of their loss and burden, Commissioner Gaskill after the late February vendue turned over the paltry sum of $333.35.

The schooner Carroll A. Deering herself, the ship that had cost a quarter-million to build, stood three weeks pounding on the world's worst shoals, then came apart.

W. O. Saunders
Offices of the Independent
505 East Fearing Street
Elizabeth City, North Carolina
Saturday, February 26, 1921

You see how Herbert Hoover—who'd not too long ago raised twenty million dollars to feed the starving children of Poland and Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia and Austria and Germany but refused to help out the equally innocent starving children of Russia—finally had his group turn loose of a hundred thousand for Russia? Makes me think a hair better of the new secretary of commerce.

Everybody's so wound up and afraid somebody down the street or up in Washington's going to be helping a Bolshevik and then that Bolshevik's going to turn up right in their hometown, picking their pockets and running off with their women, or their mules, you name it. Some kids, I reckon it was, broke in the school and used the fire hydrant to flood a couple of classrooms—vandalism is what it is and it's worse than sorry, it's just meanness and that's bad enough.

But what does Professor Sheep, whose school it is, say is behind it? Why, Bolshevism!

Governor Morrison's come out against the Invisible Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, thank God and the Fourth of July. Now, there really are some of them around, somewhere, leaving notes, threats, wanting to run things from behind their veils and under cover of darkness. Well, go on and threaten me some more, Knights. I still say, Bolshevism could hardly be worse than invisible government.

News of the Day
The Carolina sound country
February 1921

On Saturday, February 5, the day after Lula Wormell received definite word about the stranded Deering and its lost crew, the News and Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina, told the world in cold type: "will be unable to save schooner off hatteras." The newspaper said the schooner was valued at $275,000 and would be dynamited after she was stripped for salvage. The great craft was less than two years old.

Nor was the Deering the only craft in distress.

In Washington, D.C., some navy men were arrested in a plot to blow up the presidential yacht Mayflower. Who would do such a thing? people wondered, and why must there always be trouble with boats and ships?

The four-master George R. W. Truitt Jr. caught on Lookout Shoals just a week after the Deering hung on the Diamond. Then Warren Harding's yacht Victoria sat for two days on a mud reef in Mosquito Lagoon below New Smyrna, Florida, prompting the president-elect, once she was floated free, to extend his Miami-to-the-Keys fishing vacation. In early March the affable adulterer would be sworn in as the nation's twenty-ninth president, and as part of his elevation Harding would kiss George Washington's Bible, his lips right on the verse in Micah that said, "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?" The Bible-kisser from Blooming Grove, Ohio, would unknowingly let his government lease away the navy's black gold at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to the oilman Harry Sinclair, and the only mercy of it all for Harding would be the Lord's calling the president home before the scandal really broke, George Washington's good book having long since been returned to Mount Vernon, intact yet having signified nothing.

Elsewhere in America, inventor Thomas Edison turned seventy-four in West Orange, New Jersey. The singer Enrico Caruso lay desperately ill in New York. The anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti awaited trial for murder in Massachusetts.

Back in the sound country, in Betsy Town, the riverport on the blackwater Pasquotank that was the closest town of any size to the Outer Banks, the main drive shaft of the cotton mill broke. C. Raymond "Snooks" Evans, star pitcher of the Elizabeth City Twilight League, about to head north to play baseball for the New York Nationals, got a big sendoff banquet, with North Carolina's future governor Blucher Ehringhaus helping lead the salutes.

In New Bern, a man named J. O. Lowder displayed at his shooting gallery a steel pin featuring all 65 words, 254 letters, and 19 punctuations of the Lord's Prayer engraved on its head, the work of three years for a Spokane engraver!

If such things could be, could the missing crew of the Carroll A. Deering not also be found?


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