Fred Jordan's Christmas Gift

Note: This story is from currently unpublished "A Cask of Good Liquor: A Biography of Long Island Sound" by Tony Muldoon.

 They were just two kids out fishing on Long Island Sound when they received their Christmas gift from Fred Jordan. The gift was their lives, and Fred Jordan had paid for it almost fifty years earlier.
                Every lighthouse worth its candlepower has a resident ghost to watch over, or curse, mariners. Long Island Sound is no exception being, as it is, the maritime entrance to New England, where grim and mysterious tales are the staff of life. The Sound’s ghosts range from the hundreds of cantankerous revolutionaries who the Brits left exposed to the rising tide at Execution Rock at the western end, to poor old Ernie, keeper of the New London Ledge Light at the eastern end who took a header off one of the outside galleries onto the rocks below after his wife sailed away with the skipper of the Block Island ferry.
                 But Fred Jordan is without a doubt the most helpful, benevolent ghost on Long Island Sound, or anywhere else for that matter. There were the two boys in the capsized skiff, of course, as well as several other yarns of sailors who were helped through the storm-tossed or fog-shrouded entrances into Fairfield or Black Rock Harbor. 
                Fred was the keeper of the Penfield Reef Light just off Fairfield, Connecticut.  It has been perched on the eastern end of one of the nastiest pieces of real estate on the Sound since 1874. Penfield Reef used to be dry land and there are reports from pre- colonial days of cattle grazing on the gentle, green field surrounded by salt water. 
                Time and nature have long since eroded all the soil from Penfield Reef, leaving a deadly crescent of rock lashing out from the Fairfield beach like a scimitar. The reef lies just below the surface at high tide and every new sailor is warned before taking their new boat out of Black Rock or Fairfield to NEVER, EVER try to go between Penfield Reef Light and Fairfield Beach. 
                And, of course, there are always a few who ignore the advice and find themselves hung up on the reef or with the bottom torn out of the boat and the Sound rushing in. 
                One particularly grim Penfield Reef tale involves a family of seven who climbed over the rocks to the end of the reef. Then the tide came in and they were never seen again. 
                Life was lonely out there at the Penfield Reef Light and could be downright hard when the classic winter nor’easters whipped the sea up into a lethal fury. No wonder, then, that Fred wanted to spend the Christmas 1916 ashore,  with his wife and two children at home in Fairfield. 
                Shortly after noon on December 22, 1916, Fred set off from the lighthouse in one of its small skiffs. A storm was howling and it is easy to say Fred was a damned fool. But, Christmas was coming. He was less than halfway to Fairfield Beach when the boat was overwhelmed by the booming surf and Fred was dumped overboard. 
                Rudi Iten, the assistant light keeper, saw his boss struggling desperately in the surf. Rudi tried to launch one of the station’s other boats, but the winds and the waves defeated his attempts and Fred was carried away by the sea. 
                Fred’s body was found on Fairfield Beach a few days later. Rudi Iten was absolved of any responsibility in Fred’s death and was, in fact, named to replace him as chief keeper of the Penfield Reef Light. 
                Reports that Fred Jordan’s spirit still lingered around the old masonry lighthouse began within a couple of weeks of his death and continued at least into the late 1960s. Iten reported several spectral appearances, during which the light seemed to flash erratically. Iten also found the station’s official logbook opened to the page for December 22, 1916.
                A friend once told me of a similar occurrence when he was a young Coast Guardsman stationed at Penfield in the late 1960s. Clearly, to most of us anyway, it was the sea breeze blowing in through an open window that ruffled the logbook’s pages. But was it all that clear to the people who lived at the light station? 
                Fred Jordan remained a largely undefined apparition until 1942, when he delivered the first of his gifts. The two boys whose misfortune kicked off this yarn, managed to make it to the reef after their boat capsized but were too weak to pull themselves up on the slippery rocks.
                Then, a strange looking, pale faced man appeared above them and offered his hand to pull them from the water.  Later, after they had been taken to the lighthouse to warm up and dry out, they were unable to pick out their rescuer from any of the station’s Coast Guardsmen. They did, however, pick Fred Jordan out of a photo gallery of past lighthouse keepers on the wall.
                To this day, if you hang around Fairfield or Black Rock harbors, you’ll hear stories of storm battered, dangerously exhausted sailors being guided to a safe berth by an unknown pilot who always vanishes as soon as the dock lines are secured.
                There is no one stationed at the Penfield Reef Light today. It was automated by the Coast Guard sometime around 1969 and is visited only occasionally by Coast Guardsmen maintaining the light or preservationists trying to save the historic old masonry building.
                Yet on Snoopy’s proverbial dark and stormy night, when only lunacy or an extreme sense of duty could lure anyone out on Long Island Sound, a shadowy figure has been reported patrolling the gallery on the roof of the lighthouse, watching for people in peril on the Sound and, if called upon, delivering  the present that Fred Jordan purchased at such great cost ninety-seven years ago.         

               

               

 

 The Ghost Ship of Seattle

(Note:  This article first appeared in Professional Mariner magazine.)

                              

                       “I looked upon the rotting sea,'
                             And drew my eyes away:
                       “I looked upon the rotting deck,
                         “And there the dead men lay.”
 

                                                  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

                                                        Samuel Taylor Coleridge

        

             Eleven shipmates, mostly reduced to bleached bones by nearly a year’s exposure to the wind and sun of the North Pacific Ocean, lay before Genosuke Matsumoto in May  1927 as, with hand and eye steadily giving way to disease and starvation, he wrote the final entry in the logbook of the Ryo Yei Maru;

            “…drifting with remaining sails hoisted.”

            The dying Matsumoto had made his last entry into the log of  a hellish eleven month drift around the North Pacific Ocean Gyre – north almost to the frozen Arctic, south towards the simmering Equator and eastward towards North America – to Umatilla Reef, just eleven miles south of Cape Flattery and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the entrance to Puget Sound.

            Cape Flattery is the most northwesterly point of the mainland United States. In the waning months of the year it offers fog, snow and rain as well as its normally treacherous currents. In the autumnal grayness of Oct. 31, 1927, Cape Flattery presented a macabre mystery to Capt. H.T. Payne, master of the bulk carrier Margaret Dollar.

           Margaret Dollar had just passed through Strait of Juan de Fuca into the Pacific and turned south towards California when Payne spotted a vessel apparently aground on Umatilla Reef.  Payne altered course and brought his six-year-old, 429-foot freighter close to the mystery ship.

            She was an 85-foot, two-masted, motorized Japanese fishing vessel.

            Ryo Yei Maru, “Good and Prosperous,” was her name.

            By the time the Margaret Dollar found her, she was neither.

           Ryo Yei Maru was not the first Japanese ship to be driven onto the West Coast of North America by the North Pacific Ocean Gyre. In 1831 three terrified Japanese mariners were rescued by local Indians near Cape Flattery in the first recorded such incident. Since then, many Oriental ships and their crews were found adrift or wrecked, alive or dead, along the North American coast from Mexico to the Aleutians.

           They had been blown offshore from Japan by gales or typhoons to be sucked into the infamous Black Stream.  If they were lucky, the sailors survived the months of starvation, exposure, scurvy or beri beri. The twelve men of Ryo Yei Maru had not been lucky.

           Payne sent First Officer L. A. Byberg and two seamen to investigate the derelict. Ryo Yei Maru had obviously been adrift for a long time. Her hull was sheathed in four inches of barnacles and seaweed and the sails and distress flags on her weather-worn masts had been reduced to rags by the lashing winds. Fishing gear was neatly stowed on deck, but engine parts and mechanic’s tools were scattered haphazardly about.

           Worst of all were the remains of the crew, all twelve men. Some lay wherever they fell, the bones and skulls of others were neatly and respectfully arranged on bunks or on shelves waiting to be recovered and returned to their homeland. In the cabin were the mummified remains of Capt. Tokei Miki and Matsumoto, an assistant engineer. Nearby, in a small wicker chest were two notebooks, kept first by fisherman Suteji Izawa and later by Matsumoto,  that told the pathetic story of their  final voyage.

           Ryo Yei Maru, owned by Otomatsu Hosoi, of Wafuka, Wakayama Prefecture, had sailed from the major commercial fishing port of Misaki on December 5, 1926. Things went wrong almost from the start when the engine crankshaft broke and the ship began her deadly eastward drift, away from the friendly shores of home.

           On December 23, with the wind raging at nearly 70 knots, the freighter West Isom spotted the distress signals and came to Ryo Yei Maru’s aide. Through his Japanese speaking cook, Capt. Richard Healy warned the fishermen that they were in terrible danger. He urged them to abandon their crippled vessel and seek safety aboard West Isom.

            Miki refused; he was determined to repair the engine or get a tow home to Japan. It was a foolish decision that sealed the fate of Ryo Yei Maru and the unfortunate souls in her. A broken crankshaft was clearly something that could not be repaired at sea and hoping for a vessel to happen by and offer a tow back to port was a wistful dream at best. By refusing Healy’s offer, Miki condemned himself and his shipmates to a grim, lingering death. West Isom sailed on, leaving Ryo Yei Maru 700 miles off the coast of Japan.

           Healy and his men were apparently the last to see Ryo Yei Maru’s crew alive.  They were lashed unmercifully by storm after storm. The New Year turned and by February 5, 1927, they had given up trying to repair the engine and tried to sail. But the sails were quickly destroyed by the savage winds and the ship kept on drifting ever deeper into the Pacific.

           Miki must have thought he was getting a second chance when early in February 1927, about six weeks after the encounter with West Isom, he spied another ship. But their potential savior did not see the distress signals and soon dropped below the horizon.

          It was about that time that the first crewmembers began falling ill. Chief Engineer Denjiro Hosoi was the first to die, on March 9.

           Between March 12 and 29, beri beri and starvation carried off fishermen Torakichi Mitani, Tsunetaro Naoe, Hatsuzo Terada, a fisherman identified only as Yokata and First Mate Tokichi Kuada. Suteji Izawa died on March 17, leaving the sorrowful task of journal keeping to Matsumoto.

           The food was all gone, but hope flickered briefly on April 5 when Miki managed to snare a large sea bird. The ravenous sailors devoured the bird raw, but Ryoji Tsujuichi died the following day anyway.

           A shark was gaffed and wrestled aboard, but the men were too badly weakened by starvation and disease. Yukichi Tsumemitsu died on April 19.

           A crewman, identified only as Kamite,  also died on April 19. Only Miki and Matsumoto were alive now, and both of them were too far gone to see to their vessel.

           Capt. Miki fell seriously ill on May 6 and Matsumoto noted: “The captain became seriously ill. Four days later only Captain Miki and I remain alive, both of us too weak to tend the helm.”

          Miki was probably next to die. On May 11, a day when the northwest wind was fresh, the sea rough and the weather cloudy, Matsumoto made his final journal entry, and then joined his shipmates.

           The worst was not written down in the sad little notebooks but was concluded  by the quarantine officer at Port Townsend, where Margaret Dollar brought Ryo Yei Maru. After inspecting the pathetic remains, he had little doubt that the fishermen had resorted to cannibalism in the face of starvation, according to historian James A. Gibbs. (Shipwrecks Off Juan de Fuca, Binfords & Mort Publishers, Portland, OR.)

          The reaction along the Seattle waterfront was predictable. Thousands flocked to the shores of Elliott Bay to see Seattle’s very own ghost ship. The city’s more flamboyant entrepreneurs, while they may not have done anything for a buck, never lost sight of H. L. Mencken’s dictum that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Breathtaking amounts of money were offered to buy the ship, bones and all, and turn it into a tourist attraction.

           Fortunately the Japanese hold their dead in higher regard. Locks of hair were retrieved and the remains were cremated in a proper Buddhist funeral service. Both the hair and the ashes were sent home to grieving families.

           The last hopes of free enterprise were dashed when, at the owners’ request, Ryo Yei Maru’s storm-worn hulk was doused with oil and set ablaze on Richmond Beach opposite Seattle on the southern shore of Puget Sound.  Several Japanese families came down to the waterside to witness the tragic pyre. They were struck, comforted perhaps, as a flock of white gulls congregated above the burning ship, as if waiting to escort the souls of  the twelve fishermen home.

 

The Way We Were

Note: This article was published in the November 2012 issue of Good Old Boat magazine.

          Boats and books each do the same thing. They transport you to distant places and, if their builders have knocked together craft that are good and true, to another time as well.

          Just such a craft found itself hard aground on the sale table at the Mariners Museum’s library in Newport News, Virginia.(The Compleat Cruiser; The Art, Practice and Enjoyment of Boating, by L. Francis Herreshoff, Sheridan House, New York, N.Y., 1956.) Its original cover price was five dollars, but for less than a buck I booked passage back to when our cars had huge tail fins and whitewall tires, we all liked Ike and Mickey Mantle’s bats and Herreschoff’s boats were made out of wood.

                The Compleat Cruiser is a book well read. L. Francis brings us a snootful of nautical knowledge, just as you’d expect  a Herreshoff to do. It comes to us in the comically stilted instructional dialogue between Mr. Goddard and his daughter Primrose (Honest!) as they cruise around southern New England aboard their 32-foot ketch Viator.

                 The dust jacket alone tells you all you really need to know about the way we were in the mid-1950s. The cutaway end view of Viator presents us with Mr. Goddard and one of his male friends, probably Mr. Coridon  from the 24-foot catboat Piscator, sitting in the cabin after dinner. Mr. Goddard puffs contentedly on his pipe watching proudly as a beskirted, halter topped, perfectly coiffed Mrs. Goddard pours the coffee with a beatific smile. Her June Cleaver image is spoiled only by the fact that she appears to be wearing boat shoes instead of heels.

                Mrs. Muldoon saw this illustration after a long, hot day of cutting and positioning fiberglass panels during a lurid affair involving rotted out chain plates.

                “That’ll be the day,” she snorted after getting rid of her respirator and safety goggles and combing a small blizzard of fiberglass dust from her hair. She poured not coffee, but did crack open a couple of beers to mark the end of a hot Virginia afternoon.

                It should be obvious by now that Mrs. Muldoon, Karen, is a first rate cruising sailor who has been known to do her nails with a rigging knife and is quite proud to be known as a Boat Babe. What can you say about a lady who lathers up epoxy and sheets of fiberglass with the aplomb of Julia Child in her kitchen and can install what felt like a nine thousand pound cast iron exhaust mixing elbow without swearing like…well, a sailor?

                Mrs. Goddard laments leaving her pinking shears and material at home, preventing her from deriving something from the fashion magazines and dress patterns that she brought along on the cruise. At one point Goddard left his wife, daughter Prim and her friend Veronica in the cabin making dresses while he took the dinghy on a row around the anchorage assessing, judging and advising on various boaty bits as a real Herreschoff should.

                This must have been on a subsequent cruise when Mrs. G did remember to bring her pinking shears, etc.

                 It’s true that cruising under sail sometimes raises hell with the body and spirit of femininity, but to suggest that a 21^st Century Boat Babe lay below to make dresses is certain to earn you a swift kick in the flotation device.

                The Compleat Cruiser  also overflows with the old time contempt for powerboats, which Herreshoff dismisses as “chrome plated noisemakers.” His disdain even extends to sailing right past a powerboat struggling in a squall on Vineyard Sound  between Edgartown and Cuttyhunk. Goddard tells his crew that it would have been difficult at best for Viator to have aided the storm tossed noisemaker but also that “it is not customary for sailboats to offer assistance to a power boat.”

                Well, excuse me!  Both times I’ve needed assistance getting my Golden Gate 30 sloop off the bricks (once in the Cape May Canal and once on the way into Deltaville, Va. from the Rappanhannock River) it’s come from a power boat. We’ve all been annoyed by careless wakes and howling watercraft, but there are times when a chrome plated noisemaker comes in damned handy.

                To be fair, Herreshoff’s view of Boat Babes is not really all that retrograde. Primrose and her friend Veronica are smart, capable and cheerful young sailors, the kind of kids you’d take aboard in a minute. Goddard is well aware of this. As Herresoff’s avatar, Goddard has a lot to teach and confidence that Prim and Veronica are more than capable of absorbing it.

                Herreschoff  is not at all dismissive, contemptuous or hostile towards women.  He is reflective of how mid-20th Century sailors looked not so much at women but at sailing itself.

                While the fictional Goddard set off on a cruise with his wife, his daughter and her girlfriend, the boat itself was looked at as the definitive man cave. It was a place where real guys could befog the cabin with cigar smoke, brag about ribald  adventures with the lighthouse keeper’s daughter and pee over the side without a single civilizing influence to spoil the fun.

                The great designer Philip Rhodes reportedly never included a double berth in any of his otherwise perfectly elegant yachts.  Cruising under sail was supposed to be a male bonding experience just as, I suppose, dressmaking was supposed to be for the ladies of Goddard’s Viator.

                A sailor’s bookshelf is ill found without a copy of The Compleat Cruiser, for the knowledge passed on to Prim and Veronica is passed on to all of us. There is basic knowledge, especially of cruising southern New England waters, that remains valid in the 21^st Century and the romance of small ships and the sea that can never pass out of style.

                But what modern Boat Babe is going to sacrifice a golden day at anchor at Block Island or behind Gibson Island in the Chesapeake in favor of making dresses when all she need do is run directly downwind to Talbot’s or the Dress Barn?

                It’s impossible to realize how far we’ve come in fifty-five years without looking back at the way we used to be.

             

 

Welcome

 

Welcome to the Sailor’s Snug where we will spin salty yarns – most of which have already been published in various sailing magazines such as Good Old Boat, Professional Mariner, Sail, Cruising World, Chesapeake Bay Magazine etc.

We hope you will find them humorous, entertaining and informative.

We’re also working on three salty novels and will tell you more as they progress.

Check back.  We hope to post our first article shortly.

Tony and Karen Muldoon