The Wreck of the Schooner D. Gifford

There was another wreck, too. On your father’s side.

In the first granite fleets, sloops were preferred for the ease with which they could be rigged with a derrick boom for on- and off-loading stone. This meant the crews literally lashed a small crane arm to the single mast. Later, when coasting operations were less discerning and simply required a working craft to haul the stonemen’s cargo, two-, three-, and four-masted schooners were modified to join the granite trade. To accommodate the boom, shipwrights moved the main mast as far aft as was possible, a retrofit that made many a rig disproportioned and, when under sail, unmistakable, especially when loaded low with a hull of stone.

The D. Gifford was one such rig. Built in 1862 in Mays Landing, New Jersey, she likely came to coasting from the Cotton Fleet, which sailed the Gulf Stream from Savannah to New York. By 1906 she would have been a stodgy looking ship. About the stone trade, one historian wrote, “It was rough and heavy work and the last resort of many an old vessel that had seen her best days.” 

Most trade schooners sailed hard for 20 years and then were scrapped. Here she was, twice that, working the North Atlantic.              

By the time your father’s father got hold of the D. Gifford, she’d run aground at least once, sunk twice and was floated both times. 

In 1900 she went down off Boston’s Deer Island. Captain J.J. Donovan said the storm came off Bakers Island and she fiercely leaked. They pumped and pumped and even lashed themselves to the pump. But it wasn’t enough. Eventually she went twenty feet down and they abandoned ship. But the schooner and cargo were insured, and she was eventually floated. Even the coal was saved. 

Three years later, coasting from South Amboy, New Jersey, to Newburyport, again hauling coal, she ran aground at Vineyard Haven and then, within a week’s time, sank at Rockport in Pigeon’s Cove. 

Again she was floated, again her cargo recovered. 

But of course your grandfather wouldn’t be so lucky. He was twenty-three, newly married to Southport’s Sarah Alley. At nineteen he’d gone to sea and spent his first two years in the South American trade. Started as a cook, worked his way to mate and boatswain, and eventually captained the D. Gifford. According to the newspapers, he owned her outright. According to a note scrawled in your father’s pen, the Gifford was owned by Southport, Maine, stakeholders. Their family, their friends, their neighbors.

She was 112 feet of freedom from his father and his father’s father. She was three masts of self-sufficiency, a self-ordained coasting legacy laid out before him. 

Until that spring of 1906.

You told me the story on Molly’s Point. This was after Mom moved out and rented that duplex on the river. Probably you told me earlier, but this time I remember. 

We drive to Maine for April break. I’m in the fourth grade, and it’s my birthday. An off-season trip was a treat. North to Worcester, then the slog of 495. Lowell and Lawrence and into the sliver of New Hampshire. We pull off at the Welcome Center. Outside was cool and gray. I wore my matching anorak and shorts with spandex built in. Cobalt blue you let me pick out from the L.L. Bean catalog. I stretched my calves and hammies on the old Oldsmobile with the wood paneling, one leg up and then another, like they taught us in P.E. I was convinced I looked part of a team. Cross country, maybe. 

In truth I was a fat kid with a bowl cut about to turn ten.

At Molly’s Point you reminded me not to use the bathroom, that the city water didn’t come on for another few weeks. Pa checked the electric toilet upstairs. He was always testing it in the summertime, turning someone’s turd to smoke, which puffed into the afternoon from a vent above the door.

It’s good to have a working john, you said.

In the morning you ordered birthday cake from the island bakery. We listened to a baseball game on the radio. That night you tucked me in downstairs in one of the twin beds set beneath four walls of photographs. Mostly tugs and steamers from the Boothbay Line. Some schooners. You took one frame down. That three-master, you said, pointing at a vessel set off behind two others docked at a wharf, was the D. Gifford.

Then you told the story. 

Oh to hear you tell it again, how your grandfather owned that ship once, how they wrecked on the Reef of Norman’s Woe when a storm chased them into Gloucester with a hull full of paving stone, how the gale was so wicked they lashed themselves to masts, how otherwise they would have gone with her.

At some point you shared the letter.

You said to read it.

Look at the date, you said. 

It was my dated birthday. 

Gloucester, Apr. 10. 

Read it, you said. 

So I did. 

Sadie, he said. He supposed she’d heard of the wreck by now. They had a hard time of it. They came in just after dark last night and after one it commenced to breeze up and by half five this morning they went ashore and the sea broke all over her. It was running mast head high. If the lifesavers hadn’t come they would have gone with her. He didn’t know when he’d be home again. He thought it would take a week. I am discouraged, he said. I wonder if you’ll think the same of me. He said, You are all I have got to live for now, Sadie. For god sake, don’t think any the worse of me. I have lost about everything we have got, but I saved my good clothes. 

You cried. I thought I should cry too but didn’t know why. 

Soon there were headlights in the drive. I kneeled on the bed, Pa came in, and you both looked on happily, knowingly. Outside in the night was Dad, stepping out of that little Ford pickup, still in his suit, duffel on his hip, climbing the stairs.

I wouldn’t miss it, Dad said.

He and I shared the downstairs room. The photograph of the Gifford hung over us like a ghost. But all I could think about was Mom. How she was missing out. How I wished she could be here too. How I needed to have a birthday celebration with her when we got back, just to keep it even.

Your grandfather and his crew, if they left from Boothbay, likely sailed the Gifford downeast past South Bristol and Yellow Head, then Port Clyde and Spruce Head, through the Fox Islands and Merchant Row to the Mount Desert Narrows, and finally to Sullivan. She was flying light, an empty hull, her bowsprit like a spire high in the spring air. Then she docked, on-loaded 26,000 paving stones from a Sullivan’s Island quarry operated, no joke, by the Booth Brothers Granite Company. 

That’s right. Before you were born. Before the families came together and before your parents made a pair, your mother’s clan of quarrymen sold and loaded stone into a schooner owned and operated by your father’s clan of seamen. 

Then they turned toward New York. Crawling. Deep-loaded now. A stone coaster was often packed close to the point of sinking. Her hatches were double-battened, her pumps running day and night without rest. 

In a file you left behind is an anonymous account of the Gifford’s few days that followed. Surely someone in the family. It claims they anchored outside Gloucester Harbor at Magnolia Point. Further south, more exposed, than where the newsmen place her on the Pancake Ground, known by seamen for centuries as a reliable refuge. I have reason to believe the papers. Your grandfather, you always said, was a savvy seaman. But the family narrative also claims “the skies looked ominous” the night before but that “the weather glass didn’t drop so instead of seeking the safety of Portland Harbor [the Gifford] continued toward Boston.” 

Both things can be true: he made a grave mistake when he forewent Portland, but when he finally chose his place to wait out the storm, he chose a proper spot. 

The Gifford, I believe, arrived in Gloucester Harbor just past dark.

Captain Nelson King, head of the Gloucester Lifesaving Station, said he noticed late on 9 April that the Gifford was in concerning position, which suggests that, if they had in fact anchored at the Pancake Ground, they dragged or drifted considerably. The Lifesavers monitored her closely. But I wonder how. There wouldn’t have been a moon. The lights from the shore couldn’t have illuminated the water. 

In his letter, your grandfather notes the sea was running “mast head high,” which for a three-master could mean seventy feet. And that’s in a harbor. Which seems unlikely. Or did he mean seventy-foot seas on their way into the shelter of Gloucester? 

A masthead can also mean the place on the stern where her name is printed for the rest of the ocean to see. 

In the grandest case, it’s waves like the ones the surfers ride off the coast of Portugal. Like the one in that famous photograph of the lighthouse, La Jument, in France from that storm in ’89.

Did they light lamps below deck. Did someone cook a meal. Say a prayer. All of it in a wicked spring gale.

They set a kedge. A second anchor placed in safety’s direction by a smaller craft. Two men—their crew was just six—rowed with that anchor and a sturdy length of line or chain. They dropped it away from the danger, away from the Field Rocks and Norman’s Woe, away, presumably, from the west side of the harbor, further east toward from where they’d dragged, toward the Pancake Ground, and upon their return, they, with the rest of the crew, attempted to haul by hand the schooner back into a safer position. 

By break of day, Captain King ordered the launch of the big surfboat, an open-air dory, paddled from shore and onto which drowning men were brought aboard. When King and his crew came upon the Gifford—its two anchors dragged across the harbor, its stone-loaded hull aground on the sharp shallows of Gloucester Harbor—I imagine my great-great-grandfather and his mates were in a state. Wet canvas and wool. Numb hands and feet. Ice on the sails, on the derrick boom. Cold like lead.

The lifesavers signaled for a pair of tugs but the sea and wind were so wicked nothing could be done.

Simply, quickly, the Gifford struck the Field Rocks. They had just “cleared the side of the vessel . . . [when] she gave a deep lurch to starboard and settled on the bottom of the shoal water.”

Completely gone in minutes.

That the spot of the wreck, out on the Field Rocks near Freshwater Cove, would have been visible from the lifesaving station on Dulliver’s Neck, which is where your grandfather wrote home to his young wife. Your grandmother. 

Sadie, he said, “I almost wish I had gone with her.”

I imagine him wrapped in a blanket. His good clothes, the ones he saved, soaked right through, now drying by fire. I wonder who he asked for paper, quill, and ink. Did he get it right the first time or were there crumpled drafts at his pruney feet? What was a man to say to the woman at home with his small children in Maine?

By 11 the next morning, the Gifford’s “keel had ground away, the house and a part of the deck were gone,” but “the masts still held at that hour.” What a sound and sight it must have been beneath the wind. A splintered heap. Two hundred tons shattered in the shallows. And three masts like beacons in the cold morning.

I finally shook thoughts of Mom alone in her apartment by the river, and fell asleep, Dad in the bed beside me. Outside the first flakes of a spring storm fell into the night, and by sunrise there was a half-foot of fresh snow. I wanted to melt it into pots for drinking but there was plenty of bottled water. Both tubs were full. The power was out. We peed off the deck, and I looped my initials in the white below. Someone went for the cake. When it came time to sing, you put ten candles in. Dad cut me a piece and immediately we smelled kerosene. Kerosene like never before. You said the bakery’s power was out too, that it smelled in there of kerosene too, that somehow it made it in. I imagined heating oil mistaken for cooking oil. At the time, it seemed remarkable we weren’t getting sick. 

I took a couple bites but couldn’t stand it.

And that was all. No cake. No electricity. Which was disappointing and fun all at once. Like camping. Though it’s true Mom loved camping too. And even now can I taste that cake like poison on my tongue.

Naturally there’s a gap between what you told me and what’s been documented in the news, and I’m back and forth on which story to choose. A case study, I guess, in a generational game of telephone. In the document from the family—it’s just a photocopy, typewritten—whoever penned it claims the “crew’s only hope was to lash themselves to the rigging for a night of horror in subfreezing wind and wet snow. Exposed and exhausted, they faced certain death before dawn.”

You told it that way too: that they lashed themselves down. But did you just read it where I’m reading it now? There’s nothing in the letter home about that. And there’s nothing about certain death. Your grandfather doesn’t sound like a man who almost died. He sounds instead like a man who understood what he stood to lose and lost it in a single night at sea.

The way you told it, I imagined the ropes. I saw an older man. Not a man of twenty-three. I saw white caps and waves thrashing over the rails, the bowsprit coated with ice.

I wonder now, if since I can see still in my mind, if seeing it my mind somehow makes it true. I wonder, too, about the end of that Longfellow poem:

  At daybreak, on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,

To see the form of maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
             The salt tears in her eyes.

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-week,
           On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,
          In the midnight and the snow!

Christ save us all from a death like this,
          On the reef of Norman’s Woe!

But the Gifford, it seems, was several hundred yards to the north and never struck Norman’s Woe. You told it one way and it was another. But it isn’t far from where she went down on the Field Rocks in Freshwater Cove.

A year later, the wreck, what was left of it, washed ashore at Pavilion Beach. This is at the head of Gloucester Harbor, where, allegedly, she was “removed by the owner.” By then your grandfather had survived another wreck and taken the first mate gig aboard the steamship Yale, which effectively ended his short career of coasting and running stone.

This I can’t shake: 

I picture him on a train, though more likely another schooner brought him back to Gloucester. That trip, however it went, was slow. Time for quiet. Top of mind was that spring storm the year before. I wonder if it bankrupted him and his investors. I wonder what became of his standing in the community, among his family and his friends.

I know he moved south to New London in the years that followed. That he eventually resigned his post from the Yale. That he started selling seafood at G.M. Long. Cod. Oysters. Lobster. There were seven children. Safe and steady work offered stability.

He became partner and, later, sole owner. And then in September 1938, the storm of the century wiped his business off the riverbank and into Long Island Sound.

But now he was just twenty-four. What exactly was he recovering from the beach north of Boston? Hardware and rigging. Cracked china and glass. An anchor. A chest of ledgers and letters and investors’ requests.

The paving stones from the Booth quarry downeast, uninsured and valued at $30,000, stayed, presumably forever, on the ocean floor.