Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea (12 page)

T
HE BRIG
M
ARINE
had drifted so far to leeward that she now lay five miles off, the sea making a clean sweep over her deck. Most of the women sat or stood in the water on deck, holding on to their children and on to each other, watching for the lifeboats to arrive on their second trip from the steamer. Each expected her husband to be in the next boat.

Looking back across the distance they had come in the small lifeboats, they could see the steamer. “The fog cleared away,” remembered one, “and we saw the steamer very distinctly against the sunset clouds.” With the sky growing dark, the women’s fear for the safety of their husbands renewed, but they had seen a sail near the steamer, a schooner, which buoyed their hopes.

Addie Easton was among those on deck, looking out toward the steamer, searching the water for the first of the lifeboats. Her only thought was for her husband, and although the water on the
Marine
deck often ran a foot and a half deep, no one could prevail upon her to go below. Surely, she thought, her husband would be in the first boat. But as she searched the faces, she could see that it was the bos’n steering the boat alongside, and that it held but three women, Mr. Payne, the
engineer Ashby, and other men she did not recognize. She kept her vigil for the next boat.

Ashby leaped aboard the
Marine
and immediately relayed Captain Herndon’s request that Captain Burt work his way closer to the crippled steamer. He had been trying, said Burt, but with no mainyard, no main topsail, and no jibboom, he could not work to the windward. Ashby then implored him for the use of his lifeboat. He could have the boat, said Burt, but it was only a yawl and would last but a moment in such seas. Ashby offered him five hundred dollars to get the brig “alongside” the
Central America
, and Burt repeated his statement, that in its condition his vessel could not be coaxed closer.

While Ashby pleaded with Captain Burt, John Black appealed to his oarsmen for a third trip, this one with the distance between the two ships now grown to over five miles, every pull a fight against heavy seas and strong winds. With their tacit consent, John Black shoved off once more.

Addie Easton now spied another lifeboat tossing in the waves, coming closer to the brig, filled with men. Her hopes rose, and as the boat neared, her eyes combed every man.

“With anxious heart and a choking fear,” she recalled, “I saw a third boat come close to the ship and in it was not the one I longed to see.”

When the men in the boats had safely transferred to the brig’s deck, the oarsmen pulled in their oars and refused to embark on a third trip. The women pleaded with them to return, and Captain Burt also spoke to them, but to no avail.

Ashby jumped into one of the boats, screaming an offer of one hundred dollars for any man who would get in and help pull for the steamer. One oarsman said he would return to the steamer for no pay if she were fifty miles away, but two men could not pull a lifeboat in those seas.

One woman remembered, “Mr. Ashby called loudly from the boat, ‘If you have any humanity in you, for God’s sake, come back to the ship!’ He and one boatman were ready, and if he could get another man, they would have been able to row back.”

The oarsmen had been in the lifeboats with no rest for six hours. Their legs were cramped and strained, their back, shoulder, and arm muscles knotted from pulling against the sea. For twenty-four hours prior to launching the lifeboats they had bailed and pumped without
stopping, and for nearly two days they had had no sleep and little or no food. Plus, the two boats leaked from being smashed against the sides of the two ships and having their timbers stove in. The battle back to the steamer would be against the wind and the sea for many miles, and when they arrived, they knew the scene that would be waiting for them: five hundred men facing death and looking at the twenty-passenger lifeboats as their only salvation, and now, with the women and children gone, not even chivalry to hold them back.

Ashby climbed out of the boat and accosted passengers on deck whom he claimed were deserted sailors. “He tried to make me leave the brig,” said one man, “and pull the boat back to the steamer, pretending that I was one of the steamer’s men who had deserted, and that he had come after me. I think he did this to cover his own desertion. The captain of the brig told me to stay where I was.”

One oarsman said they could never reach the ship again, and he refused to leave in his damaged boat. Finally, Ashby gave up, and with that went his promise to Captain Herndon.

O
NLY THE BOS
’
N
Black had yet to return from his last trip to the steamer. The other crews dropped their two boats astern and bailed them out and fastened them to the brig.

“It was growing dark,” remembered Addie, “and the boatmen refused to go back again to the ship. I put my face down in my hands, too wretched to speak, reproaching myself that I had not stayed with him, regretting that I had not defied Captain and all when they commanded us to leave.”

Then someone touched her on the shoulder, and she heard the voice of Captain Burt.

“Here’s a letter from your husband, Mrs. Easton. It was brought by someone in the last boat.” He handed her a small scrap of blue paper.

“My Dear Wife,” Ansel had written. “If the captain of the ‘Marine’ will send a boat forward for me, you can give him what he will ask. I will watch for it and be on hand. Your aff husband, A.I.E.”

Addie pleaded with Captain Burt to send one of his own lifeboats to the
Central America
to rescue her husband. The captain told her, as he had Ashby, that his only boat could not survive in a sea such as this, especially now that darkness was setting in.

“But Captain,” she pleaded, “they may all die before morning. Anything, ten thousand dollars if you will send another boat.”

“My dear, dear lady,” he replied, “if I could send it, one should go without a cent of money, but a boat such as we have would not live a moment in such a sea. I will try to take the brig nearer the steamer and she will probably float until the morning.”

“Language fails me to give even a faint description of that night,” wrote Addie. “If anything it was worse than the one previous. There were thirty women and twenty six children in a cabin but very little larger than a
little
parlor, and most of us sitting on the floor, while every wave dashed over the brig and most of the time, the water was several inches deep. We were all wet, and I had not one dry thread on me, but I was not conscious of my physical sufferings, my agony of mind was so much greater.”

The widow Ann Small had been lowered into the third lifeboat, but it had loaded quickly and cast off before the second lifeboat. Throughout the entire trip she had suffered the uncertainty of her two-year-old daughter’s fate. But on the brig they were reunited. “I afterwards learned that Captain Herndon took charge of her, and sent her to me by another boat, by a lady named Mrs. Kittredge, who handed the child to me soon after I reached the
Marine
.” She now went back out on deck, her daughter safely in her arms, and sat looking out across the waves.

“It was a melancholy spectacle we were now compelled to witness,” she said later. “Two staunch lifeboats floated uselessly upon the rough waves, while the wreck of the steamer, black with people, was visibly sinking before our eyes.”

Some of the women had gone down to the brig’s small cabin, there to comfort and feed their children and to strip off their wet clothing and don the wardrobes of pantaloons and shirts offered them by Captain Burt’s sailors. Looking through a windward scuttle they could make out lights burning a few miles away on the
Central America
. In the cabin, Virginia Birch reached into the bosom of her dress and carefully retrieved the little canary. Its feathers were disarranged, but it was still alive, and placed in a cage, it began to sing.

The sea still ran high and the wind blew hard, but the storm at last seemed to be passing. Captain Burt continued trying to work his way
closer to the steamer, his brig so badly disabled he had to tack in a circle of several miles.

Addie was on deck with other women, watching the only thing they could see now in the darkness that had descended over the Atlantic. “As we came back towards the steamer we watched her lights flashing,” remembered Addie. “Suddenly a rocket shot out obliquely, the lights disappeared beneath the waves, and all the world grew dark for me.”

Late that night, the sky black, the
Marine
’s lamps only dimly illuminating her flooded deck, the men and women aboard heard the creaking of oarlocks. Into the dim light, rising and dropping with the waves, glided the boat of the bos’n John Black, his oarsmen beyond exhaustion, his boat beaten by the sea and filled with water.

Black had left the
Marine
for his last trip to the steamer about six o’clock, when the sea was running high and confused. Still some distance from the steamer he had seen a fore-and-aft schooner round her stern and cross her bow, and then he had lost sight of the schooner. His boat made the steamer about half past seven. By then it was dark and the ship was sending up distress rockets, the uppermost part of her deck now nearly even with the waterline. Black had seen Captain Herndon and Second Officer Frazer on the wheelhouse, and Herndon had sighted the boat in the dark and hailed Black, who reported that his boat was stove and leaking. Herndon directed him to keep off at a hundred yards. Minutes later Black had seen a rocket come off the
Central America
wheelhouse at an odd angle, not high and arcing but straight out across the ocean.

Save for the exhausted oarsmen and excessive seawater, Black’s lifeboat was empty. He came alongside and looked up at the men and women gathered on deck. “The steamer has gone down,” he said, “and every soul on board of her lost.”

TOMMY

DEFIANCE, OHIO

T
HE
1960
S

A
T THE CONFLUENCE
of the Maumee and the Auglaize rivers, the town of Defiance, Ohio, is an island of homes in a sea of tilled brown earth, with silos and black-and-white cows and brush-pile fires and big barns and white-frame farmhouses all floating in the landscape. Here dwell small-town insurance agents and fifteen-year-old boys with large hands, whose vision of the future stops on the Buckeye gridiron in Columbus, two and a half hours by car to the southeast.

In 1787, Congress ordered a fort built here, where the two rivers meet far up in the Northwest Territory, and when the fort was completed, General “Mad Anthony” Wayne told one of his colonels, “I defy the English, the Indians, and all the devils in hell to take it!” Fort Defiance it became, and later the town of Defiance, with a population in the
1960s of eighteen thousand, many of whom worked at the General Motors foundry with its tall stacks visible to the south across a little roll of hills, or the Johns-Manville factory to the east no more than a mile.

In town, another institution older than either the foundry or the factory had sat at the corner of Fifth and Clinton since before the depression: Kissner’s restaurant, where Tommy Thompson and Barry Schatz and some of their friends often stopped on the way home from school for a brain sandwich.

“Got any brains today?” they would ask Bruno Kissner, and he would always reply, “If I did, I wouldn’t be working here.”

That was part of the reason they went to Kissner’s, just to ask the question; the other part was they liked eating brains, pig or cow, Tommy for the novel idea, Barry for the taste. Barry liked his brains open-face on toasted rye. When he was seven years old, he had also loved oyster sandwiches, early glimmers of a young wanderluster and epicure. Tommy never much cared when he ate or even if he ate; like the rest of life, food was only something to wonder at and explore.

Born in 1952, Tommy and Barry shared the same birthday, April 15, tax day, and the same day forty years earlier that the
Titanic
had gone to the bottom in an icy sea. They had become friends in the seventh grade, when Tommy’s family moved to Defiance from Huntington, Indiana.

Tommy’s father, John, was an engineer, and his mother, Phyllis, was a nutritionist. They had met while in college at Purdue. Early in their family life, they had seen polio strike both of their daughters, Patty and Sandee. Patty had a mild case and recovered quickly; Sandee’s condition was worse. Twice doctors called John at work and told him to come home immediately or he might not see her alive again. After surviving both episodes, she could move only her left elbow, and doctors said she would never again sit up. But Phyllis massaged her arms and her legs and her back at intervals, all day and all night, for weeks and then for months. And Sandee sat up. And then she stood, and then she walked, and then she ran, and then she became a cheerleader and won a college scholarship for cheerleading and singing, and for years the media and the doctors would interview John and Phyllis about her recovery. The experience gave them whatever additional perspective they needed to
see the value of family. John Thompson wanted to be home from work at five. He wanted his kids in small schools, growing up in a small town surrounded by a countryside of white farmhouses. Tommy lived his first twelve years in neighborhoods where he could drive the three-wheel hot rod he and his dad had built around the block, around and around, out in the street, until all the tires wore off. Two blocks over were fields of corn.

The Thompson household was an eclectic mix of conservative values and liberal views: Make it instead of buy it; repair it instead of replace it; curfews for Patty, Sandee, John Jr., and Tommy; church every Sunday for everybody, at the church where John’s father preached. But the kids could pedal their tricycles around the basement and paint their own rooms whatever color they wanted. Phyllis made sure they got the paint. They could go to a dirty movie or read a dirty book if they wanted to, as long as they told their parents, so John and Phyllis could see the same movie or read the same book and talk to them about it. When a black gospel singer came to sing in Huntington, where blacks could not stay the night in a motel or eat in a restaurant, she was welcome for dinner at the Thompson home. The kids set the table and sang with her at the piano.