USA > New York > Nassau County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume I > Part 59
USA > New York > Suffolk County > Long Island; a history of two great counties, Nassau and Suffolk, Volume I > Part 59
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The story of the America's triumph is well known. Steers accom- panied the crew which sailed her across the ocean for the Royal Regatta of 1851. There, ridiculed by English yachtsmen as a glori- fied Sandy Hook pilot-boat, the smallest entry in a fleet of fifteen yachts, she won the fifty-three mile contest and brought what is known as the America cup back to this country where it has since remained. In 1921, seventy years after her triumph, the America was acquired by popular subscription for the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis where she has since been preserved, a real monument to the Long Islander who designed lier.
W. ..
Birthplace, at Yaphank, of Mary Louise Booth, Famous Author and First Editor of Harper's Bazaar, 1867
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Another famous Long Island ship was the schooner Wanderer, built by W. J. Rowland at Port Jefferson for Colonel John D. John- son of Islip in 1857. Flying the burgee of the New York Yacht Club of which Johnson was a member, this rakish 114-foot vessel outsailed all others of her class, was later sold to Southern slave runners and became the most infamous craft of her day in that illicit trade. In the opinion of one southern writer, Dolores B. Colquitt, the Wanderer's exploits aided materially in "precipitating the Civil War". She made one voyage from Africa to Georgia with a cargo of 600 slaves, half of whom died enroute, which brought about a Congressional investigation.
This ship, confiscated twice by the United States government only to be recovered both times through the courts by her Southern owners, eventually served the federal cause during the war against southern privateers. Following the conflict she was acquired by a trading con- cern of Rockland, Maine, which entered her in the West Indies trade. During this period, it has been claimed, she could still outsail anything of her size, but in 1871, caught in a gale off the easterly coast of Cuba, she was wrecked on Cape Maisi and abandoned.
The Wanderer was by no means the only Long Island vessel to run afoul of the law. Wrote Harry D. Sleight, Sag Harbor historian : "Many of the old whaleships were peculiarly and fittingly constructed for ready conversion into slave carriers, and it is known that some of them embarked into unlawful traffic." The Marion, built at Sag Harbor, sailed the Congo-Cuban route under the notorious slaver, Manuel Petro, and finally, like Napoleon, ended her days in durance vile at St. Helena. The Montauk, another Sag Harbor vessel, went to Captain Quayle of New York who dealt in "ebony immigrants." The so-called whaling ships Romulus and Augusta slid from Long Island vards into brief careers of slave-running. Appleton Oaksmith of Patchogue had Jesse Carll of Northport build him the fast, roomy bark Early Bird, only to have her and himself captured red-handed by federal agents while running slaves through Fire Island Inlet. The Early Bird went to Uncle Sam while Oaksmith, scapegrace son of the nationally known poets, Elizabeth Oaksmith and her husband, Jack Downing, whose home was in Patchogue, went to Charlestown prison at Boston.
Perhaps the most famous vessel ever built at a Long Island shipyard was the historic Monitor, launched during the Civil War at a yard on the East River. Seven similar vessels were also built there. James M. Bayles' shipyard at Setauket, later J. M. Bayles & Son, in 1868 built the Carib, one of the most luxurious barks of her day. More than one hundred vessels of between two hundred and a thousand tons displacement were built by this firm.
Other Port Jefferson-Setauket shipbuilders of the nineteenth century were John Wilse and his son John, William L. Jones, James R. Davies, Joseph and W. J. Rowland, "Uncle" David Bayles, Jere- miah Darling, Richard and John R. Mather, William Bacon, Vincent Dickerson, Nehemiah Hand and another Bayles, James E. It is esti- mated that these men produced 317 vessels with a total tonnage of
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51,521. Two-thirds of these ships were schooners, but also included were brigs, barks, six steamboats and one gunboat. The last large wooden vessel built at Port Jefferson was the four-masted schooner Martha E. Wallace, launched in 1903 to be lost a few years later on Cape Hatteras.
John R. Mather, whose father Richard had established a shipyard at Port Jefferson in 1809 and who had built a small gunboat for the United States during the War of 1812, became one of the island's best known shipbuilders, sharing the distinction with Nehemiah Hand of Setauket who opened his yard in 1836. Hand's schooner Flying Eagle, built in 1853, won considerable renown by crossing the Atlantic with a cargo of rum and pepper during the Crimean War, sailing the length of the Mediterranean and running the British blockade.
Hand, having completed the schooner Aldebaran just previous to the outbreak of the Civil War, placed his nineteen-year-old son, Robert E. Hand, in command and sent her south. She left Charleston harbor the day that Fort Sumter was fired upon and before she reached Setauket the Rebellion was on. Thereafter the Aldebaran ran into one adventure after another until in 1863 she was captured by the privateer Florida, plundered and burned. Thirteen years later the United States government paid Hand $30,160 with interest at four per cent for the loss of his ship and cargo.
"Boss" Hand was a man of strong convictions, among them an utter disbelief in marine insurance, arguing that "if companies make money insuring poor vessels, I can save money by running my own risks on good vessels." He was also opposed to compulsory pilotage and waged a long but unsuccessful fight against the law which created it.
William Bacon built the Mary and Louise at East Setauket. When, following a successful voyage to Italy and return, this trim square- rigger sailed for China in 1858, her cabinboy was one Egbert Bull Smith who later wrote a book which he called The Voyage of the Two Sisters. With Captain Benjamin Jones on this voyage also went his young bride to spend two years in Asiatic waters where the vessel carried on trade between China and Japan.
The Mary and Louise was not, however, the first Long Island vessel to enter Japanese waters. In 1845 the Sag Harbor whaleship Manhattan, captained by Mercator Cooper of Southampton, entered the forbidden harbor of what is now Tokyo to deliver several ship- wrecked Japanese sailors who had been rescued from their sinking junk some weeks before. This Long Island whaleship was probably the first American vessel to reach Japan. According to Historian Sleight, a chart of Japanese waters acquired by Captain Cooper on this visit was used by Commodore Perry on his official voyage to the Nipponese kingdom some seven years later.
About the middle of the nineteenth century there were four ship- yards in Northport. Moses B. Hartt ran one; David and Jesse Carll another; Samuel Prior Hart and Captain Lefferts others. Each yard had its own blacksmith shop and nowhere on the island was there produced a greater variety of boats, nor were so many large vessels
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overhauled. The sailing ship Ricardo Barras was brought all the way from Brazil to be overhauled at the Carll yard.
It was Jesse Carll who built the double-decked, center-board vessel Rudd for Woodhouse & Rudd of New York to be used in the Mexican trade. This firm specified that the ship must be as near hurricane- proof as possible, a quality which she soon had a chance to demon- strate. While lying at anchor off Brajos on the Gulf of Mexico, the Rudd was picked up by a tidal wave and swept inland for a distance of more than a mile. When word of her plight reached the owners they decided to abandon her as less costly than to attempt salvage operations. But Jesse Carll had more faith in the vessel which he had built.
Taking passage south, he made his way to the stranded ship and studied her position. He then engaged a force of peons, rented a shovel dredge and dug a canal back to deep water, an operation which took a full year. The Northport schooner was eventually floated, scarcely damaged from her unusual experience. To cap the climax, the Rudd took on a cargo of hides, wool and lead at Brajos which, according to the Carll scrapbook, preserved by descendants of the shipbuilder, "paid the full cost of salvage operations."
Some years later the Rudd became one of the very few Long Island ships on which mutiny occurred. Her captain, however, sub- dued the uprising with a shotgun after his first and second mates had been tossed over the rail to their death.
In 1880 Jesse Carll launched his masterpiece, the 1100-ton bark Mary Greenwood which was used for some years in round-the-world commerce. She was among the fastest merchant ships of her size.
While, as previously stated, the north shore yards specialized in the building of barks and brigs, the south shore of the island became equally famous for sloops and catboats of much lighter draught. One of Patchogue's early shipbuilders was Phineas Rose who, having built a number of light draught boats, decided to try his skill on a sloop of much greater tonnage. Having completed the vessel and launched it in Great South Bay, he chose to become its sailing master and entered the West Indies trade. On one such voyage, however, the sloop, together with Rose and his crew, was lost just off Fire Island.
Hiram and D. Gunoe also operated a shipyard at Patchogue, using horses to haul their sloops and catboats into deep water. Another practice of shipbuilders of those days in order to launch vessels through shallow water was to invite boys to come aboard and run races up and down the deck, thus shifting their combined weight back and forth to provide motion that would rock the vessel over the sand as the horses hauled her forward.
Another builder at Patchogue in the early days was Oliver Perry Smith whose yard was west of the village. Later his son Martemus won renown as a designer and builder of small racing sloops and catboats. One of his sloops captured first honors in the international sonder class races held off Marblehead, Massachusetts, about 1900.
This Certifies, That
John burtis
is entitled to Five
shares in the stock of the President, Directors and Company of the Bethpage Turnpike Road, in the county of Queens, transferrable at the office of the Treasurer, conformably to the By-Laws of the company. November 18th 1890. Date?
My order of the Divertors
Albert Hertz
Bengt though Sed' y.
Treasurer.' Charles Sowell
President,
(Courtesy of Jesse Merritt)
Original Certificate
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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
A few years ago the New York Herald-Tribune reported that the Chesapeake Bay oyster schooner Australia bore the inscription : "Repaired at the shipyard of John Grantham, Patchogue, 1833." In the opinion of the reporter, who claimed to have made a thorough investigation, the 67-foot Australia was none other than the British schooner Alma, captured by the Americans during the War of 1812.
Among the leading shipbuilders of the east end was Daniel Lord whose shipyard on Shelter Island became known far and wide for the high quality of his vessels. The Lord homestead, now known as Menantic Grove House, was built before 1800.
We have previously mentioned the Roslyn yawl which won fame as a racing craft during the latter half of the nineteenth century. She was the creation of Thomas Clapham, one-time yacht enthusiast who, having lost his wealth, decided to put his own ideas of a racing yacht into execution. Acquiring a waterfront shop near the estate of Wil- liam Cullen Bryant, the poet, at Roslyn, Clapham first made models until, having worked out his theories by actually sailing these toy boats, he went to work and produced a number of yawls which were in great demand for some years.
Few if any Long Island shipyards ever reached great proportions. Ships were built in succession usually, rather than more than one at a time. Ship building was often a one-man operation, the builder simply employing helpers as he needed them for the different kinds of work. Because of this, many an employee left his neighbor's ship- yard to open one of his own and during the latter part of the nine- teenth century every waterfront community had several of these small plants. Today it is these small shipyards which have survived but although small in themselves, together they provide a great amount of employment and comprise an important industry.
The commercial sailing era, which reached its peak on this side of the world during the nineteenth century, saw many an ill-fated ship destroyed off the coast of Long Island. Of the Christmas eve blizzard of 1811, Thompson wrote: "It is supposed that more than sixty vessels were cast upon the shore at the north side of Long Island; most of which were destroyed or so greatly injured as to be of little value. Whole crews were lost."
"Many vessels were driven upon Lloyd's neck, Eaton's Neck and Gardiner's Island," declared H. D. Sleight of the same storm. "Thirty-six bilged and stranded vessels were counted in one day." And again: "In this storm Captain Edward Conklin, a hero of the Revolutionary War, and his vessel and crew were lost in Long Island Sound." The following year the British sloop-of-war Sylph, belong- ing to the fleet which was blockading Long Island, was driven ashore at Shinnecock with a loss of 115 men.
A hurricane devastated Long Island in September, 1815, and, ac- cording to reports of that day preserved by Ralph Tuttle, Jr. of East- port, severe damage was done to shipping. Among the vessels lost in Long Island waters was the brig Orion, Captain Seth Thomas, bound from Russia to Providence, Rhode Island. Driven against the bluff on which stood Montauk Light, the Orion was pounded to pieces with
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severe loss of life. Stated Griffin's Journal: "Several vessels were lost and sunk in the sound that night, and in some instances every soul on board perished." Another report declared: "Captain Spencer's vessel at Patchogue is totally destroyed," while the diary of Daniel Hildreth, III, of Watermill records that "the sea rose so high that it swept down almost every dune or bank the length of Long Island."
In the hurricane of 1821, according to Charles Franklin Brooks of Harvard's Blue Hill Observatory, "the tide in the Hudson River rose thirteen feet in one hour." Between that point and Fire Island Inlet nine Long Island sailing vessels were destroyed with a loss of twenty-one lives. "Uncle Josie" Robinson of East Patchogue, as his schooner Glorian turned over, placed a length of cordwood under either arm and managed to reach the Rockaway shore and live to describe his experience.
Not alone in great disturbances, however, have disastrous ship- wrecks occurred in Long Island waters. On October 27, 1822, the square-rigged former steamship Savannah struck Oak Island Beach, opposite Babylon, and was destroyed. The Long Island Star reported a few days later: "Every soul on board is supposed to have perished." The 300-ton Savannah had made the passage from New York to Liverpool with steam-driven paddlewheels, the first American steamship to cross the Atlantic. In England, because of engine trouble, she had been rigged as a sailing brig and thus she met her end within a day's journey of the home of her master, Captain Coles of Glen Cove.
About this time there occurred near Shinnecock the wreck of a mysterious vessel which has ever since been referred to as "the Money Ship." This ship, which James Truslow Adams described as having "resembled in build and rig vessels sailed along the Spanish Main," was discovered smashed and deserted some fifteen miles east of Moriches where her master, Captain John Sloane, and his cabin boy had managed to reach shore. Following this episode a considerable number of Spanish coins were found along the beach near where Sloan had landed. His story was that he was taking the vessel to New York for the Mexican government to have her over- hauled when he lost his bearings and ran afoul of the Long Island coast.
He claimed further that the drowning of his entire crew except the cabin boy whom he had rescued had been due to their cupidity ; that when he reported the ship doomed, the Mexican sailors had robbed the safe and distributed among themselves the large amount of gold coins with which Sloane was to have paid the cost of over- hauling. Unfortunately for the sailors, the two small boats which were used in an attempt to reach shore were capsized and only the captain and his cabin boy, who alone were unburdened with the heavy coins, were able to swim. Captain Sloane remained a resident of Moriches for some years.
The winter of 1836-37 marked two especially disastrous ship- wrecks off the south shore of what is now Nassau County. In the
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wreck of the passenger vessel Bristol near Far Rockaway on Novem- ber 21, 1836, nearly one hundred persons were drowned, most of them Europeans who were seeking life in the New World. A few weeks later, on January 2, when the bark Mexico piled up near Point Look- out, opposite Freeport, more than sixty immigrants from England died. Of this second wreck Daniel M. Tredwell wrote: "We remember seeing the bodies of the drowned and frozen brought from the beach in sleds and placed in rows in John Lott's barn (at Baldwin) for the identification of friends and relatives. We remember the funeral,
(Drawn by George R. Avery)
Clipper Ship
consisting of fifty-two farm wagons carrying the boxes containing the bodies of the unclaimed dead."
The hero of this wreck was Raynor Rock Smith of Freeport who, with a volunteer crew, rowed out through the surf and succeeded in rescuing eight persons. He was later banqueted by friends and awarded a government medal for his heroism.
During this same winter the ship Tamarack was wrecked on South Beach with the loss of many lives. Among the survivors was one William P. Leek of Port Jefferson who expressed his gratitude by composing a long epic poem describing the tragedy. Three years later he was among the many residents of the north shore who wit- nessed the burning and complete destruction of the steamship Lexington on Long Island Sound.
The Lexington, carrying one hundred and thirty-one persons bound from New York for Stonington, Connecticut, was off the mouth of Huntington harbor on the night of January 13, 1840, when fire broke out in her cargo of cotton-bales and almost immediately severed the steering cables. In the icy waters the blazing ship described a
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great circle as her engines drove her forward unguided. Only four persons survived the disaster, these by clinging to bales of cotton. Mate David Crowley rode a bale for fifty hours, finally reaching shore forty miles to the east near Riverhead. Crowley later sold cloth which he called the Lexington brand, claiming it to be a product of the bale of cotton to which he owed his life.
William S. Mount, Long Island's most famous native painter, wrote a letter describing this tragedy which he witnessed from near his home at Stony Brook. From this same tragedy Nathaniel Currier began his rise to fame as an artist for the burning of the Lexington inspired his first lithograph, before he had become the senior member of Currier & Ives.
When in 1842 the French merchant ship Louis Phillippe, carrying a cargo of nursery stock, was pounded to pieces near Mecox in East Hampton Town, she provided her own memorial. Rose bushes sal- vaged by local residents and planted in dooryards established in that vicinity a line which, it is claimed, still persists and is still known as the Louis Phillippe rose. From this wreck, too, according to one report, came some of the elms which shaded the main thoroughfare of East Hampton until destroyed in the hurricane of 1938.
Forty-two passengers, together with the crew and Captain Isaac K. Duston were lost in the wreck of the steamer Atlantic on Fisher's Island in November of 1846. In 1850 the freighter Elizabeth, bring- ing three passengers from Europe to New York, was driven on the beach at Point O'Woods, several miles to the east of Fire Island Light, with total loss of life. The passengers were the famous Ameri- can writer, Margaret Fuller, her Italian husband and their child.
The winter of 1856-57 was an extremely severe one for shipping on the Atlantic seaboard. The Hempstead Inquirer of January 21, 1857, declared that "The ocean, opposite Moriches, has been frozen so that the boys have skated a considerable distance from the shore, entirely around the wreck of the Irene, which recently went ashore at that place." This winter marked the establishment of Ponquogue Light at Good Ground, now known as Hampton Bays.
The Ponquogue beacon, which surmounted a 140-foot concrete tower with eight-foot walls at the base, began operations on New Year's night, 1857. It stood some thirty miles to the west of Montauk Light which since 1795, except for a brief period during the hurricane of 1815, had been a familiar sight to mariners.
For sixty-two years Montauk's steady beam had warned ships to bear easterly to avoid the barren coast on which it stood. But when Ponquogue Light began operations it was equipped with a steady beam while Montauk Light was changed to an intermittent flash signal. Thus ships returning from extended voyages, unin- formed of the new lighthouse and the change of lights at island's end, might easily be misled into a disastrous change of course.
This became the fate of the 1445-ton New Bedford schooner John Milton, homeward bound from a three years' voyage around Cape Horn to the west coast. On the night of February 20, 1858, during a severe storm, Captain Ephraim Harding of the Milton, sighting Ponquogue's steady beam, set his course well to the north-northeast
-
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to clear what he thought was Montauk's friendly beacon. The ship crashed head-on some miles to the east of Amagansett and broke up in short order. Twenty-two ice-encased bodies were recovered from the surf next day but the eleven others aboard were never found. A few days later the bodies were buried at East Hampton, following services at the local Presbyterian Church. Wrote Mary E. Bell, local historian, in 1944:
"It was a strange procession which slowly moved from church to burying ground. Behind the pastor came the biers of Captain and mate carried by the church elders. As there were no more biers available, the other bodies, a score in number, were drawn along in farm vehicles by young men of the village. Behind them walked other men, some from far villages, most of them seamen who had known the ocean's wrath and in many cases had lost comrades and relatives in storm and shipwreck."
The Milton's great bell, rescued from the surf, was in 1859 hung in the Presbyterian chapel, now known as Session House, from whose belfry for more than eight decades it has called the people of East Hampton to worship.
The wreck of the John Milton aroused the people of Long Island to demand some form of shore patrol by the federal government. When the Revenue Cutter Service was created by an act of Congress in 1790 it became an arm of the Navy. Not until 1837 had Congress authorized the use of this service to search out wrecks, save lives and property and to destroy derelicts. The only shore assistance rendered stranded vessels, meanwhile, had been by volunteers who dwelt near the sea and knew its moods and its miglit. In 1849 the government provided a shed equipped with lifeboat and other appa- ratus for use of residents of Eaton's Neck, near Northport, on Long Island Sound. The claim that this was the first life-saving station established by the government has been disputed by other communi- ties. On Long Island seven similar stations were built by the govern- ment within the next few years.
Before the government established a paid beach patrol, however, a private society, known as the Life Saving Benevolent Association, had provided Long Island with a chain of small buildings which were called Humane Relief Houses. Located along the ocean front, ten miles apart, these shelters were equipped with a stove, fuel, matches and a lantern, and stocked with provisions and fresh water. On the unlocked door of each house, both inside and out, were directions printed in several languages, telling how to obtain further assistance.
As a part of the system, guide-posts at intervals along the beach pointed out the nearest shelter. The hurricane of 1869 in which, declared Devens, "losses reached millions of dollars and many lives were lost," demonstrated the value of the Humane Relief Houses in providing shelter for innumerable local fishermen and market gun- ners as well as shipwrecked mariners.
L. I .- I-34
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Unfortunately, the market gunners-local baymen who shot and sold "old squaw" ducks for their feathers at six cents per bird- gradually turned the well stocked, isolated Relief Houses into social
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