Post by Gian on Sept 1, 2011 9:04:01 GMT -5
As strange as the Mary Celeste, and one of the most acted upon mysteries of the sea, is the case of the deserted five-masted schooner Carroll A. Deering. Returning to Maine from Rio de Janeiro, the Deering stopped over at Barbados on January 9, 1921. She was next to be seen off the North Carolina coast by the Cape Lookout Lightship on January 29 at 4:30 p.m. On the morning of January 31, the Carroll A. Deering was found hard aground on Outer Diamond Shoals, North Carolina. The ship was ghostly silent; the eleven crew had vanished.
Unlike the Mary Celeste comparatively little has been written about the case of the Carroll A. Deering, and even less has been speculated about it. Yet it is actually far more of an intriguing and mysterious case than the famous derelict of the Azores. There is even evidence for theories considered outlandish in the case of the Celeste, such as mutiny or at least murder having happened. I was apparently the first to put up a detailed article on the World Wide Web. This was based upon all the records I could dig up at the National Archives. Then Patrick Davis, a great grandson of Carroll Atwood Deering (for whom the ship was named) contacted me and gave me the photographs contained herein. I was even informed by another author that it seemed my article was plagiarized and used for the basis of another author’s published account. Be that as it may, I didn’t bother to pursue it. I was glad to see, however, that Bland Simpson of the University of North Carolina finally published a book on it: Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals. Before this the best rendition was Edward Rowe Snow’s in his popular compendium Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (Dodd, Meade, 1948) in the chapter “The Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals.” That title, as you might expect, reflects the attitude of the locals of Cape Hatteras and Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, where sparse remnants of the vessel’s bleached bones have attracted curious onlookers until hurricane Ione washed them away in 1955. A few pieces have been salvaged and can be found to decorate roadside places in this very seafar-ing part of the United States.
But by all seafaring definitions a ghost ship she was. The vessel was manned by no crew in her last hours and yet un-swervingly maintained her course of doom to Diamond Shoals. The Deering is, in fact, the embodiment of all the legends of ghostly ships. What legend of deserted ships does not have the eerie accounts of interrupted life, such as a meal waiting to be served? How about the ship’s mascot found peacefully awaiting rescue? How about half-marked charts and interrupted journals? This indeed is the Carroll A. Deering.
In a sense the Deering is also the farewell to the old age of high seas mystery. She was built in Bath, Maine, as late as 1919, by the G.G. Deering Company. She was huge schooner of 5 masts. Some 225 feet length overall, she evoked the great days when mariners fought to round the Cape and sail on through legendary seas to discover lost islands. Her days were the ebb of the age of discovery, and this tints the photos with more than sepia. It lends that tar and brine and wooden deck smell to adventure at sea. . .and the pre-wireless isolation and “terror of silence” to the mystique of the giant ocean. Frankly, she was obsolete. Few ships of her great size and rigging would be built and used for actual trade purposes anymore. Steam had long surpassed sail for efficiency and reliability.
Those still plying the world’s trades in tall ships were like eddies on the side of a river bank. The great torrent of progress had passed them by. Engineers and not quartermasters drove the seas. Officers and not mates governed the ship. Wireless sent regular reports. Radio allowed updated messages to arrive to the ship far out to sea. The terror of silence, that wraith intimately associated with sea travel, was vanquished by Marconi. In its place ships became tied to land by invisible nerves of wireless communication.
With this alone the captain was no longer a lone lord of the sea. He was a representative of the company. Orders could even be sent to change destination or await further instructions. Radio communication made mutiny unlikely and mystery even less so. Wireless was like a magic potion that disenchanted the great sea and defeated its vastness.
The merchant lines were still saturated, however, by sailors of old barkentines, where foc’s’cle served and quarterdeck ruled by iron will. Superstitions, old and unrelenting, crept into the steel hulls of coal belching steamers. There the strange lore could be isolated by modern crews and trained officers. But amidst teak decks and slapping sails it still predominated. Those sailors too old to be taught new tricks funneled their quickly obsolescing talents to those tall ships still remaining, those awkward but elegant cousins of the modern steamer. They were at home on sloping decks. They were used to foc’s’cle duties and poop deck dominance. New England was still the center of it all. It was full of old seafarers. This proud yolk of the egg that hatched and formed America was steeped in pride. The Yankee merchant had tapped the China trade, fought off Barbary pirates, and enjoyed the American empire, far and flung, when it fell from Madrid’s hands into Washington’s. Amongst these old shellbacks would be found sailors from nations where sail still dominated for short distances and common cargo. One of these was Denmark. The schooner was the tendon between the many islands, and hundreds dashed across the North Sea and the Baltic’s cold swells to Norway’s fjords and Sweden’s bustling ports. The old pious New Englander rubbed shoulders with a distant and unintelligible Scandinavian accent or with carob brown lads from the West Indies.
This was the cut of a man’s jib in August 1920. They swaggered around New England ports hoping to land a job sailing the Seven Seas, to far ports or to home in Europe or to an exotic island. Reliability was everything. And one thing insured reliability in the owner’s mind: a strong willed captain and family reputation.
The G.G. Deering Company acted in accord with long New England tradition and hired a captain of such background: William M. Merritt. The first thing he did was sign his son, S.E. Merritt, as First Mate. This in itself was a fortuitous start. The voyage from Norfolk to Rio de Jenario would be a long one, and the Deering carried no wireless.
Unlike the Mary Celeste comparatively little has been written about the case of the Carroll A. Deering, and even less has been speculated about it. Yet it is actually far more of an intriguing and mysterious case than the famous derelict of the Azores. There is even evidence for theories considered outlandish in the case of the Celeste, such as mutiny or at least murder having happened. I was apparently the first to put up a detailed article on the World Wide Web. This was based upon all the records I could dig up at the National Archives. Then Patrick Davis, a great grandson of Carroll Atwood Deering (for whom the ship was named) contacted me and gave me the photographs contained herein. I was even informed by another author that it seemed my article was plagiarized and used for the basis of another author’s published account. Be that as it may, I didn’t bother to pursue it. I was glad to see, however, that Bland Simpson of the University of North Carolina finally published a book on it: Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals. Before this the best rendition was Edward Rowe Snow’s in his popular compendium Mysteries and Adventures Along the Atlantic Coast (Dodd, Meade, 1948) in the chapter “The Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals.” That title, as you might expect, reflects the attitude of the locals of Cape Hatteras and Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, where sparse remnants of the vessel’s bleached bones have attracted curious onlookers until hurricane Ione washed them away in 1955. A few pieces have been salvaged and can be found to decorate roadside places in this very seafar-ing part of the United States.
But by all seafaring definitions a ghost ship she was. The vessel was manned by no crew in her last hours and yet un-swervingly maintained her course of doom to Diamond Shoals. The Deering is, in fact, the embodiment of all the legends of ghostly ships. What legend of deserted ships does not have the eerie accounts of interrupted life, such as a meal waiting to be served? How about the ship’s mascot found peacefully awaiting rescue? How about half-marked charts and interrupted journals? This indeed is the Carroll A. Deering.
In a sense the Deering is also the farewell to the old age of high seas mystery. She was built in Bath, Maine, as late as 1919, by the G.G. Deering Company. She was huge schooner of 5 masts. Some 225 feet length overall, she evoked the great days when mariners fought to round the Cape and sail on through legendary seas to discover lost islands. Her days were the ebb of the age of discovery, and this tints the photos with more than sepia. It lends that tar and brine and wooden deck smell to adventure at sea. . .and the pre-wireless isolation and “terror of silence” to the mystique of the giant ocean. Frankly, she was obsolete. Few ships of her great size and rigging would be built and used for actual trade purposes anymore. Steam had long surpassed sail for efficiency and reliability.
Those still plying the world’s trades in tall ships were like eddies on the side of a river bank. The great torrent of progress had passed them by. Engineers and not quartermasters drove the seas. Officers and not mates governed the ship. Wireless sent regular reports. Radio allowed updated messages to arrive to the ship far out to sea. The terror of silence, that wraith intimately associated with sea travel, was vanquished by Marconi. In its place ships became tied to land by invisible nerves of wireless communication.
With this alone the captain was no longer a lone lord of the sea. He was a representative of the company. Orders could even be sent to change destination or await further instructions. Radio communication made mutiny unlikely and mystery even less so. Wireless was like a magic potion that disenchanted the great sea and defeated its vastness.
The merchant lines were still saturated, however, by sailors of old barkentines, where foc’s’cle served and quarterdeck ruled by iron will. Superstitions, old and unrelenting, crept into the steel hulls of coal belching steamers. There the strange lore could be isolated by modern crews and trained officers. But amidst teak decks and slapping sails it still predominated. Those sailors too old to be taught new tricks funneled their quickly obsolescing talents to those tall ships still remaining, those awkward but elegant cousins of the modern steamer. They were at home on sloping decks. They were used to foc’s’cle duties and poop deck dominance. New England was still the center of it all. It was full of old seafarers. This proud yolk of the egg that hatched and formed America was steeped in pride. The Yankee merchant had tapped the China trade, fought off Barbary pirates, and enjoyed the American empire, far and flung, when it fell from Madrid’s hands into Washington’s. Amongst these old shellbacks would be found sailors from nations where sail still dominated for short distances and common cargo. One of these was Denmark. The schooner was the tendon between the many islands, and hundreds dashed across the North Sea and the Baltic’s cold swells to Norway’s fjords and Sweden’s bustling ports. The old pious New Englander rubbed shoulders with a distant and unintelligible Scandinavian accent or with carob brown lads from the West Indies.
This was the cut of a man’s jib in August 1920. They swaggered around New England ports hoping to land a job sailing the Seven Seas, to far ports or to home in Europe or to an exotic island. Reliability was everything. And one thing insured reliability in the owner’s mind: a strong willed captain and family reputation.
The G.G. Deering Company acted in accord with long New England tradition and hired a captain of such background: William M. Merritt. The first thing he did was sign his son, S.E. Merritt, as First Mate. This in itself was a fortuitous start. The voyage from Norfolk to Rio de Jenario would be a long one, and the Deering carried no wireless.