Sudden Sea (20 page)
Clayton Chellis had his little sister, Marion, by the hand when they stepped off the bus into the waters of Narragansett Bay. Clayton believed he could swim in anything. He was eleven years old and fearless, but he had never experienced anything like a hurricane. Joseph Matoes was holding his youngest sister, Eunice, by the hand and nudging his other sisters ahead of him toward the door. Dorothy and Theresa were rigid with fear and inching forward with small, stiff steps like mechanical dolls. If the school bus had stalled on any other day, they could have walked home. Their farm was at the end of the causeway, less than a quarter of a mile away. Joseph coaxed them forward:
We’re almost home. Don’t be scared, I’m right behind you.
Over the howl of the hurricane, Norm cupped his mouth and shouted to the children to form a line, holding hands. Clayton was at one end with Marion, next came the Matoeses — Dorothy, Theresa, Joseph, and Eunice. John and Constantine Gianitis hung back in the bus, pressed against each other as close as Siamese twins. They were five and six years old, babies in a foreign place on a foreign day. They couldn’t understand what was happening or even say that they were afraid. It was the tenth day of their first school year on an unfamiliar island in an unknown country. They had learned only a few words of English.
Norm Caswell had three sons. He was praying they were home, safe. He climbed into the bus and picked up a boy in each arm, and they joined the line of children. Even protected by the bus chassis, they were struggling to keep their footing.
From the edge of his farm, Joe Matoes squinted into the storm. He could just make out the line of children emerging from the shelter of the school bus. They braced themselves against the rush of wind. Water eddied around their legs. The younger children were up to their chests, hanging on to the hands they held, squeezing as tight as they could. If they began to cry, no one heard them over the screaming voice of the storm. They could not see where they were going, could not even see the other children in the line, just the one or two on either side.
The water of Mackerel Cove was surprisingly warm and dirty, worse than the worst seaweed day. All kinds of things were floating in it, as if the contents of the town dump had been emptied into the cove by mistake. Matoes strained through the murk and cutting wind to pick out his children. His daughter Dorothy’s new red skirt and the yellow school bus were spots of color on the gray-black day. As he watched, the children stumbled toward the road and began to advance together. One step, maybe two.
If you sail the New England coast between Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Boston, about midpoint in your journey you’ll round Cape Ann and pass by Thacher’s Woe and Avery’s Fall, a small island and memorial of sorts to the first documented hurricane in American history.
The Great Colonial Hurricane struck New England in the summer of 1635 when Plymouth Plantation was fifteen years old and the Massachusetts Bay Colony was in its fifth year. It landed at daybreak in Narragansett Bay and swung east to pummel the Pilgrim settlements. Trees, houses, and wigwams fell. A merchant ship was tossed up on shore near Boston and at least eight people drowned. It was said that six hours of rage were followed by an eclipse of the moon.
In Boston, Governor John Winthrop wrote: “The wind caused the tide to rise to a height unknown before and drowned eight Indians flying from their wigwams.”
Plymouth governor William Bradford described “such a mighty storm of wind and rain as none living in these parts, either English or Indian, ever saw. It began in the morning a little before day, and grew not by degrees but came with violence in the beginning, to the great amazement of many.” He likened it to “those hurricanes and typhoons that writers make mention of in the Indies.”
New England Puritans who witnessed its fury believed the Great Colonial Hurricane was a tempest of biblical proportion. They compared it to the Great Deluge and feared that the prophecies of the Apocalypse were coming to pass. The only storm they had seen approaching was a spiritual one, stirred by the radical preaching of the charismatic young cleric Roger Williams.
In the summer of 1635, the Plymouth and Boston colonies were thinly settled and struggling to gain a foothold in the New World. The Great Colonial Hurricane struck toward the end of the planting season. It disrupted harvesting and battered ships bringing new settlers and vital supplies. The four-hundred-ton
Great Hope,
out of Ipswich, England, was driven aground near Charlestown, not far from the spot where Paul Revere would wait, booted and spurred, more than a hundred years later, to spread the alarm.
The worst wreck, though, “one of the most disastrous that ever afflicted the iron-bound coast of New England,” occurred on the short, usually uneventful sail from Ipswich to Marblehead. A pinnace carrying Anthony Thacher and John Avery, ministers and cousins, and their young families was dashed against a small rocky island off Cape Ann. The Reverend Thacher recounted the ordeal in a letter to his brother in Salisbury: “We were driven before the wind and waves, expecting with every wave to be swallowed up and drenched in the deeps…. Ghastly death every moment stared us in the face.” The ship was lifted onto a stony ledge where “the violence of the wave and fury of the winds (by the Lord’s permission … beat her all to pieces.”
Thacher, who could not swim a stroke, was “driven hither and thither in the seas a great while.” Finally, like Jonah spit from the belly of the whale, he was thrown back onto the rock. Just beyond his grasp, he saw his daughter Mary, his cousin John Avery, and Avery’s son struggling to reach him — “all three of them looking ruefully on me on the rock; their very countenances calling unto me to help them, who I could not go unto, neither could they come to me. Oh! I yet see their cheeks, poor silent lambs, pleading pity and help at my hands.”
Near midnight, the Great Colonial Hurricane passed and the wind was silenced. Thacher waited and listened, hoping to hear his children calling. At first the night was blank. The only sound was the slap of the sea, then the scuttle of the pinnace cast ashore. Thacher found his wife entangled in the wreckage. For three days the couple stayed on the island rock, praying to be reunited with their children. The sea returned one body to them, and on the third day a passing shallop rescued them. From that day, the tiny island and treacherous rock off Cape Ann have been called Thacher’s Woe and Avery’s Fall, and the colonists built a lighthouse there to warn other ships of the peril.
In the years that followed, the story of Thacher’s Woe was often told “about the hearth-fires of the coast-dwellers in the long winter evenings and the fishermen with ‘grave and reverend’ faces, recalled the ancient tale when they passed the fatal ledge and saw the white waves breaking over it.”
Three hundred years later, another father, on another island off the New England coast, watched as his children were hurled into a hurricane sea. Like the Reverend Thacher, Joe Matoes was helpless to save them.
No one on the island of Jamestown had ever witnessed such a tumult in Mackerel Cove. Murderous winds screamed off the bay. They smacked the line of children holding hands on the causeway and pushed the empty school bus across the road into the water of Sheffield Cove. The sheltering arms of the cove hugged the rampaging sea, hemming it in, forcing it to rise until the storm surge was a liquid wall as solid as stone, as high as a house, higher than any wall the children had ever seen. Like a voracious giant, it picked up the three-story bathing pavilion and swallowed it whole, leaving only the stone steps behind. Then it swaggered across the causeway, devouring everything in its path — stones, seaweed, automobiles, book bags. A row of children holding hands in a once sheltering cove did not stand a chance against such a marauder.
Visibility was two hundred feet at most. But for one fraction of a second, the miasma of spray and sea and rain and salt cleared, and Joe Matoes glimpsed two of his daughters. A wall of water as wide as the cove was tearing toward them. It lifted them up onto the roof of the bus. He saw them clutching at the sleek surface, their faces distorted in terror, their mouths open in a silent scream. Then the storm closed over the cove. From its vast height, the surging sea crushed over them. It dashed them off the roof and sucked them down again.
Exactly what happened next has been debated and argued on the island ever since. The mayhem of the hurricane created a confusion of conjecture, blame, heartbreak, and anger. Although memories were fractured and time has not added clarity, when pieced together, the various accounts create a certain picture.
Clayton Chellis had a tight grip on his sister, Marion. There was never a day in his eleven years when Clayton was more than a few feet from the sea. He grew up diving off the rocks at the Beavertail light, a treacherous spot that he swam with ease. But a rugged eleven-year-old weighs maybe seventy-five or eighty pounds. One cubic yard of water weighs about three-quarters of a ton. When Clayton came through the wall of water, he was alone. He must have tried to find his sister, but the cove was a boiling stew. Sucked into the roaring sea, he drifted with it, stunned, half-drowned, exhausted by its force. He gave himself up to the sea and rode with the rushing current past Fox Hill Farm and up the bay.
Norm Caswell probably had a hold of Constantine and John Gianitis. A running wall of water was sweeping toward them, spilling tons of water. Doubling a wave’s height quadruples its energy; tripling a wave’s height increases its energy nine times. Caswell lost the boys in the first surge of the sea. He surfaced and was sucked down a second and a third time. The boys were five and six years old, so small and light that the wind could have picked them up and carried them like dandelion pods.
For the Matoeses, home was so close. A few strokes and they would reach their father on the banks of the farm. If Joseph tried to yell to his sisters, the wind took the words out of his mouth and filled his throat with rain and spray, choking him. Eunice slipped from his grasp. He dove under the wreckage and reached her again. Holding her with one arm in a lifesaver’s grip, the boy tried to get his bearings and find Theresa and Dotty. There were cows from the farm in the water, dead fish, and beach cabanas. In the one clear second, Joseph must have seen his sisters on the roof of the bus.
When the surging sea flung them off, he swam to them, dragging Eunice with him. Theresa and Dotty grabbed on to him, and he tried to swim, pulling his sisters home. The Matoeses were all strong swimmers. A lifetime on an island accessible only by boat and swimming becomes second nature. They knew not to fight the tide, but in that nightmare moment, hurled into a raging sea, beaten by debris, weighed down by clothes and shoes, lessons were forgotten. Theresa and Dotty flailed against the storm.
On the bank of Fox Hill Farm in the gathering night, Joe Matoes braced himself against the wind. The air was wet and salty. Salt water washed his face, stung his eyes, dripped from his chin, and clogged his throat. Matoes’s tears and the ocean ran together.
Cast Adrift
T
he two women lay on their stomachs, trying simultaneously to keep the roof balanced, the debris off their backs, and the child safely between them. The detritus churning in the water and flying through the air was as menacing as the sea. Harriet Moore had no idea how long she and Margaret had been hanging on to the fragment of roof. They had lost all sense of time and of the larger world. Reality was reduced to their single diminishing piece of rooftop and the boundless water. It seemed a lifetime ago that Harriet had the luxury to worry about something as trivial as living room curtains. Now her only thought was saving her daughter.
Little Mary Moore, who had been treated like precious porcelain every day since her adoption, kept her eyes squeezed shut to keep the salt water out and braved the wild ride without a whimper. The child had been immersed in the water so long that she was shivering uncontrollably. The waves were tremendous. If they survived them, Harriet was afraid they’d be dashed to pieces against the wreckage that had piled up along the shore.
All of a sudden Margaret started shouting, “A tree! A tree!” Sure enough, sticking up through the water just ahead of them was about three inches of cedar. Where there was a treetop, there must be land. Before they had a chance to figure out a plan or attempt a landing, their roof-raft split. Margaret washed away on one piece. Harriet lost hold of the other. With Mary in her arms, she slid off the splintered roof.
Somehow, probably through sheer willpower, she managed to gain her footing. The water was chest-high and clogged, and the breakers were slamming in hard and fast. Harriet had all she could do just to hold on to Mary. She could not make any headway toward shore. Several times the force of the surf knocked her down and tore Mary from her arms. Each time, Harriet shot to the surface in a panic, thinking she had lost her daughter; each time, she managed to reach the child in time. A single relentless purpose drove Harriet: to bring Mary to safety.
Inch by inch, with her daughter wrapped in her arms, Harriet fought her way ashore. Hoisting Mary up in front of her and climbing behind, a foot at a time, she picked her way over the mounds of wreckage. When they finally reached firm ground, Margaret was there, waiting and praying. The three had washed across Little Narragansett Bay to Osbrook Point, Connecticut. It was dark and cold. Their sodden clothes were clammy and they were so exhausted that they would have gladly lain down on the wet ground and closed their eyes. But Harriet was afraid Mary could not survive the night out in the open. They had come through so much. She could not lose her daughter now. No matter how tired and battered they were, they had to keep on going until they found shelter.
With Mary between them holding hands, Harriet and Margaret began to run. The child tried to keep up, but she was too exhausted to take another step. Mary stumbled and fell on her face. She lay motionless on the wet, rutted path. Harriet turned her daughter over. Mary’s mouth was foaming and her eyes had rolled up into her head. All around them the wind shrieked through the trees like a gleeful witch who had cast an evil spell and was coming to collect her prize. Harriet was more frightened than she had been on the furious sea, but she did the only thing she could think of. She pounded Mary on the back, beating the child with her fists to revive her. Mary came to, vomiting salt water. Harriet and Margaret got her on her feet, and the three started out again, more slowly and even more determined.
