Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [64]
A crew of volunteers from Truro, led by Captain Edwin Worthen, keeper of the USLSS’S new Highland Lifesaving Station, came to the aid of Frances’s crew. Dragging a whaleboat through the dunes and onto the beach, the lifesavers braved the surf and being crushed against the wallowing steel hull to pluck the freezing men from the rigging. Every soul aboard was saved, but the ordeal proved too much for Captain Wilhelm Kortling, Frances’s master. He died from the effects of his exposure to the cold, three days later. When the surf quieted down, some of the cargo was salvaged, and then Frances was left to the sea. But the wreck never broke up. Buried periodically by an offshore sandbar, the hulk, as the National Seashore’s visitor guide explains, “pokes up occasionally above the Atlantic waves and serves as a memorial to the more than 1,000 shipwrecks that have occurred along the outer Cape over the past three and a half centuries.”
To get to Frances, we had to walk carefully backwards through the surf, then turn around quickly to dive under the waves and swim fast to avoid becoming a scuba-clad surfer instead of a diver. I joined my friend and colleague, National Park Service (NPS) archaeologist Larry Murphy, on a reconnaissance dive. Murphy is a tall, solidly built man whose nickname at the time was “Mongo,” in recognition of his size and strength. As we swam up to Frances, I was amazed to see that most of the ship was there—not just a skeleton. Half buried in the sandbar was the entire iron hull, rising up out of the seabed to the decks. We took measurements of the bow and drifted up to the intact wooden deck. Holes bashed through the planking showed an open space below, which we thought was the forecastle where the crew had bunked. Neither Murphy nor I could fit through the holes, so we swam back down and headed aft to an open hatch in the deck. The main deck was half gone, battered away by the sea or nineteenth-century salvagers who were after the cargo of tin ingots. We easily dropped into the hold and were rewarded by the sight of a small scatter of ingots. Beyond them was a hole in the iron bulkhead that led directly into the forecastle. The light that came in through the holes in the deck above us illuminated the scene as the pounding of the surf boomed through the iron hull. We both realized that few if any had been in this compartment since that night just after Christmas 1872.
The wooden bunks of the German sailors had collapsed, but, as we surveyed the room, we spotted a wooden box, half buried in the sand, with a hole in the lid. We thought that it might be a sailor’s sea chest, filled with his personal belongings, preserved by the sand and ready to reveal its secrets to us. Murphy cautiously stuck his hand into the hole to feel around, and suddenly yanked his hand back, bellowing through the regulator clenched in his teeth. As he waved his right hand frantically, I saw a large crab, its claw firmly holding on for the ride. I nearly drowned as I burst out laughing, holding my regulator in with my teeth. Larry managed to pull the crab off and, nursing his sore but not injured hand, beckoned that it was time to go.
Back on the beach, we were debriefing with the Navy divers, who had also been mapping the wreck and who had anchored a small inflatable boat over the bow. They had a strange tale to report. As they were swimming over the bow, a sudden burst of air bubbles had poured out from inside the wreck, and they could swear they heard, muffled through the water, alternating screams and shrieks of laughter that had convinced some of them