Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [16]
The first person we know to have recognized something unusual a hundred miles out was an American crewman aboard one of the most famous ships ever put to sea. James Alden was born in 1810 in Portland, Maine. He was a direct ancestor of Mayflower pilgrims John Alden and Patricia Mullins, a young woman reputedly cast into a love triangle between Alden and the Mayflower’s captain, Miles Standish. (The affair was immortalized in Longfellow’s scandalous nineteenth-century poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.)
Alden was ballsy, irascible, and a talented navigator. During his early years, he was assigned to an epic survey of the South Seas under Commander Charles Wilkes. The mission charted some fifteen hundred miles of Antarctic coastline and made expansive forays through the South Pacific. At the expedition’s end, Alden was assigned as an officer aboard the USS Constitution. This legendary, seemingly indestructible frigate earned the name “Old Ironsides” in the War of 1812 for the confounding ability of her oaken hull to deflect British cannonballs. On the Constitution, Alden served alongside a famed and unbalanced captain, Jonathan “Mad Jack” Percival. Percival was a sailor’s captain, at least some of the time. During an 1826 visit to Hawaii, he risked his career by demanding island chiefs rescind a missionary-sponsored law that forbade local women from boarding ships, so as to ease the sexual tensions of visiting sailors, and yet later he became known for taking an almost maniacal glee in ordering subordinates flogged or even pistol-whipped at the slightest transgression.
Alden and Percival sailed the world aboard the Constitution, becoming, among other things, the first Americans to attack Vietnam. Then in late 1845, rumors of war between the United States and Mexico reached the Constitution in Hawaii. Percival led a miserable passage that reached Monterey, California, on New Year’s Eve. The harbor was bereft of American ships, so the Constitution immediately made a fourteen-day run for Mazatlán.
Strong, frigid northwesterlies propelled the ship at a clip perhaps as high as fourteen knots (16 mph). Her logs while off California carry characteristically simple entries that belie little of the drama or misery: “Got up the larboard chain and bent it—got the larboard anchor off the bows…pumped ship out…inspected the crew at quarters, exercised the 1st Division of great guns…Punished Wm Brackley (O.S.) with 12 lashes of the Colt for selling his clothes.”
We’re thus left to ponder a late-afternoon conversation on January 5 among Percival, Alden, and Lieutenant G. W. Grant as the Constitution proceeded along a course that supposedly kept her well clear of navigational hazards. A log entry from Grant offers a tantalizing shard of information: “From 4 to 6 [4–6 P.M. ] moderate breezes and clear pleasant weather. At 4-20 [4:20 P.M. ] discovered breakers bearing N.E. about 10 miles distant.”
The night before this strange sighting, the moon was at half phase. It disappeared below the evening horizon around midnight, leaving the Constitution sailing toward an uncharted seamount under a black sky. Were she gliding over a large groundswell, an adept watchman might recognize phosphorescent foam from breaking waves off her bow well before they created a hazard. But waves were not seen until 4 P.M. the next day. This speaks to a likely, sudden arrival of a powerful winter swell.
Percival, Alden, and Grant surely extended telescopes, marveling and puzzling as giant, ghostly white horses galloped across an utterly empty ocean. Wonder would have been mingled with dread and