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By Root 1221 0

when Alden wrote of “the untimely death of that intelligent and energetic officer.” NOAA historian Albert “Skip” Theberge confirmed it a suicide and suggested I read the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Mains’l Haul, the journal of the Maritime Museum of San Diego. The issue is devoted to the journal of Coast Surveyor Philip C. Johnson, who served briefly under MacRae on what it seems was MacRae’s second journey to Cortes Bank (I cannot definitively state that MacRae went to Cortes twice, only that reports seem to indicate so). On November 18, 1855, Johnson wrote, “Lieutenant MacRae committed suicide by blowing his brains out in the cabin of the Ewing. He was buried in cemetery on the 19th.” Further queries revealed that MacRae was a member of Wilmington, North Carolina’s most prominent family. (His great, great, great nephew Hugh MacRae Jr. is today an avid surfer). Eric Kozen, caretaker of Wilmington’s Oakdale cemetery showed me his gravesite. (If MacRae’s indeed buried there, he was pickled in whiskey and shipped home). Beverly Tetterton, special collections librarian at the New Hanover Public Library in Wilmington, made me aware of MacRae’s letters at Duke University. At Duke, research librarian Arthur “Mitch” Fraas provided inestimable help in locating and sifting through some four thousand pages of MacRae family documents. Google revealed MacRae’s lengthy account of his days in Chile in The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere During the Years 1849–’50–’51–’52. MacRae’s writings reveal a fiercely intelligent and witty raconteur, and are ultimately heartbreaking. They include the following:

In the Andes: I have rarely passed so uncomfortable a night, nor one, at the same time, more impressive. My face and hands were blistered by the sun and chapped by the cold winds to such an extent as to produce fever, and I found it impossible to sleep…We made our fires at nightfall with mules’ dung—the best fuel to be had; and as the wind was strong in squalls, our stew was pretty well seasoned with the ashes. These, however, are things to which one becomes accustomed…

Letter home from Santiago: “Sue” asked my opinion as to whether a fan she had was large enough to go to a ball with. On examining it, I discovered that it was a little broke, and pretending to think that I had broken it, I insisted on carrying it and having it repaired. To this, she consented and accordingly I carried it off. But instead of having it fixed, I bought a new one which cost me three dollars and sent it—as a reason that I could find no one to repair the other. A few nights after being there alone, Susan thanked me one night with such a sweet confession, showing at the same time a gentlemen’s ring which had not even the jewelers mark off it, that I felt most infernally spooney (author’s note: enamored in a silly, or sentimental way) but withal a little scared. I had an idea that ring was destined for me and knew that if it were once given, all would be over as far as my will was concerned…

6. MacRae’s delivering news of the Mexican-American War was recounted on page 287 in The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft: History of California, 1884-90 by Hubert Howe Bancroft (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007). Former New Jersey Governor Rodman M. Price, who served under MacRae aboard Cyane, also recounts MacRae’s work as a spy.

7. The claiming of Bishop Rock by the United States by Commander William Adger Moffett appeared in “We Get More Territory,” The New York Times, October 16, 1911.

8. The timeline of the SS Bishop and numerous articles that would question the Bishop’s Cortes Bank collision would have been impossible to find without diver and treasure hunter Steve Lawson, whose discoveries included archival stories from the Daily Alta, The New York Times, and “About a Rock—and a Bishop,” Mains’l Haul 5, no. 2 (1966). To learn more about Lawson, read Lost Below: The Southwest’s Most Intriguing Shipwrecks, Sunken Aircraft, Submerged Ruins and Undersea Treasures by David Finnern (Pearl Publishing, Monterey, 2009).

9. Another source