Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [21]
When he returned to Santiago, MacRae wrote to his brother of plans to ask a girl named “Susan” to marry him, though perhaps he was only caught up in the romance of his own adventure. “From the time of our first arrival…everything had passed so rapidly as to appear a dream, and I was at a loss for a while to determine whether I had been in Santiago or not; but when I felt my bleeding heart, and got the scent of French brandy from my pocket handkerchief, I knew that all was reality.”
Archibald MacRae departed Valparaiso via steamer on January 15, 1854, traveling alone. As to why he returned without a fiancée, we can only guess.
No image of Lieutenant Archibald MacRae, who discovered Bishop Rock, can be located. We might imagine, though, some resemblance to his dashing father, General Alexander MacRae, 1796–1868, a man who served the United States during the War of 1812 and the Confederacy fifty years later. The general would bury at least three of his nine or ten sons (it’s not entirely clear how many he had)—with Archibald being the first. The general’s letters show a man both fond and proud of his explorer son. In 1840, he wrote: “I am afraid that you do not take the interest in writing home that you aught. ‘Be not weary in well doing.’ Don’t neglect in writing as it is is not only a source of gratification to ‘all hands at home’…tell us all that you have seen—that is, all that is proper to be written. Your affectionate father, Alex MacRae.” Photo courtesy New Hanover Public Library, St. Johns Masonic Lodge No. 1 Collection.
On January 30, 1855, MacRae reported for duty as captain of the Ewing. He didn’t write home much during this time, explaining he had no good tales to tell. In addition, the logbooks of the Ewing and of Alden’s ship, the Active, seem to have disappeared into a black hole. Personal pictures of shipboard life are thus scant. In 1855, a young officer named Philip Carrigan Johnson served aboard the Active with James Alden, and did time briefly aboard Ewing alongside MacRae. His diary is one of few personal windows belowdecks.
Johnson describes a posse of inveterate chess players, bird hunts, near drownings, and a mingled annoyance with and great respect for James Alden. He also noted the deep mutual disdain between Alden and fellow survey captain, George Davidson. Alden’s wife—a woman already wrecked by her husband’s lonely years at sea—lived aboard the Active, and Davidson took a rabid delight in terrifying her with tales of the ocean. “I expect she will explode one of these days on account of Davidson,” Johnson wrote.
The accomplished and headstrong MacRae, meanwhile, found the leaky Ewing something like a brig. In the year before joining the Ewing, he had taken ill, racked with recurring, debilitating rounds of a flu-like illness whose cause was a mystery. In the wake of a bout that laid him low for days, he wrote home to his brother Donald:
Our duty here is so uninteresting and the whole coast so inhospitable that I can find nothing worth relating and therefore must leave it to your imagination to make out what our course has been. Running lines of soundings on a very exposed coast, looking for rocks and indeed suffering every inconvenience except not catching fish, if that may be considered a convenience, when we are so tired of their sight as to loth [sic] them. That has been our last two months experience.
From here we shall proceed near the mission of San Buenaventura [Ventura, California] and probably in a month from this repair to the coast near Monterey. If I did not suffer a good deal with rheumatism and other ailings, I should speculate on what might occur in the future but as it is I can’t say.
In the summer of 1855, possibly in July, Alden ordered MacRae to sail for the Cortes Bank, perhaps in reaction to the stories circulating of the Bishop. Yet unlike T. H. Stevens, MacRae actually managed to locate the submerged black dome that is the Bank’s shallowest reef, and one imagines that, at least for a moment, the deadly tedium of his work lifted just a bit. Even if MacRae did not witness