Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [22]
News of MacRae’s findings crossed Panama and reached the director of the Coast Survey in early October. They were published in the pages of the New York Times on November 3.
Meanwhile, on October 13, 1855, MacRae either asked or James Alden ordered him to return to the Cortes Bank for a thorough, weeklong survey. This time, Cortes Bank surely impressed upon MacRae its majestic profile and let him witness at least a portion of the North Pacific power it could unleash. He had uncovered a hazard unlike anything off the coast of California. Soundings revealed a series of stair steps fifty to a hundred feet high that told a story of periods of rapid sea level rise and erosion by forces almost unimaginable in scale. Alden and Davidson would come to postulate a truth that geologists would later confirm: Though no Active volcano ever rose out here, the Bank’s black stone is not only volcanic in nature but is probably still growing. Yet as California’s tectonic plates push the Bank upward, toward the water’s surface, the more that rock is pulverized by waves. It is a battle that has raged for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of years.
Then, if you were to walk off the final stair step—itself some four hundred feet in depth—you’d plunge into abyssal waters MacRae sounded out at better than six thousand feet deep. As open-ocean swells approached the coast, what would they do when they met this mile-high wall? MacRae was both a man of science and a seasoned sailor who had survived towering seas around Cape Horn and visited Oahu during the wintertime big wave season. Despite how little was known about wave formation in 1855, he almost surely surmised exactly what would happen out here: Swells would lift to heights that defied the imaginations of scientists and seafarers.
In the meantime, MacRae was bearing a hardship that no doubt made this expedition both the height of wonder and the acme of misery. He was unable to recover fully from one of his regular bouts of “rheumatism,” and he began to complain first of debilitating headaches, and later a persistent, maddening sensation around his right temple. When pushed for a description, he called it “a vibration in my brain.”
In early November, Ewing left the Bank and reached Santa Barbara, but MacRae was unable to obtain satisfactory medical attention. He ordered the Ewing to San Francisco, anchoring alongside Alden’s Active off Market Street Wharf on November 12. There, an old Wilmington friend named John Savage greeted him. “He was not at all well and he seemed in low spirits and disgusted with everything out here,” Savage wrote.
Active’s surgeon, Dr. John M. Browne, must have thought MacRae looked a wreck—a bit jaundiced and with dead corpuscles turning his urine the color of cola. Browne described MacRae’s ailment as a “biliary [liver or bile] derangement attended by slight fever of the remittent type, both affording symptoms peculiar to a form of fever prevalent at the Lower Coast [a term for South America].”
In short, MacRae had malaria, which he must have contracted from a mosquito bite a couple of years earlier on his South American adventure. Where avalanches, landslides, blizzards, lightening, bullets, mortars, thieves, and giant waves had failed, tiny parasites were at last succeeding.
Dr. Browne administered opiates and ordered MacRae to rest. Three days later, MacRae announced a near-miraculous recovery. The finally cheerful lieutenant spent Friday and the following Saturday enjoying San Francisco with a small, tight crew of North Carolina adventurers.
Yet late on Saturday after returning to the Ewing, the dead cells clogging MacRae’s brain brought the buzzing, throbbing sensation back with a vengeance. “If this doesn’t stop,” he told James Alden’s nephew James Madison Alden, who had been working as his assistant, “I’m going to jump overboard.”
MacRae was soon