Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [23]
Eventually, MacRae lay alone on his bunk, attended by Madison Alden, who sat in a chair reading the Daily Alta. The air was suddenly shaken by a thunderous blast. A massive .44-caliber Colt Dragoon skittered across the floor and bounced off young Alden’s boots. He fled in mortal terror, shouting to the others: “The Lieutenant just tried to shoot me!”
“Horror became depicted on our countenances at the terrible spectacle that greeted us,” Browne wrote. “Mr. MacRae was seen reclining upon his berth, his face in a bath of blood, the right portion of his cranium blown away, brains and integuments scattered in all directions upon the deck and bulkheads.”
On the cabin’s desk lay a note penned in MacRae’s flowing handwriting.
San Francisco, Nov. 17th, 1855.
As it may be possible for me to leave this world for another, I wish this disposition to be made of my property.
Viz: My watch to my brother John Colin; my funds in equal parts to the two children of my brother Alexander and the one of my brother Donald.
My books I will to Phelps [MacRae’s assistant during his time in Chile], and my body to be taken outside the heads and be dropped overboards on the ebb tide.
If on settling my accounts there should be money due me, I wish it should be appropriated to the purchase of seal rings to be given to each of my brothers.
My soul I give to God and I hope he will make better use of it than I have.
Signed, Archibald MacRae
Lieut, U.S.N.
In the decades after MacRae’s death, waves of immigrants and pioneers continued to knowingly and unknowingly risk their lives at Cortes Bank. Most were simply passing north aboard steamships powered by leaky, explosion-prone boilers. Others, though, sought out Cortes Bank deliberately, attracted by the same marine treasures that centuries before dazzled the ancient Kinkipar. Live coral reefs, jungles of palm and bull kelp, deep crevices, and strange, boulder-filled craters created the perfect habitat for black, white, pink, and red abalone and giant, decades-old lobsters. Plying the waters were gorgeous pelagic fishes—yellowtail, yellowfin, marlin, and massive bluefin—so big, fast, and strong they were nearly impossible to catch by lure or spear.
Still, as the twentieth century dawned, the defining aspect of Cortes Bank wasn’t its incredibly fertile waters but the perils it posed for navigation. Such was the perceived danger that in 1911, U.S. Navy Commander William Adger Moffett ignored the fact that the Bank actually lies in waters due east of Mexico. He deployed a new high-tech buoy that featured not only a bellows-driven whistle but an acetylene-powered blinking light. He hoisted a U.S. flag, and in a modest ceremony summarily claimed Bishop Rock and Cortes Bank in the name of the United States. The New York Times stated that Moffett had actually laid claim to a small island. They were, of course, several thousand years too late for the statement to be accurate, but have yet to issue a correction.
Because steamers didn’t have to cruise far offshore like sailing vessels, Bishop Rock’s waves were soon being frequently sighted, and the Cortes Bank began captivating writers for the Los Angeles Times. In 1925, Maude Pilkington Lukens joined the Coast Survey ship Pioneer, whose crew discovered that the actual location of Bishop Rock was a mile from where it should be, a supposedly precise celestial waypoint James Alden had established shortly after MacRae’s death. It was hypothesized that shockwaves from a powerful earthquake that had just struck Chile had somehow shifted the seafloor. It’s more likely that Alden’s reckoning was not quite dead.
A year later, Los Angeles Times writer George Wycherly Kirkman set out for the Bank aboard a fishing vessel. He was spellbound by the Bank’s gin-clear waters and the possibilities of what lay