Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [49]
“They realized that the sail on their boat was rotten,” said James. “But just as the men were getting ready to jettison the sails, my uncle told them to save them to catch the rainwater. In the end, that’s what saved them.”
James Whitemarsh, Executive Officer of USS Ramapo, veteran of World War I, a future veteran of Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima, and witness to the largest wave ever recorded from the deck of a ship in 1933, marries Rebecca Bird Caldwell Gumbes, future mother of Francis “Taffy” Wells. Photo courtesy of Whitemarsh’s great niece, Angie Gregos-Swaroop.
By the time Ross Palmer Whitemarsh set sail aboard the Ramapo fifteen years later, he was a seasoned mariner, a husband, and father of two young girls. One of his daughters, Francis “Taffy” Wells—today, a delightful, plucky octogenarian living in Honolulu—helped me reconstruct her father’s most legendary adventure.
Ms. Wells grew up both adoring and fearing her devoted father, whom she recalls as a fanatical golfer and strict taskmaster. “His favorite saying was ‘order, counterorder, disorder,’” she said. “I heard it hundreds of times. If you didn’t follow orders, there’d be disorder, and he hated that. I remember shagging golf balls for him as a little kid. I’d sit off to the side behind a palm tree, and when he’d hit all the balls, I’d run out and pick ‘em up. And you know, he had this dry, British humor. He’d tell a joke with a completely straight face. You’d sit and think about it for an hour, and then you’d just start laughing like crazy.”
Ms. Wells was three when her father set out from Manila aboard the Ramapo. The ship was a Patoka class oiler, built in 1919 at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock. She was 478 feet long (about one and a half football fields), sixty feet wide, and weighed 17,000 tons (better than three times heavier than Jalisco). She was also low slung and stable, drawing twenty-nine feet of water. Despite a pair of twin 2,800-horsepower steam turbines, she was, like Jalisco, a plodding ship. Laden with seventy thousand barrels of oil, she was barely capable of ten knots. This made her two-thirds as fast as the USS Constitution or, say, the Pequod under full sail.
Between 1929 and 1934, Ramapo made a great many crossings from San Diego to Manila. According to Ms. Wells, the journeys became incredibly monotonous. “The crewmen kept getting into fisticuffs and trouble,” she said. “Dad was trying to figure out something that would involve the whole crew and get them to stop bickering.”
Whitemarsh and Ramapo Captain Claude Banks Mayo had an advanced echo sounder brought on board, and they decided to teach the crewmen to use it and interpret the results. On each trek, the ship took a slightly different route, and after 17,239 soundings, her crew eventually produced a huge 3-D plaster of paris map of the midlatitude Pacific seafloor. It was stunning in detail, unveiling two trenches, the Nero and Ramapo Deep (now called the Japan Trench) that were more than thirty thousand feet deep. Mayo wrote that the map revealed “a submerged continent, with mountains, river courses, and plateaus, at an average depth of one mile stretching from the Hawaiian to the Barin Islands, east of the coast of Japan.” The map and its later, more-refined iterations became an instrument not only for geologists and oceanographers but for early surf forecasters like Walter Munk, who wanted to know how waves interacted with the seafloor. Countless