Ghost Wave - Chris Dixon [53]
In May of the same year, the fifty-two-foot yacht Mignonette set sail from Southampton, England, for Sydney, Australia. But off Africa, a hurricane-force gale pushed great northerly swells headlong against the south-flowing Agulhas current, which sweeps past the Cape of Good Hope. Amid a pileup of swells, the struggling Mignonette finally succumbed to a single, colossal peak again higher than her masts. Nineteen days later, starving and adrift aboard a leaky dinghy, the desperate captain and two crewmen decapitated and devoured their dying seventeen-year-old cabin boy. The trio was miraculously rescued four days later and carried back to England to be tried for murder and cannibalism. Following one of the most macabre court cases in maritime history, one man was acquitted while two spent a mere six months in prison. But the sensational case forever outlawed a gruesome, if occasionally necessary, “Custom of the Sea.”
Whitemarsh doesn’t give heights of the waves that regularly swept beneath the ship but instead noted that they typically moved at sixty to sixty-six knots. “Probably no two seas [waves] were identical in length and height,” he wrote. “They varied from 500 to 750 feet in length of sides, or total wave length of 1,000 to 1,500 feet, as measured by the ship itself and the seaman’s eye. This is verified by motion picture film taken during the morning watch. The Ramapo is 477 feet ten inches in length. For purposes of illustration, a conservative wave length of 1,180 feet is assumed. It was noted that the ship’s entire length glided down the lee slope of waves an appreciable time before the next crest overtook the stern.” [Unfortunately, the film footage Whitemarsh refers to seems to have disappeared into a black hole at the U.S. Naval or National Archives.]
After twenty-four hours of racing up and down over behemoth waves, Whitemarsh posted Lieutenant Frederick C. Marggraff to watch and measure the swells from an ideal spot atop the pilot’s house. At around 3:30 A.M. , Marggraff stood dumbfounded as a billowy monolith eclipsed the moon. A great wave had collected what seemed the entire ocean in its maw. It stacked up behind Ramapo, nearly a quarter mile long from its trough to its crest, and moved much faster than the other swells. As it overtook the ship, the Ramapo began to slide forward like a surfboard descending a wave. Whitemarsh and the crew held on as Ramapo pitched forward a harrowing twenty-four degrees. Fortunately, the great swell was not breaking in a top-to-bottom fashion; it was simply so large that a portion of its upper reaches submerged the ship’s stern and cascaded down her deck. Had the swell in fact been breaking over the backs of its fellow waves, Ramapo would have been completely buried and almost certainly sunk. Instead, she rocketed forward as if atop a sea of ball bearings. In the canyonlike trough, her bow dug in but not so deep that she was pitchpoled forward. Despite the tumult, Lieutenant Marggraff somehow kept his nerve. The five-foot-eleven officer set a line of sight between the pilot’s house and the crow’s nest. Using basic trigonometry, he calculated a true wave height of 112 feet, or 34 meters—that is, a wave roughly ten stories high. This remains the largest wave ever observed by a human being from the deck of a ship, and the first reliable documentation of a wave greater than 100 feet high.
Since that time, there have been numerous terrifying and reliable measurements of waves approaching, but none officially “besting,” the Ramapo wave’s height when measured from an actual sea-level position. In 1995, the North Sea oil platform Draupner had a mammoth rogue wave 95 feet high sweep beneath her from seas that were averaging