Wrecker’s Garden
Raised on a mountain of water, the ship was in a moment thrown into a dark abyss. Again and again, the gale tossed her as it bellowed. The terror of the day was only surpassed by the seemingly endless darkness of the night. As light came to the horizon, the calamity worsened as the ship was raised and thrown into a deep trough. The stem of the bow let go of some planks, and the sea struck her aft. The rudder tore off, seawater poured in, and the pump alarm sounded. The run was loaded with cargo and the captain ordered the men who were not running the pumps to throw the cargo overboard to access the leak. The water flowed in a torrent and, once the leak was found, shirts, pants, sail cloth and all else suitable was caulked into the seams. The water rose, now four or five feet below decks. The crew climbed into the spars to save themselves, and from there, if icy spray and violent wind had not obscured their view, they might have seen the chimney smoke swirl from their own homes.
The townspeople had gathered on the shore. The icy sea was still too rough to launch a dory, and they watched helplessly. By the time the storm was over, no one was left alive to rescue. The next day, the beach was strewn with tattered sails, planks and barrels. For weeks and months, even years to come, the remnants of the ship washed ashore, and although the crew of these early ships couldn’t always be saved, the cargo often was. After a wreck, townspeople came out with carts to haul away whatever spoils had been cast up on the beach. Many referred to these men as “wreckers”.
One wrecker hauled his wooden cart along the shore and looked out at a smooth horizon. The sea had finally calmed, and the wind was slack, though the air was still crisp. Filling his cart from the great piles of seaweed that had been thrown upon the beach, he picked out remnants of that awful night. A tattered shirt, a broken clay pipe, a piece of sail, a shattered dish, and here an intact cask that survived. He made a pile of barrel staves, split planks, a rail and ribs. The long brown kelp, bladderwort and eelgrass were destined for this wrecker’s sandy fields.
Inland farmers thought it a joke that anything could grow on the barren shores of Cape Cod, but the refuse of the ocean was a Cape Codder’s bounty, brown gold, free for the taking, manure from the depths of the sea. The man hauled his seaweed and pieces of the wreck up the cliff and home to his garden, a wind shorn, piecemeal patch that lay behind the dunes, the quintessential “wrecker’s garden”. The wooden barrel staves and planks would work well to keep marauding predators and plundering livestock out of the garden, and the ship ribs would serve as a perfect trellis. The seaweed would be spread upon the dormant asparagus and turnip fields. Spring would soon be here. He now worked to tap the barrel rings free from the intact casks to see what bounty from across the Atlantic was held within. To his delight, it was filled with seed, the barrel sealed so tight its contents were still dry.
Seeds were a common item ordered from the homeland. Early in 1629, John Endicott (1588-1665), one of the early colonial governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, placed an order for apple seeds and seedling. In a typical order of those days, he ordered vines, wheat, rye, barley, oats, peas, stones of all sorts of fruits, woad seed, saffron heads, pomegranates, licorice seed, madder roots and seed, potatoes, hop roots, hemp seed, flax seed, and currant plants from England. These seeds and roots, according to accounts, sprung up and flourished throughout New England. And, although many similar shipments were sent, not all made it to their destinations.
The first recorded wreck off Cape Cod was the Sparrowhawk, which ran aground at Orleans in 1626. The people onboard were able to get ashore safely, and the ship was repaired, but many future wrecks were not so fortunate. Loaded with passengers and cargo, many of these ships to New England were to wash up on the “backside” of Cape Cod. These ships carried supplies of all sorts for beginning lives anew in the New World: books, pots and pans, furniture and, perhaps most importantly, plant stock from their homeland. Seeds and nursery stock were crucial to the survival of the early settlers, as displayed by Gov. Thomas Prince, who began the first settlement at Nauset, pitching his tent in April 1644, and commencing the labor of cultivation on about two hundred acres of the richest land in the place. The first thing he did was plant a pear tree.
“This celebrated pear tree, planted by Governor Prince, two centuries ago, was still annually yielding its delicious fruit” so states the historical records of Eastham some 100 years ago and with it a verse written by Herman Doane, a descendant of Deacon John Doane, one of his Gov. Prince’s companions, expressing its importance. “Two hundred years have, on the wings of time, passed, with their joys and woes, since thou, Old Tree put forth thy first leaves in this foreign clime, transplanted from the soil beyond the sea.”
Even more variety of cargo hit the shore as East Coast commerce flourished in later years. Wine, coffee, nutmeg, cotton, tobacco, exotic fruits and vegetables, and items of trade and luxury moved north to south and back again. Once the new colonies expanded so did the supply routes now leaving England, Spain, France and the Netherlands. They sailed south “till the butter melted,” then followed the trade winds west to the Caribbean Islands where they loaded valuable cargo such as sugar and rum. They continued on, running up the east coast to New England and beyond, passing by the outer Cape on the way to Boston and points north to reload ships with lumber and other products. Then they passed by once again with these fresh commodities to sell further south, or returned once again to England and Europe with New World finds.
By the early 1800s, schooner traffic was bumper-to-bumper off our shores year round, with an average of two wrecks every month during the winter that met a tragic end on our sandbars. Unlike on the rocky coasts of some shores, the cargo here often did not break up, and, if packed properly, such as in sealed oak barrels, made it to the beach.
The winter of 1839 was particularly bad in New England. In a period of fourteen days there were three gales. In the book, Awful Calamities the Shipwrecks of December 1839, the disaster is well described.
“It has probably never fallen to the lot of the citizens of New England, to witness, or record, so many terrible disasters by sea, in the short period of fourteen days, as have transpired within that length of time the present month. Three gales of unequalled fury and destructiveness, have swept along our coast, December 14th, 22nd and 27th. The tide all along the coast rose to an unprecedented height, and great damage was done on shore by the overflowing of the wharves. It appears that 1 barque, 17 brigs, 68 schooners and sloops, were lost in the three gales. It was supposed 50 were lost at Gloucester alone in the first storm. Besides this, 23 ships and barques, 22 brigs, 168 schooners, and sloops, were dismasted, driven ashore, or greatly injured some other way. We do not suppose we have ascertained the loss of near all the vessels which have been destroyed by these tornadoes. Many were foundered at sea and some went ashore and to pieces, so that no intelligible record of their loss left behind.”
The list of shipwrecks was unrelenting in years to follow. Our beaches were littered with everything from coal, flour, corn, fruit, guano, and cattle horns to lumber, plants and more. Here are some of the more memorable hauls:
● On the first day of March, 1849, the full-rigged ship Franklin struck and foundered near Newcomb’s Hollow, on the ocean side of Wellfleet. She was en route from Deal, England, to Boston, with passengers and cargo. A good part of the Franklin’s cargo was salvaged by the people of Wellfleet and other Cape Cod towns. It carried wool, linseed oil, nutmegs, books, dry goods, and what the news called “a choice selection of nursery stock.” The nursery stock washed ashore much undamaged, was bought in England and Scotland by a South Boston man named Bell, who had the idea of setting up a horticultural business. The fruit trees recovered from the wreck brought years of fresh fruit to the town, so it is said. Captain Isaiah Hatch from South Wellfleet was mentioned in a Barnstable Patriot article in 1871. It was reported that a pear tree in his garden was claimed to be an unbelievable 130 years old, which many suspected was to conceal the fact that he had actually salvaged it from the Franklin.
● During the late afternoon of March 4th, 1875, the Italian bark Giovanni ran aground during a storm on the outer bar of Cape Cod, three miles west of the Highland Lifesaving Station in Truro. Thirteen men perished. The ship was carrying casks filled with white wine and claret, which ultimately led to the death of even more men. According to the Provincetown Advocate the following week, “Many of these casks were cut into and the heads knocked out and men in a disgustingly gluttonous manner gorged themselves with the contents till they became intoxicated, several cases resulting fatally it is reported, while others appeared in town so drunk that they needed the walk widened in order to save their jugs and demijohns from being smashed against the iron fences.” The Provincetown Advocate summarized the activity thusly: “We believe there is no place or time at which human weaknesses become so conspicuous as at a shipwreck.”
● The Onondaga washed ashore in 1907 near Chatham. It was a huge ship, filled to the brim, and the locals wasted no time unloading it while she lay waiting to be refloated. Candy, gravestones, whiskey, blankets, sheets, pianos, wrapping paper, champagne, coffee, cartloads of potatoes and much, much more were absconded with. Five-pound boxes of Lowney’s chocolates were strewn across the beach, and there were so many that the children became tired of carrying them home and left many boxes behind. Beer, scotch, and champagne stocked the locals cupboards for months to come.
● One infamous wreck was that of the Horatio Hall that ran aground off Chatham in 1909. It lay on the bottom of a shoal, but her upper decks were out of the water, making it possible for anyone with a boat to make off with her cargo, which they did. It seems everyone in Chatham had matching china after that wreck, as well as mirrors, billiard tables and balls.
● On the morning of February 17, 1914, five members of the Italian bark Castagna met a tragic end on the sandbars just south of the Marconi Station in Wellfleet. The Castagna had left Montevideo, Uruguay, two months earlier with a load of guano and cattle horns, bound for the Bradley Fertilizer Company of Weymouth. I’m trying to envision how that ended.
● And then there was the famous “Blueberry Boat”, the Lutzen. On February 3, 1939, this Canadian refrigerated ship ran aground off Nauset Beach. It was loaded with codfish oil, fish and frozen blueberries. The codfish oil was dumped overboard in a failed attempt to lighten the ship and refloat her. It was then decided to unload the fish and blueberries. Unfortunately for the shipping company, unseasonably warm weather moved in and thawed much of the blueberry cargo. As the story goes, people from all over the Cape began making their way to Nauset Beach to take home boxes of free blueberries, and “that’s how the heavenly aroma of freshly baked blueberry pies ended up wafting from one end of Cape Cod to the other in the dead of winter of 1939.” Today the Orleans Historical Society holds a Mason jar of blueberries from the Lutzen in its collection.
In the 1700s and early 1800s, agriculture on Cape Cod was booming: dairy and sheep farming, strawberries and field crops in Falmouth; ducks in Orleans; cranberries mid-Cape; corn and other grains on the lower Cape; and, surprisingly, cattle farming in Truro. During this period, many Cape farmers were able to shift from subsistence to market farming, producing enough corn, wheat and other grains to export. By the end of the eighteenth century, there were many windmills used for processing the Cape’s abundant harvest of corn. Farmers in Eastham also grew English hay on the uplands and harvested salt marsh hay from the wetlands along the Cape Cod Bay side of the town and from the Nauset Marsh. But eventually the outer Cape farmers found that 200 years of growing wheat, corn and other grains had exhausted their soils, so these crops were soon replaced with asparagus and turnips, which flourished in loose soils.
Asparagus, or Truro grass, as it was once referred to, had a mysterious beginning here on the Cape. It is believed that colonists brought asparagus to North America in the 1700s, planting it initially in New England, thus giving it plenty of opportunities to be shipwrecked on our shores. Asparagus and turnips were most often farmed together, turnips being planted as soon as the asparagus harvest was in. Sandy, saline soils of Germany and Holland were considered ideal for asparagus, and huge crops were raised, harvested, sold and exported. History confirms that asparagus was introduced to the New World by Dutch settlers. By 1865 asparagus was appearing in American seed catalogs. Originating in sandy, salty soils, asparagus tolerates salinity better than the majority of common weeds. Weed control has always been the most difficult part of asparagus production, and today herbicides are often used, but in the days of old they used rock salt and, here on the Cape, seaweed straight out of the ocean. Asparagus is not affected by the salt, but the weeds will die away. Being a hardy perennial, it might have only taken a few seeds washed onshore, as suggested by Thoreau, to find the perfect environment to become established.
Eastham boasted of their superior sandy-soil root crops: turnip, carrots and beets. Turnips were an important crop in those days throughout New England, not only as human food but as an indispensable animal fodder in winter. A farmer’s harvest of turnip and mangel (a large turnip-like root) could make or break a farmer’s profit, as it was the preferred winter feedstock, particularly for sheep and cattle. Turnips were so important that during an exhibition of vegetables by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1840, a Mr. Pond, chairman of the Committee on Vegetables, exhibited 31 varieties of turnips. He said that they were a product of seed imported by him from Scotland. He originally had over 50 varieties, but had given some of them to other agriculturists throughout New England. “Many of the varieties,” Pond boasted, “will be found to be superior to any that we have in this country.”
Scotland, you say? I do find that intriguing. It was noted in an article by Ellen Whalen in Edible Cape Cod (fall 2009) that the Eastham turnip is an heirloom: an open-pollinated variety passed from generation to generation for over 100 years and that Charlie Horton, an octogenarian formerly from Orleans, passionately believes the turnip is descended from Scotland’s version of the turnip, called a neep. It is said that you can trace every turnip in Eastham, Truro, Wellfleet, and Orleans back to a Mr. Raymond Brackett’s seed, although the origin of his original seed is unknown.
Mr. Brackett was born in 1893 and had stated in his later years that growing turnips had been in his family for 100 years, which, if true, would put the arrival of the famous turnip in Eastham around the early 1800s which also coincides with eastham’s change in agricultural crops from corn and wheat to root crops. Just as intriguing are these lines from Henry Thoreau’s book, Cape Cod, of an encounter with a local man down Cape during the 1800s.
“A man traveling by the shore near there, not long before us, noticed something green growing in the pure sand of the beach, just at high-water mark, and on approaching found it to be a bed of beets flourishing vigorously, probably from seed washed out of the Franklin. Also beets and turnips came up in the seaweed used for manure in many parts of the Cape.” And further on he writes, “Another, the same who picked up the Captain’s valise with the memorable letter in it (from the Franklin), showed me, growing in his garden, many pear and plum trees which washed ashore from her, all nicely tied up and labeled, and he said that he might have got five hundred dollars’ worth.” He also mentions a Mr. Walter Rowell, “In whose garden stands four sturdy apple trees. Their fruit is different than the Cape apple, something like a Baldwin but snappier, juicier. And that the neighborhood agrees because they are Franklin apples from saplings tossed up by the sea.” One might agree from the timing of these events that it would not be unreasonable to speculate that the unknown origin of the famed Eastham turnip just may have been solved. It may have originally washed up from the wreck of the Franklin or some other unfortunate vessel, though we will never know for sure.
Market grower of heirloom vegetables, herbs and flowers, Veronica Worthington also raises chickens, peafowl and heritage breed sheep for wool and show. A long-time contributor to Edible Cape Cod, Worthington writes about the trials and tribulations of raising animals and market gardening in her Farmgirl Confidential column and on Facebook.
