The Mast-Head: From the Surf
A 160-yard-long black plastic pipe washed out of the ocean at Georgica last week. When I finally got around to looking for it on Sunday afternoon, I was disappointed that it had already been cut into shorter lengths and dragged away.
We had been first alerted to it by my friend Tim Garneau, who sent a few smartphone photographs and was the source of the 160-yard estimate. Paul Vogel, another friend, who is the de facto early-morning mayor of Georgica Beach, emailed a report at about the same time. From Tim’s photos, it was obvious that the pipe had come from a dredging operation, but how and from where remained unknown.
Georgica Beach is a good place to seek surprises cast up by the sea. The stone jetty there, which has produced a subtle rise in the onshore sand, traps floating objects on an easterly swell. Among the items I have picked up at Georgica are money, sunglasses, a gold-and-jade bracelet, and two insulin pumps, one of which was still beeping in the sea-grass wrack line. The beachcomber’s glory days are long since passed, however. My paltry finds are but trifles when matched against those that used to appear in the age of sail.
Long Island shores, north and south, had for centuries taken their toll on ships. A miscalculation at night or during bad weather could put a vessel on the bar, where it might as soon break to pieces as be refloated. A ship’s pilot unlucky enough to steer onto the Montauk rocks would have no hope of rescue.
Places along the coast carry names memorializing such wrecks: Cullo den Point in honor of the British warship that sank there during the American Revolution, Amsterdam Beach for a British steamer by that name that went aground in 1867 carrying a load of fruit, raisins, lead, and wine to New York.
Perhaps the most intriguing East End wreck came in 1816 when a mysteriously empty ship struck the bar at Shinnecock. As the wreck master prepared it for auction, a bystander found a Spanish silver coin in a piece of rigging; visitors to the hulk discovered more coins here and there. Then, two young men, determined to do a thorough search, crept aboard with candles and a tin lantern.
Making their way from fore to aft, they at last spotted the shiny edge of a coin in the cabin ceiling. Prying the boards apart, one of the men was showered with silver dollars, but his companion dropped the lantern and much of the trove rolled into the sea.
On subsequent trips, the men found other coins, but kept quiet until much later. When the ship broke up that winter, people began to find money in the sand. Farmers took ploughs to search; one came away with a princely haul worth $60. Now and then for years afterward, bits of Spanish silver could be found. It is hard not to believe that some of that loot might still be out there.