The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future (Cont.)

You Are Here:

Home >> The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future (Cont.)

Today's Question
How do you make primitive snowshoes? answer

What should you do if you get lost driving in a snow storm? answer

Today's Question
What is the greenest ski and snowboard on the market? answer

Can I really damage a coral reef with sunscreen while snorkeling? answer

What kind of dog will make me look manlier? answer
Is there a sport that safely combines my twin passions for guns and kayaks? answer
How come most of the world's cultures enjoy eating goat, but Americans don't? answer

Online Favorites

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Outside Magazine April 2002

Page:

The Ghost of Shipwrecks Future (Cont.)

"ABOUT NINE TWENTY, as though from some unknown danger, the room we were in fell into a deadly silence—no word was uttered. Then came the crash." The final moments of the Mohawk were chaotic, according to one of the surviving Williams students. In a 28-page testimonial composed for the college archives, Karl Osterhout described the departure that blustery afternoon from Pier 13 in Manhattan and the crash just hours later. The Mohawk sailed the day after what the New York Daily News called the "worst storm since 1920"; 17 inches of snow had fallen on the city, and ice still coated the ship's railings. As the vessel rounded Sandy Hook and headed south,

He had just dealt a hand to my uncle when the freighter surged out of the night and sliced into the port bow.

the college students had no inkling that the steering system was freezing up. They ate dinner and then sat in the lounge, playing cards. Osterhout had just dealt a hand to my uncle when they heard a ship's whistle blow, and then silence fell over the passengers. The Mohawk had veered out of its sea lane; everyone seemed to sense some danger approaching. It was the Talisman, which surged out of the night and into the Mohawk's port bow.

"It didn't seem like a big crash," Osterhout wrote, "but there was a sound like splintering wood. At the impact everyone stood up simultaneously. One woman screamed." The Talisman sheared off, drifting but intact, and after gawking at the disappearing freighter the Mohawk's passengers rushed to their staterooms. Some sensibly put on warm clothing, but many paused to pursue bizarre urges. Osterhout encountered one of his friends sitting calmly in bed, scribbling a diary entry about "exactly how I felt when the crash came." One man stowed two teaspoons in his pockets, dejected that his shipment of antique silver was locked in the hold. Osterhout caught himself obsessively collecting his scattered playing cards. The Mohawk listed hard to port, then tilted to starboard. The pitching corridors were filled with families hauling steamer trunks, and old women in nightgowns. Falling pots and pans brained the cook. Few members of the 110-man crew were to be found: One officer, Osterhout noted, "tried to make the band play, but the men refused." Passengers stumbled up the gangways and skittered across the snowy decks. Some of the lifeboats could not be broken out of the ice; people filled others with their luggage, and handed their children out to strangers in departing boats. The lights failed, restarted, and failed again. In the darkness, the geology party became separated. Osterhout heard glass portholes shatter belowdecks, a sign that water was rising fast. He jumped into one of the last lifeboats, landing beside the waiter who had served him dinner.

Even those who made it into the lifeboats suffered severe frostbite during the two-hour wait for rescue, but my uncle didn't make it into a boat. If he did manage to escape the ship, the "suck" that followed the Mohawk's dive would have pulled even a strong swimmer under, and as the downdraft subsided, the debris that rocketed back to the surface would have knocked even a strong man unconscious. More than a hundred people in lifeboats survived, but the lives of my uncle and 44 others ended quietly, a plunging body temperature leading quickly to exhaustion, then numbness, then blackness.

Two ships picked up the lifeboats and stayed on station until dawn as a formality; the Talisman did too, before being towed into port. When the Mohawk survivors docked in New York, they were thronged by photographers ("MORE SHIP DISASTER PICTURES PAGES 12, 18, 20, AND 21," crowed the Daily News) and the distraught families of passengers. Among them was my grandmother, still hopeful that her eldest son, initially reported to be safe, would come limping down a gangway. A few days later his body was recovered, and William D. Symmes was switched into the column of the dead. Most of the bodies were found, but not all, and the Mohawk began its long residence as a memorial to the lost.

I never knew my grandmother, but I find it hard to think of her on the dock that day, waiting. Things seemed to go wrong for my family after that. Within a few years my grandfather too died; my grandmother passed away shortly after that. My father's remaining brother died in the 1950s, and my father more than a decade ago. The youngest son of the youngest son, I was cut off from this lost generation. In the photos, Uncle Bill seems like a stranger—unfamiliar in the root meaning of that word.

There is an old photo of my father sledding in Central Park on a snowy day, and when I turned it over recently I was surprised to see, in my grandmother's neat writing, that it was taken on January 24, 1935, the day the Mohawk sailed. It was the last day of an old world, the day something broke between the past and present.

Page: