With great hope, each new ship that slid down the ways of a bustling early 20th-century shipyard and out to sea set a path toward adventure, destined to crisscross the wakes of thousands of similar vessels in its travels. Such was the story of the five-masted schooner Nancy when it launched from the Foundation Co.’s shipyard in Portland, Ore., in the relatively late year of 1918.
“She is one of the staunchest vessels on the seas,” claimed the Miami Herald on May 21, 1926, as her crew loaded general cargo under the watch of Capt. S.C. Forde, including automobiles, trucks, speed boats, and furniture, as well as other goods heading for New York City. “She was built as an auxiliary vessel, and during 1918 she made several trips to France with war supplies.”
At the end of the war, the ship was held in Brest, where her engines had to be removed. The age of pure sail-driven vessels was rapidly coming to an end, but vessels of this size often had engines that drove machinery on deck used to load and unload cargo as well as tools for propulsion.
In fact, though, it was the war that brought three-, four-, and five-masted sailing ships back to prominence. With steam vessels of all kinds commandeered for the war effort, “fore-and-aft craft” had returned to prominence.
“They are economical vessels, sailed by small crews, these Yankee schooners,” wrote Winthrop L. Marvin in the American Review of Reviews in 1918, “and are proving to be veritable bonanzas to the patient shareholder who has held on through years of lean or missing dividends.” The war provided one last moment of glory for the American sailing ship.
Between 1918 and 1926, Nancy faced other challenges. Sold to the French government in 1918, along with 41 other auxiliary schooners built during the war on the West Coast, Nancy helped rebuild the war-torn nation, stopping around the United States to pick up flour, copper, and even oak staves to make wine casks. Once, during a particularly frigid winter, she froze in the ice of a Canadian harbor for the season. Another time, in November 1925, she lost all of her canvas – sails – during a ferocious storm off Cape Henry. A month later, Nancy grounded on Squash Meadow Shoal in Vineyard Sound, carrying 3,500 tons of bituminous coal from Hampton Roads to Bangor, Maine. On this most recent trip, she came from Philadelphia by way of Charleston to deliver 1,873,000 feet of lumber to accelerate the growth of the blossoming city of Miami. The voyage to New York, though, proved to be quite quiet, as real estate salesman heading for the city aboard the schooner sent word of their safe passage on June 16, 1926.
After all these voyages, to ports from the West Coast to Europe, Nancy would find a permanent home not alongside a dock, but instead high and dry on the beach at Nantasket.
The story started out simply enough. The ship arrived in Boston on Feb. 4 with a load of coal from Norfolk, a single line noting its appearance in the shipping column. But then, attempting to beat its way south ahead of a storm, the crew found itself in harm’s way. Riding “in ballast” – meaning very light, with no cargo – two weeks later, on Feb. 19, the ship hove to outside of the Boston Lightship in a blinding snowstorm, attempting to find stabilization in the turbulence, dropping two anchors. The seas, though, proved too strong, snapped the chains leading to those anchors and started to drive the ship toward Nantasket Beach.
Elsewhere on the Massachusetts coast the storm caused severe damage and even death. Coast Guard patrol boat CG-238, a 75-foot vessel mostly dealing in Prohibition enforcement off Cape Cod, was on watch 4 miles off Truro’s Highland Light when it, too, set down an anchor and sent out an SOS. The engines died; the anchor could not hold; and eight Coast Guardsmen sank to their deaths in the icy sea.
One man froze to death in Dedham, another in Leominster. Snow piled up as much as 10 inches in places from New York to Boston. Ashore in Hull, the Stony Beach section bore the brunt of the storm’s power, with piazzas torn from a dozen summer cottages.
During the night, Nancy, under the command of Capt. E.M. Baird floated perilously toward Harding’s Ledge, “but the captain ordered the staysail set and the ship was worked to clear the ledge, only to come aground at Nantasket Beach about 100 yards off-shore with eight men aboard,” according to Hull resident Arthur Hurley. The local residents feared for the lives of the men aboard the ship. Humane Society volunteer lifesavers beat the Coast Guard to the scene, enlisting the help of two horses to drag the famed surfboat Nantasket to the scene of the stranding through a foot of snow. The call went out for volunteers, and nine men stepped forward. The lifesavers attached a line to the surfboat, leaving the other end ashore, as a crowd gathered on the beach.
“The waves were monstrous,” writes Hurley, “but the men succeeded in bringing the life boat to the side of the ship which was broadside to the sea. The ship had about thirty feet of freeboard so a rope was put over the side and every time a wave hit the Nancy, she would keel over and dump gallons of water into the life boat. This kept the men very busy bailing out.” One man refused to let go of the rope and had to be manhandled by the lifeboat crew. At a given signal, the 200 people ashore who could wrap their hands about it grasped the line and pulled the lifeboat to the beach. “It was very fortunate that the boat was pulled in on a receding wave which gave the men time to get out. The next wave coming in smashed the life boat against the rocky shore. If the life boat had come in on an incoming wave, many lives would have been lost.”
The last great Humane Society lifeboat rescue had been enacted by Adelbert Nickerson, Edwin Hatch, Robert W. Blossom, Clifton Jaeger, Joseph James, James H. Murphy, John J. Sullivan, and Hurley, all led by Capt. Osceola James, the lone surviving son of famed rescuer Joshua James.
In the immediate aftermath of the storm, as Captain Baird surveyed the situation and considered the refloating plan, word broke loose that thousands of lobsters were ashore near the ship, as well as up and down the Hull coastline. One Hingham man corralled 600 before he simply could not carry anymore. “Majestically situated high and dry in its cradle of sand at Surfside, the five-masted schooler Nancy, driven in by the gale, serenely viewed the scene,” reported The Boston Globe on Feb. 23.
The following day the Kenosha News, out in Wisconsin, ran a photograph of the crew walking around the entirety of the ship. It had driven so high onto the beach that that massive vessel sat high and dry at low tide. It was at that point that local authorities began to wonder whether or not it would ever leave the beach. By March 3, they knew for sure.
“The gale and high tide to-day placed beyond all hope of salvage the five-masted schooner Nancy which ran onto the beach here during the terrific gale of February 20,” reported the Associated Press. “The vessel this morning was swung broadside and lifted 40 feet further up the beach.”
Ten days later, the town realized it had received both a blessing and a curse, as 12,000 cars motored down to the beach to take a look at the ship. More than 2,000 people got out of their automobiles and visited the ship. The struggling seaside community, victimized by the freedom those very automobiles gave vacationers, had a sudden tourist attraction. It also had a traffic jam on Nantasket Avenue.
The highest tides of the year came in October, but even the assistance of a Navy vessel, the Redwing, could not get the ship back to sea, as 25,000 gathered at the beach to watch. The tug made several attempts before the hawser snapped with thunderous force. Another attempt in early December failed as well. Cottage owners who lost ocean views due to the ship’s massive size sued for damages. The Hull selectmen attempted to tax the ship’s owners. And all the while, Nancy settled deeper into the sand.
“The Nancy washed ashore at the beach behind Doc Bergan’s,” recounted former resident Herb Skellett in a letter to this writer. The Nancy had been on the beach for a year by the time the Skelletts came to town in 1928. There wasn’t a child alive in the early 1930s in Hull who could forget its presence. “I used to play on this ship when we were young.” Mr. Skellett’s letter included a blow-up photo of the ship. “One of the kids named Biladeau broke his leg, and that scared us off.”
By the mid-1930s Nancy had become a dangerous derelict, inviting local children to a world of cuts, bumps, and bruises. In 1937, the town succeeded in burning the hull of the boat down to the waterline, with funding from the Works Progress Administration, but could go no deeper, until now. Henry J. Stevens, commissioner of public safety (a job created for him that combined the positions of chief of both the Police and Fire departments) applied for more WPA funding that spring to finish the job.
Rumors abound of the final resting places of several pieces of the ship. The masts supposedly reach the Quincy granite yards. An anchor possibly sits on a front lawn in Mashpee. Grossmans’s lumber yard in Braintree may have gotten some of the lumber. A Works Progress Administration workforce burned what remained of the boat down to its keel in the late 1930s, burying what remained thereafter.
Every once in a while, we get that doozy of a storm that shifts the sands enough for us to see those remains, the last remnants of a once-proud, yet troubled ship that sailed less than 10 years, but lingers in Hull memory almost a century after it came to town.