Missing, 1930
A story
I. The year starts off with the disappearance of an English
solicitor. On January 16, Mrs. Phillips,
the wife of Davis Moses Phillips, visits the police office in Boulogne-sur-Mer
to inquire about her husband. Mr. D. M. Phillips had taken the train from
London on December 20 to go to Paris, by way of a channel crossing boat. He had
an appointment to meet a certain Frank Samuel James, who resided in the
neighborhood of Passy in Paris. Mr. Phillips apparently arrived from the boat
from Folkestone and presented his first class ticket, no. 32,222, to the
official at his disembarkation. He was wearing a chestnut brown suit, and he
had a grey felt hat on his head. He held the handle of his valise in his hand.
The valise had his initials on it: DMP.
It was rather odd that Mrs. Phillips had not begun her
investigation into her husband’s disappearance earlier. He didn’t come home for
Christmas. Did they have a fight? Did she prefer not to mention domestic
difficulties?
Or was his disappearance connected to the mysterious deaths
of Mrs. Wilson and Miss Daniels, two cases that were still open, as was asked
by the reporter for Le Matin? Mrs. Florence Wilson, an English nurse,
had been “savagely assassinated in the dunes of Touquet on the evening of
Saturday, May 19, 1928.” Miss May Daniels, another English nurse, had been
discovered, dead, in a field near Boulogne in April 1927. Their commonality
with Phillips was of the vaguest – all were English. Excelsior reported a twist in the tale
on January 17 – apparently, another woman, calling herself Mrs. Phillips, had
already been snooping around Boulogne, and had asked about the solicitor using
the precise number of his ticket to identify him. Who was she and how did she
know the ticket number? A question that goes out there on some frequency, and
is never answered. So often, this is the case with the questions. Did the newspaper somehow end up on the wrong
end of the stick? Was this a rumor?
On the 25th of January, Anatole France died and
the police in London announced that Mr. Phillips’ valise had been sitting, all
the time, in the lost and found department of the Waterloo train station in
London; which posed a problem – would Mr. Phillips have actually made his way
all the way to France without his valise? Wouldn’t he have felt it important to
retrieve it? Unless he was carrying the valise only to disguise his real
intention, such as it was. A double photo of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips is published
on the front page of Le Matin. Phillips is wearing owlish glasses. He looks
very young. The photo is badly retouched. Mr. Phillips is holding his hand
under his chin, but the hand looks squashed and pulpy, the retouching job
somehow failing here. This is not uncommon – as newspapers incorporated
photographs in the 10s and 20s, they often felt compelled to edit them, retouch
them, with spooky results. Beside her
husband with his odd hands, Mrs. Phillips shows up as not a bad looking woman, sporting
a fashionably short hair cut that tells us – well, that Mrs. Phillips went
through the 1920s like many another woman, taking her advice from her
coiffeuse.
The newspapers had their fun with him, and then disappeared
him as a story. No body, no money missing. “The case is of the type we often
see. When an Englishman takes a fugue, the
port where he embarks for the Isle of Cythera is always Boulogne, Le Havre or
Calais; everything happens as if the essential thing, for him, was to have at
last quit the virtuous soil of Great Britain for our land of love and liberty.”
II. The great disappearance of the year, on the Continental
side, happens in February: the storied, the legendary disappearance of General Alexandre
Koutiepov. This happened on the frosty morning of January 26, and was witnessed
by a nurse, Auguste Steinmetz, who was
working at the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu clinic facing Rue Oudinot in Paris. Probably smoking a cigarette, taking a
breather, staring out the window. The time : 10 :45. He witnesses a
muscular, moustached man, accompanied by three persons, two men and a woman
wearing a beret. They all get into a grey car with smoked windows. Steinmetz
turns away from the window and goes back to work. Later, he tells what he has
seen to the police. It is not much to go on.
The bluff man with the moustache had been waging war on the
Soviet Union since 1920. He was the “commander” of the White forces, such as
they were, in Western Europe. His command, it should be said, was a nominal and
disputed thing, but he nevertheless had used his authority to direct several
sneak attacks within the Soviet Union itself. A grenade tossed into the Central Club of the
Communist Party on the Moyka River in Leningrad? That was his plan. The failed
attack on the Lubyanka in 1927? Ditto. There were other White Russian
monarchists who aligned themselves with other Dukes and Princes, but nobody was
as active in the resistance as General Koutiepov.
Disappearing him was quite a coup for the Soviets.
Who were the two men? The story published by the Echo de
Paris, and believed by prolific spy journalist Nigel West, is that one was
a GPU agent named Leon Borisovich Helfand, while the other was some available gorilla
named Ellert, first name not given. Marina Grey, the nom de plume of Marina
Antonovna Denikina – the daughter of another famous White Russian general,
Deniken – tracked down the details until she had a fairly complete picture of
the event, writing the definitive book about it, which came out in the 80s. The
Soviet plan was to chloroform the general and hustle him out of France. They
used the grey car as a diversion, switching to another car while the grey car
proceeded to Normandy, as though to put the General on a Soviet boat.
But in the back seat of the other car, after chloroforming
General Koutiepov, they discovered that he was in precarious health. The
chloroform killed him. Though they took him to a private clinic on the
outskirts of Paris, run by a sympathizer, and tried to revive him, he died
there.
III. 1930 was an excellent time to disappear if you were a
speculator. When Charles V. Bob flew from Chicago to New York on October 10, he
did not arrive at the time scheduled. “A patron of aviation exploration”, Bob
had financed the Byrd Antarctic expedition. He’d also made millions in selling
mining shares. As the lateness of his plane turned into the disappearance of
Mr. Bob, it was discovered that he’d been actively removing money from his
personal bank account and cashing in shares from his Metals and Mining Company
on October 10. On October 22 Bob called his home in Akron Ohio to say he was
alive. On the same day, Phoenix newspapers reported he’d been seen in Phoenix.
On the same day, the assistant Attorney General, Mr. Washborn, told the boys of
the press that combing through the records he’d found an “astonishing number of
women” had invested in Bob’s companies and lost their money. Bob’s friends
declared he’d probably left the country. Mexico seemed pretty likely. On
October 28 his partners declared bankruptcy and his creditors had
declared that he had absconded with their money. Not an uncommon story in the
aftermath of the stock crash. A picture
of Bob was printed in the pages of various newspapers, under the caption:
Missing promoter. He looked placid, blond haired, groomed, soft eyed. He did
not look like a tough mining engineer. He did look like a nice young man. This
appearance might have been a selling point. On November 19, Charles V. Bob gave
himself up to District Attorney Crain in New York City and told the boys of the
press that the losses in the company amounted to $6,000,000 dollars. His
brother also surrendered to the authorities. They got out on $35,000 bail. Assistant
Attorney General Washburn, included Bob’s story with those of other bucket shop
speculators in a book, High and Low Financiers (1932). Bob got a chapter to
himself. So did “the Reverend Fenwicke Holmes, who preached and had great
followings which others of his clique sold stock issues to”; and so did “Harold
Russell Ryder, the Broadway playboy who lived
a $500,000 a year pace and who is now in Sing Sing.” Bob had more fight
in him than those grifters, and won suit after suit; but in 1939 the Feds
finally hung a charge that stuck in court: mail fraud and conspiracy. Seven
years in prison. But the unkindest cut was that the atlases took his name off
the mountain range in Antarctica that had been named after him by Byrd.
IV. Another Englishman, this one in Marseilles, disappears
on July 5. He closed up his desk, he locked up the combinations for the safe,
as per usual. The Vice Consul, Reginald Arthur Lee. A dull name, rather
enlivened by the many newspaper and magazine accounts about his disappearance,
in which the name is given sometimes as Arthur Reginald Lee, sometimes as Sir
Reginald A. Lee, and so on. Like the myths of the Greek gods, which come down
to us from various sources in various versions, or like the dream mechanism
that Freud had discovered at the turn of the century, where censorship and
condensation produce our monstrous, odd, and sometimes pleasing dream images,
newspapers collectively often pass down stories with a load of mutations, so
that one has to … well, be clever. Part Sunday historian, part oneirocritic.
Arthur Lee, as we will call him, is 35. Apparently, the
foreign office had determined that he was just the man to parachute into
various warm water ports – Havana, Savannah (Georgia), Marseilles. Ports where
gambling, prostitution and smuggling are not uncommon career paths. Places of
melodrama and police on the gangster’s payroll.
There are differing accounts of when the vanishing happened.
This is a structural element in all vanishings – the last moment. Often clocked
with absurd exactitude. Esse est
percipi, George Berkeley’s ontology, rules over the missing, with their
lifestory unrolling in the media and in memory, and their fleshly life as
being, themselves, percipients of whatever disorder they have gotten themselves
into, for whatever reasons, happening anyhow.
In this case the clock, officially, starts on July 10. At
the consulate, Rue d’Arcole, they are
now worried. Arthur Lee’s desk is in order. They’ve found, finally, the
combinations to all the various locks, and the book with the codes in the safe
for dispatches. But Lee has not been heard from. This gets into the papers. His
face graces the front page of the story about his missing-ness in the
Marseilles paper, Le Petit Provencal, on the 11th. This photo
shows a bald man with a large forehead, a rather bushy moustache, and wire
framed glasses. It was evidently taken for Identification purposes – hence
Arthur Lee’s blank stare. One tries to place this face at some Havana terrasse,
sipping rum cocktails, but it doesn’t quite
click. “Aimable et bienviellant” is the
judgment about Lee in the office.
The Marseilles police are on the case, under the direction
of Detective Cals.
On the 13th, Lee’s mother arrives in Marseilles
and offers 13,000 francs for information leading to the discovery of her son
and heir. Already, a story is out there: “Police have not been able to get
confirmation of the report that an international drug ring” is involved in the
disappearance.
Some rather fantastic scenes unroll in the search for Lee.
Most notably, the sensational story about a man in pink pyjamas, reading an
Arthur Conan Doyle novel, The Lost World, drinking whiskey next to a
valise on one of the rocky promontories that jut out into the Sea in that
region east of Marseilles called the Calanques. The Calanques are best
approached by the water, as they are high and rocky and only at their peaks is
there a twisting road. A report comes in that one Jacques Dessouny, who was
hiking the Calanques, actually saw a man in the pink pyjamas, wearing a grey
felt hat – and when he returned later, that man was gone. In the event, the
valise was found. In the valise was found a strange note: “I am comitting
suicide. Noone is too blame.” The evident mistakes in spelling imply that
the note did not emanate from some University trained Englishman. Later, Lee’s
part time maid identified the pyjamas in the case as Lee’s. Then she retracted
the story. Detective Cals, though, was not certain. A cadaver was found
floating in the waters of the Calanque, but to everyone’s disappointment, it
was a woman.
Then the discovery of Lee’s lover, or at least his idée
fixe: an 18 year old Swiss miss, the
daughter of one of the receptionists at the consulate: Ida Bucher. Who, when
tracked down, claimed not to have seen her suitor in some time. A matter of
breaking up.
In Detective, the
magazine edited by Joseph Kessel, the story of the Missing Consul is published
under the Conan Doyle-ish heading: The Rule of three. It is written, or
narrated, by a man named Ashton-Wolf. A Scots-American, educated in Europe. A
man who has rubbed elbows with Conan Doyle (who died in the very week that the
English Vice-Consul disappeared, and was buried on the 14th of July
in a strange, spiritualist ceremony).
There is, indubitably, a cloud of Doyle-ishness over this whole
incident. Ashton-Wolf, according to Detective Magazine, has been roaming the
dock area, drinking in longshoremen’s bars, listening to chit-chat.
A true crime writer, Sophie Masson, has written an
appreciation of Harry Ashton-Wolf from which I gather a few facts: Born in the
American West to a Scots immigrant, he was sent to prep school in Cannes at the
age of 14. Then he went to Heidelberg to study at the University. Then he came
out and decided to be a detective. He became, at least in his own account –
which often seems too fanciful to be real - an assistant to certain of the
great criminologists: Berthillon, for
instance, who came up with the fingerprint idea technique. He wrote best
selling books with titles like The Thrill of Evil. He was a great mixer
of pulp fiction and real life – an inclination shared by the public itself,
discovering the heightened life in movies and magazines. Ashton-Wolf likes to
work the combination of gritty street smarts and science – he sees himself as a
Sherlock Holmes, with a more American pragmatic bent.
Ashton-Wolf’s books go out of style, but he has his rather
rarified posterity. Rayner Heppenstall, the Francophile English novelist,
quotes him with approval in one of his books on French crime.
Ashton-Wolf, of course, has a casual acquaintance with
Inspector Cals. Good man. But is he on the right track?
The rule of three, according to Ashton-Wolf, is a rule he
learned from Conan Doyle’s detective: who profits from the crime? Find the
woman. And look for your clues in the victim’s past. Looking for the woman
seems to have been the immediate thought of Inspector Cals as well. He finds
two “respectable” girls from the English
colony in Marseille, girls who have danced with Lee at various soirees, and who
claim to have seen him on July 5 at the railroad station, Gare St. Charles.
Ashton-Wolf is sceptical of the whole direction of the
investigation.
For the Detective, Ashton-Wolf writes:
“21 July – M. Cals and his men are convinced that the man in
the pink pyjamas was M. Lee.
I have not lived as an intimate of the great Conan Doyle,
creator of Sherlock Holmes, without having penetrated a bit into his methods:
permit me, then, to find all this story a bit lame.
Where did M. Lee hide himself from the fifth to the
seventeenth?
Where does the valise and pyjamas come from, since M. Lee
took nothing from his apartment?
Why was the name of the tailor cut so carefully from his
garments?”
Questions to which Ashton-Wolf could find no good answer.
Following Sherlock Holmes’ methods, Ashton-Wolf suspected foul play by drug
dealers.
In August, the inspector, Cals, announced that he was ending
the case because he had concluded that the disappearance was a mystification.
Arthur Lee, he announced, was being deployed by the British Intelligence
elsewhere, and so they had put on this pretty game.
In England, Arthur Lee’s mother was distressed by this
conclusion. She had her own suspicions. According to the Times of London, she said
that ever since he’d been made a prisoner in the war, he’d been nervously
strained. He complained in his letters of being lonely. He’d had a nervous
breakdown once, and suffered from his heart – which could mean physical stress,
or could mean romantic despair.
His friend, the Vice-Consul in Toulon, thought Lee
suffered from a sudden bout of memory
loss.
On July 30, 1931, news of the case came from an unexpected
source: a newspaper in Osaka, Japan. A certain Kitada had been taken in by the
Japanese police on suspicion of being a largescale narcotics boss. Under
interrogation, he told this tale: Kitada had hooked up with a certain
Tsunamitsu in Turkey to sell a large amount of opium. In November 1929,
Tsunamitsu had arranged for it to be delivered to Marseille, from which it was
supposed to be taken to Hamburg. Lee, however, had somehow got wind of this,
and with the Marseille police seized the shipment. For this reason, Lee was killed and his body
tossed into the sea. Then the drugs were recovered and shipped to Hamburg.
If this story were true, it implied that the Marseille
police allowed the drugs to be recovered after the Lee killing.
The Marseille police responded to the story by dismissing it
entirely. Lee had never given them information on a delivery of opium, nor had
they seized anything from Tsunamitsu.
The fate of Lee is unknown.
V. Judge Joseph Crater is in the hall of fame of missing
persons. He was last seen exiting from Billy Haas’s Chop House on the evening
of August 6, 1930.
Judge Force Crater was not a famous legal mind. He had
risen, like many another lawyer, in conjunction with the Tammany Democratic
Party machine. He’d been appointed, recently, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
then Governor of New York, to his post. As it happens, the metro pages of the
papers that hot summer were reporting about various scandals involving the
Tammany Democratic Party machine, which had had a fine time of it under Mayor
Walker. Walker was one of the most flashy mayors of the era now closing, the
Jazz era, the Bootleg era, the burlesque era, the gangster era. One of Crater’s
acquaintances, former judge W. Bernard Vause, was on trial in August, charged
with mail fraud – that is, selling fraudulent financial instruments through the
mails.
Judge Crater that night had dined with a lawyer friend of
his at the Chop house. The lawyer friend was sitting with a showgirl, Sally Lou
Ritz. In his wallet, Crater had about
five thousand dollars. Earlier in the day he’d had an assistant go cash two
checks for him that came to that amount. In Richard Tofel’s book on the case,
Tofel puts Crater’s cash flow, investments and life insurance under the
microscope. Tofel’s theory is that Crater’s wife, Stella, who is at the
vacation home in Maine, came back to the city and went to Crater’s apartment
when he failed to show up after a week went by from that fatal August 5 night,
and found four envelopes with his finances arranged in a drawer of his desk. She
read them, and slipped back with them to Maine. After the story of the missing
Judge hit the papers, the apartment was
tossed by the cops. Stella Crater remained in Maine while the investigation was
going on, and the grand jury was out. Conveniently beyond the subpoena power of
the Grand Jury. She finally returned on January 18, 1931, when she
ostentatiously “found” the envelopes in the apartment. The envelopes have
always been a mystery – why didn’t the cops discover them? Tofel’s conjecture
is a good one. Stella always claimed that Crater was murdered for “political
reasons”, which is why she might have avoided going back to the city while the
cops were investigating her husband’s absence – she didn’t want to be forced to
testify about anything. If some political figure out there did have her husband
rubbed out, all the more reason to stay clear.
Stella moved to Florida.
So what happened to Crater? Tofel finds a clue in the
memoirs of Polly Adler, the owner of a famous jazz age whorehouse in New York
City. In Tofel’s retelling, Crater left Billy Haas’s Chop house and, perhaps
with visions of Sally Lou Ritz in his head, decided to give himself a treat at
Polly’s. From what we know about Crater, he was a cocksman. He went to bed with
one of the girls, and as he was on top (or on bottom) at the “height of
pleasure”, he suffered an enormous heart attack: too many years of too many
chops, too many drinks, too little exercise.
Adler, of course, was in a pickle, with a dead judge in one
of her rooms. She called in a favour with a gangster friend, who “provided the
whole cement-coffin burial in the Hudson River.”
A story unproven. A story ludicrous enough, dirty enough, to
be true. From the point of view that the truth is always nasty. Always in the
down low, the down frequencies. The Twenties boom was unceremoniously tossed
into the river; and the Judge Crater vanishing is how Judge Crater is
remembered. The man who never came back.
VI. A reporter interviews the legendary Kriminalrat,
Ernst Gennat, in a story about Germany’s innovative “Missing Person’s Central”
in Berlin. You have, perhaps, seen an imitation of Gennat – he was used by
Fritz Lang as the model for Inspector Lohman in M. He was a large man –
so large that the police force ordered a special car for him to be chauffered
around in, with an expanded back seat.
The subhead of the article in Der Abend reads: “13
people go missing in Berlin every day – and 12 of them are found again.” This
is a quote from Gennat. Although Gennat
does not claim credit for the system, for which he has a great amount of awe. Credit is perhaps due to some lower level
functionary or functionaries, or perhaps to some commission, or perhaps the
deal is that within the organisation of the police department, hints and
practices gradually hooked up, evolved as it were on its own, into a division
that dealt with a day to day headache. The genius of the system is to treat
missing persons as data that can be distributed by various categories in a
system in which other data are also in circulation, independent variables
looking for a home.
“The 13 functionaries note down the missing person cases,
here, sieve and sort them according to the kind and presumed idiosyncrasies of
the cases, inquire at the hospitals, oversee communication with other state and
local missing person divisions, make index cards for missing persons and
corpses, alert police offices, send reports to the German Police Blotter and
maintain contact with the Federal Missing Persons Center in Dresden.”
Questions?
“Who saw the person last? Why might the person have
disappeared? Are there family problems? Have there been physical injuries? Is
there a tendency to wandering? Infidelity? Are there pleasure fugues outside of
marriage? If a girl of a certain age, fear of punishment? Is there an out of
wedlock child? Are there debts, are there creditors the missing person might
have deceived? If a child, is there fear of school? Is there fear of a
particular teacher? Has the missing person been sad? Is there a love problem?
Or depressed by unemployment and lack of money? Has the person expressed
thoughts of suicide, and when, and to whom? Or, in the case of unforeseen
accident, is the person young? Fragile? Sick? Cretinous? Does the person have money with him? Has the
person prepared by consulting travel bureaus or ticket offices? If the person
is carrying money, could a robbery have happened? Could this be a kidnapping,
or a torture case? Could the person have committed a crime himself? For
example, taking someone’s life, assaulted someone, raped someone? Or is it a
child between seven and ten years old? Here we must fear sexual assault and
even murder.”
The thoroughness of the questions, the thoroughness of the
procedure, and the oddity of the presumptions. When a person is reported
missing, it sets in motion a procedure as rigorous as the instructions for the ritual
sacrifice of horses in the Vedas.
VII. The Lost Son Bunko. The Daily News reports that Joseph
Williams and Joseph Fuller were arrested for mail fraud. The pair would comb
the papers for news items about sons being missing. Finding one, they would telegraph
the parents, claiming to be their son, and asking for money to come home. 1930. People were on the roads. People were
hitching, people were hopping freights. The Great Depression. The Dust bowl.
Side hustles proliferated. People had to scrape by, one way or another.
VIII. The Hamburger Anzeiger, on June 11, 1930, reported the
following story.
In London, a 67 year old man by the name of Seymour Mahon passed
away. The office that issues the official death warrant found that this man had
been declared dead twenty years before, after which he had been buried. His
sister gave the officials a curious story. Twenty five years before the man had
deserted his wife and child. About twenty years ago, in the neighborhood of his
family’s home, the corpse of a man had been discovered and his wife swore she
recognized her husband in the features of the corpse. Seven years ago, the
missing man had suddenly shown up in London, going to the house of his sister.
When he learned what had happened, he decided to let his wife continue to
believe what she believed. In this way, he could covertly use the money he had
made in Canada for himself. Only by his death did the authorities find out his
incognito.
Like an outlaw draft of Hawthorne’s Wakefield, if you
substitute, for the untold intentions in that story, its existential
atmosphere, other intentions, those of greed and malice. From Hawthorne to
Raymond Chandler – a history of moral progress. Of a type.
IX. A man of God, Reverend Phillip Lindsay, came to Buenos
Aires with some news from Tristan da Cunha.
Reverend Phillip Lindsay was the pastor of a small colony of
about one hundred located on the remote island, a wind-blasted place that,
along with St. Helena, had been claimed by the British. It was eight miles wide. A New York Times
story in 1962, written after the island was evacuated due to a volcanic
eruption, notes that there are only seven family names on the Island:
“The Glass family takes its name from a British soldier,
Corporal Glass, who remained there with his colored wife when the British
garrison was withdrawn in 1817. The Greens are descended from a Dutchman, Peter
Groen, who was shipwrecked there, the Hagans from an American who left his
whaling vessel to remain there, the Lavarellos and the Repettos from two
shipwrecked Italians; and there are Swains and Rogerses.”
In 1929, Queen Mary gifted the community with an organ. It
was received gratefully – unfortunately, nobody knew how to play it.
The island had at that time two councils to govern it, one
composed entirely of men, the other entirely of women.
Reverend Lindsay was actually the lay assistant who had come
to the Island in 1927 with the Rev. R.A.C. Pooley on the SS Suveric. Lindsey
left in 1930, before the island had someone who could play the organ. In Buenos
Aires, he announced that he had witnessed the Danish training frigate, København,
sailing in the waters off the island. It seemed deserted. “I examined the
ship through strong binoculars,” he said, “and could not see a sign of life
aboard.” She came within 400 yards of the shore. He described the vessel as
having five masts, with a white band painted around the black hull, and
apparently unmanned. He declared that her foremast was broken.
The København was the largest sailing vessel in the
world. Its five masts stood up 195 feet tall. The side of the boat extended 430
feet. It was built in 1898 for the Det Østasiatiske Kompagni – the East
Asian Company. After World War I, it had become a training ship for the Company.
When it set out from Buenos Aires on December 14, 1928, under Captain Hans
Ferdinand Andersen, it was manned by 60 cadets, boys 14-20 years old, from
elite schools in Denmark. It was headed for Melbourne. It had done the Southern
hemisphere before. It was equipped with a wireless, which Andersen used
sparingly. On December 17, the steamer Arizona spotted it. On December
21, the City of Auckland contacted it.
And then there was nothing. It didn’t dock in Melbourne. It
wasn’t seen in the sealanes of the South Atlantic, nor was there a single radio
signal, nor was there a lifeboat. On September 8, 1929, she was declared lost,
and an extensive search over the South Atlantic area was made. When Reverend
Lindsay popped up, several newspapers carried stories about “the phantom
barque”. The correspondent from the Times (London) wrote to Reverend Lindsay
when he returned home to Liverpool requesting an interview. The correspondent
mentioned that in 1928-29, the “Roaring Forties” – the ocean below South Africa
– experienced an unusual amount of iceberg activity. “… the four-masted Herzog
Cecelie and the full-masted ship Grace Harwar” had narrow escapes from the
bergs. The correspondent mentioned the Finnish ship, Ponape, which was
in the Tristan’s vicinity at the time. A four-masted vessel. In the great
search for the København, somehow nobody had landed at Tristan to take
soundings.
Reverend Lindsay wrote back to the Times: “That I actually
saw the end of the København is absolute rot; but there is not much
doubt about the ship I saw. Long before I knew that the ship was missing I
could describe her fairly accurately. She was fivemasted but her fore or main
mast was broken… It was on January 21 last year that she passed. The course she
was taking was due north, and as she was roughly in the middle of the island
she would in the ordinary course of events have struck our beach where the settlement
was. However, when still a long way off (possibly 7 ½ miles) she seemed to be
drifting to the eastward… The sea was rough for our boats, which are made only
of canvas, and so we could do nothing but watch her gradually crawl past and
run inside the reefs to the west side of the island.”
After she was out of sight, Lindsay assumed she struck a
reef. It was an inaccessible side of the island. For a while boxes washed up on
the beach – and then a 30-feet flatbottomed boat.
The correspondent for the Times finds Lindsay’s story
credible. And he also finds credible the fact that the ship’s ultimate fate was
unwitnessed by the Islanders, given the nature of the terrain. The
correspondent has, himself, cruised among these isolatos.
“I have not been ashore on Tristan, but I have visited
several other islands in that belt – Cambell, the Aucklands and the
Macquaries. They are surely among the
bleakest and most inhospitable places on earth. At Campbell Island there are four harbours,
and yet there is a stretch of coastline that no one can see from anywhere on
the island. It is hopelessly
inaccessible. When I visited the island on a Norwegian whaling steamer
returning from the Ross Sea in 1924, we
found five young New Zealand shepherds who had been there for 15 months. They told us they had never seen this
coastline. For weeks on end it was often
impossible for them to see anything. Whenever they went out from the hut to look
after their sheep they were accustomed
to take a week’s food with them and some dry wood and a tent, in case
they could not find their way back to the hut again in the fog.”
These solitaries! Lost like the lint and grit in the bottom
of the world’s great pocket. The wool sewn into jackets from those Campbell
Island sheep were surely paid for in madness and panic. We’ll never repay them,
they will never get back what was taken. The fog, the hut, the sheep, the
thousands of miles from any other human face, the ghost frigates, the cadets in
the face of some horror, a sudden wave, a looming berg, the lost toted up by
index card and blank stares. As the fog closes in.
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