dans’ Papers
Page 22 April 6, 2012
Milton
danshamptons.com
(continued from page 17)
the sun was now shining. They found no one. The dead bodies were carried to horsedrawn wagons and taken to the coroner’s office in East Hampton. An article about this terrible wreck appeared in the local newspapers and the New York daily newspapers. Some people from New York came out by stage to try to identify some of their loved ones. Some succeeded, some did not. The following day, the keeper of the Napeague Lifesaving Station came upon a seaman’s chest on the beach that contained Captain Ephraim Harding’s logbook and he took it into East Hampton. Also that day, an official from the Port of New York with the title Wreckmaster arrived to take charge of all the barrels of cargo, which the log said was guano. The ill-fated crew had loaded these
barrels onto their ship while at a dock at one of the Chincha Islands off the coast of Peru. It was a material used as fertilizer on farms. Few of the barrels were still intact. The ship’s log told the story of what happened to this ship, although some questions remained. It was out of New Bedford, Mass., had loaded its cargo on Chincha, had rounded Cape Horn at the southern end of South America, had sailed up and made landfall at Norfolk, Va., and then had sailed on to deliver its cargo to New York City into this full blown gale. Captain Harding decided because of the storm to round Montauk Point and get into the more sheltered waters of Long Island Sound to get to New York City. But it seemed he had misunderstood the Montauk Light, turned early and instead
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of rounding Montauk, crashed into the rocks at Ditch Plains under full sail. The Captain’s body was found. His son, who was also aboard the John Milton as a deck hand, was never found. The last entry in the log puts the ship at latitude 36 degrees 56 minutes. There was no longitude entry because accurate ways of determining longitude were not yet available. Separately and together the townspeople of East Hampton suffered a great sorrow as a result of this wreck. It was one of the biggest shipwrecks on Long Island ever. The dead bodies in their shrouds were brought out and laid side by side on the town green so the minister there could perform a funeral service. All together there were 22 dead seamen and one dead boy, who was not the Captain’s son. The captain’s log said there were 32 men on board. Of the remaining nine men, five were found later after the ceremony, as they washed up on beaches as far west as Mecox. Four others were never found and were assumed just disappeared into the sea. After the funeral, all the bodies were carried to the South End Burying Ground by Town Pond and after further ceremony buried in a common grave beneath a great boulder that bears an elaborate description of their end. Captain Harding’s body was returned home to Martha’s Vineyard and is buried in the Village Cemetery in Vineyard Haven on that island. Two weeks after the wreck, a beachcomber named Alex Gould came upon a seaman’s pea jacket with gold coins in the pocket worth more than $400, a considerable sum. When it was found that this was the Captain’s pea jacket, Gould turned the coins over to the coroner who had it sent to Ephraim Harding’s widow, a small consolation for her grief. Officials, looking through records of nautical transactions on that fateful day, found that the day before the shipwreck, the Life Saving Service—the predecessor organization of the Coast Guard—had activated a light in a new lighthouse on Long Island and its activation may have confused Captain Harding. The new lighthouse was called the Shinnecock Bay Light, and it was at the foot of Ponquogue Avenue in Hampton Bays. This lighthouse does not exist today. The Coast Guard declared it surplus in 1948 and dynamited it down at that time. However, the day before the shipwreck, without previous notice to mariners, the powerful Fresnel lens in the light’s tower got turned on. It would now join the Montauk Lighthouse to its east and the Fire Island Lighthouse to its west, to make a series of three powerful beacons along a 60-mile stretch of the south coast of Long Island. It is believed that Captain Harding, finding the Fire Island Light through the fog, turned east and began looking for the Montauk Light to make his turn north and up into Long Island Sound. It’s theorized that when he got a glimpse of the new Shinnecock Bay Light, he mistook it for Montauk, and joyful at having made it through the gale almost to safety ordered the crew to turn the ship northward and put under full sail where, instead of running into the open water off Montauk, it crashed on the rocks of Ditch Plains killing everybody on board. The following spring of 1859, the chapel next to the great Presbyterian Church in East Hampton was completed. When it was, (continued on page 24)