llrey hWere All Strangers: the WJ!eck of the john Milton ~t Montauk, New Ye>~k
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by H enry Osmers
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ontauk, Long Island, today a mecca for tourists seeking beautiful beaches, great fishing, and spectacular scenery, was for about 265 years (1660-1925) a very desolate, lonely place, where the only regular visitors were the cattle and sheep our to pasture. The rocky coastline on the eastern tip of Long Island had claimed numerous vessels from the midl 600s, and their numbers were increasing
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by the late 1700s with the development of overseas trade in the years following the American Revolution. Once the Montauk Point Lighthouse went into operation in April 1797, the number of maritime mishaps in the region sharply decreased. Given this improvement to navigation, it is surprising to discover that the lighthouse actually contributed to a terrible shipwreck in February 1858, when the schooner John Milton was
on the final leg of its 16,000-mile journey home to New Bedford, Massachusetts, from San Francisco. With the development of numerous communities along the South Shore of Long Island and the ever-increasing growth of New York City in the 1800s came a great surge of shipping that sailed past Monrauk Point. Its steady and reliable Bame guided these vessels safely past the rocks and shores of the East End. For vessels headed our of
This 1856 map represents what Captain Harding would have known about the region when he Left far California Late in 1856 in command ofthe schooner John Milton. At the time ofhis departure, the only Lighthouse iLluminating the south shore of Long Island, west of Fire Island, was the Lighthouse at Montauk Point.
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SEA HISTORY 138, SPRING 20 12