The Scuttlefish

I just got back from a holiday vacation in the British Virgin Islands. One day we took a boat out to a small island called Salt Island, named after the natural salt ponds on the island’s interior. As we approached the island, our captain pulled us in close and told us a thrilling tale of shipwreck, rescue, and taxes. His story has probably been told by countless other boat captains to the enjoyment of their tourist passengers. Here’s a quick summary:

In the 1830s, a British mail ship sunk during a hurricane. It crashed into a reef of the coast of Salt Island. The ship sank immediately, but all the passengers were saved by the residents of Salt Island. The queen of England was so grateful for the work of the residents that she decreed that the only taxes the islanders would ever have to pay again would be a single pound of salt harvested from the salt ponds. The tradition continues to this day.

And with that, we all jumped overboard to go swim around the wreck of the RMS Rhone.

We didn’t have internet on the islands, so it had to wait till I got home to look into the story more. And so it’s only now that I discover that our boat captain’s legend was full of inaccuracies and exaggeration.

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I know how to speak in semaphore. It’s a visual alphabet, like sign language. Each letter of the alphabet is associated with a specific positioning of the arms. You grab a flag in each hand, and spell out whatever it is you want to say by moving your arms accordingly. It’s intended to be seen at distances across several hundred yards. As a form of communication, it predates the telegram.

I learned semaphore when I was a beach lifeguard. It takes a while to learn it, but once you know it, it’s almost impossible to un-know it. Almost every beach patrol in the world uses walkie talkies, but for some reason, on a 30 mile stretch of beach that runs through Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, walkie talkies are shunned for the more traditional use of semaphore.

I gotta admit that semaphore was one of the most fun parts of the job. You speak a language that no one else knows, and enter in what feels like some sort of secret society, as you send mundane images about what you want to eat for lunch up and down the beach. With each letter, the nylon flags fly into place with a satisfying Snap!

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The greatest naval ship of the 17th century only sailed 1300 meters before it sunk. 1300 meters! By high school track and field standards, that’s just over 3 laps around the track…maybe like a 5 minute race, unless you’re a really nervous, plump freshman who runs much slower than everyone else. Then it’s closer to 7 or 8 minutes. But still. When it sunk, it was only 100 yards away from shore.

The boat was the Swedish ship the Vasa. Yes, believe it or not, but during the 1600s, the Swedes were big-time naval bad-asses. King Gustavus Adolphus is generally considered the greatest European military leader of the 17th century, which is saying a lot considering Europe was in a constant state of warfare throughout almost the entire century. His nicknames included “The Lion from the North” and, even more awesome, “The Lion of Midnight.”

So a king like that needs a ship to live up to his own reputation. A marvel of shipbuilding that would impress all who saw it. A boat that was both a devastating warship, and a masterful work of art. That boat was the Vasa. 

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A few weeks ago, I was visiting my aunt in Belmar, New Jersey. One afternoon, with threats of thunderstorms looming on the western horizon, my siblings and I jumped on beach cruisers and biked up the coast to explore the neighboring towns.

Our destination was Asbury Park, about 10 miles away. Birthplace of Bruce Springsteen. Home of the Sopranos Series Finale. And to get to Asbury Park, you go through Ocean Grove.

The two cities are divided by nothing more than a small lake, probably 200 feet across at the widest. Ocean Grove sits on the south; Asbury Park is on the north. You can stand in one town and see the other. But they are drastically different beach towns.

Asbury Park is a graveyard. It is a city dominated by the desolate, crumbling ruins of the 20th century. Its amusement park, one of the oldest in the world, was demolished in 2007, and only its skeleton remains. Doorways are boarded up. Sure, there’s a little hub on the board walk that is trying to make a renaissance, but it doesn’t hide Asbury Park for what it is: a ghost town.

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In honor of Bermuda Week here at Scuttlefish, it’s time to tackle the mother of all ocean oddities: the Bermuda Triangle. Christopher Columbus claims to have seen UFOs when he was sailing through the Bermuda Triangle. 5 US Navy bomber planes disappeared in the Triangle during World War II, known as Flight 19. Spielberg made a movie out of it. Raymond Schuessler, a master chronicler of the ocean, puts the number of lost ships at over 100 and lost sailors at 1,000…and that only covers a 30 year period after World War II.

The big, big, big, big, big question to explore is obvious: what the hell is going on in the Bermuda Triangle?

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Columbus did not set sail to prove that the earth was round. That is a myth, a historical fallacy that is erroneously taught time and time again. Most of Columbus’ contemporary intellectuals believed that the earth was round. They based their reasoning in ancient Greek philosophers, including Pythagoras and Aristotle, who also believed in a spherical planet.

And for the most sake, people today believe that the earth is round.

Most people, but not everyone.

The disbelievers (or maybe they might prefer to call themselves the believers?) group themselves in an organization that has a discontinuous, but nevertheless traceable, history that dates back to the late 19th century.

They call themselves the Flat Earth Society.

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“We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch – we are going back from whence we came.”

–John F. Kennedy

To honor this most patriotic of all American weekends, I thought it only fitting to highlight the unique relationship that some of our most powerful and famous Americans have had with the ocean.

Obviously this list is not complete…it’s mostly just a fun way to think of the presidents, past and present, and how they have interacted with the ocean in bizarre and memorable ways.

Happy Independence Day!

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In 1832, Alexander Mitchell patented the the screw pile. He invented the device as a solution to an age-old mariner’s problem.

While lighthouses have guided ships to safety for millennia, they only stood on stable coastlines. No one could figure out a way to build lighthouses in deep water, or on shifty sandbars, and as a result, many harbors were left in the dark.

Mitchell’s screw pile changed all that. Lighthouses could be built in precarious places, where lighthouses had never before stood. It’s hard to imagine the amount of shipwrecks that Mitchell helped to prevent, and the lives he must have saved.

To put it more poetically, Mitchell was the spark for the light that guided ships home.

And Alexander Mitchell was blind.

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