https://hakaimagazine.com/features/the-first-first-responders/
"When a ship wrecks on an unfamiliar coastline, an already desperate situation
is all the more dire. Blinded by the night, and lost, the captain and crew of
the
Puritan, a four-masted lumber schooner en route from San Francisco,
California, to Port Gamble, Washington, in 1896, faced two agonizing options:
abandon ship into the roiling sea and head toward shore through a rock-riddled
shoal or stay aboard and hope the hull would hold.
Captain Atwood chose the latter and ordered his nine crewmen to lash themselves
to the rigging to avoid slipping off the tilting deck and into the ocean’s
frothing gullet. So bound, they waited until darkness slid into light. As the
shoreline morphed into view on that November morning, the men got a sense of
their position. The ship was pinioned to a reef, being rocked and hammered by
the Pacific. The shore was tormentingly close, just 400 meters or so away, but
the span too perilous to cross.
The
Puritan had run aground on the west coast of Vancouver Island, British
Columbia, near Bonilla Point, about 110 kilometers west of Victoria. Today, the
sobriquet “Graveyard of the Pacific” is hackneyed, but in the late 1800s, when
colonial expansion was well underway in western North America, the graveyard—a
stretch of coastline roughly from the Columbia River in the United States to
northern Vancouver Island—acquired ships on the regular. In what probably
seemed like an uninhabited middle of nowhere, Atwood and his men waited for a
miracle. Luckily, they were actually in the inhabited middle of somewhere—a
coastline that for millennia had been home to Indigenous peoples. Did the
mariners think they were delirious when shadowy apparitions at the forest’s
edge resolved into flesh-and-blood men and started wading toward the schooner?
Waist deep in the churning sea, the men tied a stone to the end of a fishing
line and tossed it toward the crew. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul in. Toss, haul
in. For almost eight hours, a newspaper later reported, they threw the line and
the
Puritan crew tried to catch it.
Finally, a crewman hooked the line and attached a heavier line to the smaller
one. The rescuers then dragged the line to shore and secured it, allowing the
crew to sling themselves to safety as if on a zipline. From there, the
Indigenous men escorted the
Puritan’s crew to a nearby shelter where they
provided food and stayed with the men until help arrived."
Via
Reasons to be Cheerful - What We’re Reading: Recognizing Canada’s First
First Responders
<
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/what-were-reading-canada-first-first-responders/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
