I wanted to put a plug in for Cindy Nickerson’s “Curator’s Corner” in the monthly newsletter of the Historical Society of Santuit and Cotuit. The latest edition, dated February 1, 2026, has a wonderful essay: “Death and Danger at Deep Hole” which explores the history of shipwrecks off of Cotuit in the 19th century.
In the piece, Cindy describes the “Melancholy Death by Drowning” by Captain Oliver A. Nickerson of Cotuit Port in April 1852; the 1867 wreck of the Hannah Martin; and the tragic February 1829 wreck of the Hyannis packet sloop Caroline which went ashore off Cotuit Bay in a snowstorm, forcing her crew ashore on Sampson’s Island where the captain’s sons, 13-year old Ebenezer Scudder and 19 year-old James died of exposure.
Cindy’s fascinating piece is just one of many benefits of membership in the HSSC.
David Hill, Lenovo and IBM’s former head of design and brand identity, and the man who redefined corporate blogging twenty years ago with the late, lamented Design Matters blog, has a new website.
ThinkNextDesign reflects the man’s impeccable design taste and showcases his greatest hits in a graceful gallery of everything from minicomputers to Trackpoint caps for the pointing stick on Thinkpads.
It also revives some of his best writing from Design Matters, the Lenovo blog the two of us reminiscenced about last month with Thomas Rogers, host of the podcast Laptop Retrospective.
Design is far more than form or function. It’s the tangible expression of a brand’s identity, values, and promise. While a brand defines what a company stands for, design gives those aspirations form and substance. Design uniquely delivers value: visually, physically, and experientially.
I woke up in the dark of this very cold January morning, with the furnace chugging away and ice skimming over Cotuit Bay, and my thoughts turned a dozen miles south from where I write, to a bleak scene that unfolded 108 years ago in the middle of Nantucket Sound when the Cross Rip lightship was solidly locked in and lost during the Great Freeze of 1918.
The end of January and beginning of February are the heart of the meteorological winter on Cape Cod, and on schedule the Great Freeze commenced on January 21, 1918 when temperatures plunged to zero and didn’t rise above that bleak point for five days. It was so cold (how cold was it Dave?) that Providence, Rhode Island reported a brutal 17 degrees below zero, and Narragansett Bay froze solid, blocking any vessels from entering or departing Newport. Buzzards Bay was locked tight with ice from the Canal to Quick’s Hole in the Elizabeth Islands. Nantucket Sound was frozen from Woods Hole east to Great Point on Nantucket. The island of Nantucket was cut off from ferry service and supplies for more than two weeks.
In the middle of the Sound sat LV-6 — the Cross Rip lightship — a 60-year old, 80-foot long former coastal schooner converted into a navigational aid by the US Lighthouse Service. Her three masts had been chopped down and replaced by an iron skeleton mast. She had once been stationed for years five miles south of Cotuit on Succonnesset Shoals but moved to Cross Rip in 1915, one of a half-dozen lightships stationed across the Sound to guide shipping through the tangle of shoals from Hedge Fence to Shovelful Shoal east of Great Point. Each lightship in “Lightship Alley” (described as a “conga-line”) displayed a unique set of lights, sounded a distinctive fog signal, and were painted different colors to aid in their identification. Before the Cape Cod Canal opened in 1914, thousands of ships passed through Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds every year, threading their way past Hedge Fence, Succonnesset, Horseshoe Shoal, Handkerchief Shoal at the southern tip of Monomoy, before entering the open seas of the Atlantic to round the outer Cape on their way to Boston and Maine.
The Cross Rip lightship was manned by six Cape Codders. Her captain, Richard E.B. Phillips was home at Dennisport on a scheduled furlough, leaving mate Henry F. Joy, also of Dennisport, in command. The ship was stationed south of Horseshoe and north of Norton Shoals at the virtual midpoint of the thirty-mile wide expanse of Nantucket Sound. Aboard with Joy were: the ship’s machinist, Francis M. Johnson of Yarmouth; the cook, William Rose of North Harwich; seamen Almon F. Wixon and Arthur C. Joy of Dennisport, and E.H. Phillips of West Dennis.
Lightship duty was tedious during the best of weather, and terrible the rest of the time. The ships had no engines or sails to speak of, and were moored to massive anchors in rough waters, especially the lightships at the eastern entrance to the Sound which were exposed to the full impact of the Atlantic Ocean. One lightship crewman once expressed his hatred of lightship life and declared he’d prefer to be convicted and send to state prison. The lightships had an unnerving habit of dragging anchor and being blown off station. In late December, 1867, the first Cross Rip lightship parted its anchor cable in a vicious blizzard and was blown out of Nantucket Sound into the open Atlantic where she started to sink. A passing ship bound from Maine to New Orleans saved the crew and carried them all the way to Louisiana. The Handkerchief lightship drifted 50 miles southwest from Monomoy to No Man’s Land south of Martha’s Vineyard in 1879. According to Thomas Leach’s excellent history, The Lightships of Nantucket Sound, “The Pollock Rip lightship became known as “the Happy Wanderer” for the number of times it moved off station or broke free.” During the 1944 hurricane, the 12 men aboard Vineyard Lightship #73 lost their lives when the ship sank off of Cuttyhunk. According to Captain W. Russell Webster, the official records “contain 273 instances of lightships being blown adrift or dragged off station in severe weather or moving ice. Five lightships were lost under such conditions.”
The crews of the lightships kept the lights shining and the fog signal ringing or blowing. They also went to the aid of stricken vessels. In 1914, the crew of the Cross Rip lightship —under the command of Captain Phillips — helped rescue the crew of the three-masted schooner John Paul that foundered in the Sound during a January blizzard. The crews were regularly relieved and brought ashore for brief breaks, but they also could be stranded past their scheduled tour of duty if conditions made it impossible for the relief boat to reach them.
By late January 1918 Nantucket Sound was completely frozen over. A rare occurrence, the ice meant no shipping could traverse the Sound, making the Cross Rip lightship’s mission irrelevant. As provisions dwindled on the ship and the harsh conditions made life intolerable and precarious. Chief Mate Henry Joy is said to have walked across the ice to the coast guard station on Nantucket to ask for permission to abandon the ship. Ordered to return, he dejectedly walked back to his doom.
Boston Sunday Post, February 2, 1918
On February 4 the pressure of the ice pack around the Cross Rip caused her to part her mooring cables. Rising temperatures thawed the ice and it started to move with the strong tidal currents, carrying the trapped lightship with it out to sea. On February 5, the lightkeeper at Nantucket’s Great Point light spotted the trapped ship sliding helplessly out of the Sound, past the light, and into the open Atlantic. Her ensign was flying upside down, the maritime signal of extreme distress.
The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror of 16 February, 1918 reported: “Considerable concern is felt for the safety of the little Cross Rip lightship, which was dragged from her moorings in Nantucket Sound, about twelve miles north of this island, by the heavy ice which started moving by the 50-mile northwest wind between Monday night and Tuesday morning, when the record low temperature was recorded all over New England.
“The lightship gradually swept through the sound, rounding Great Point still fast in the ice, absolutely helpless; and early Tuesday afternoon she passed out of sight by Great Round shoal in the direction of the dreaded Rose and Crown shoals, where the bones of many a good vessel now rest.”
The news of LV-6’s plight spread. Ships were dispatched by the US Navy and Coast Guard to find the missing lightship. Frederick B. Thurber, commander of a minesweeper stationed in Newport, RI, recalled the search in the March 1962 issue of the United States Naval Institute’s journal Proceedings:
“During this period the Cross Rip Light Ship went adrift around Great Point on the northeast point of Nantucket, drifted over the shoals, and sank with all hands. The Commander of the Mine Force had made repeated requests for radio, as at times we were sweeping 40 or 50 miles off the beach but the answer came back that the sweepers did not rate it. After my report that if we had had a radio, we could have gotten to the Cross Rip Light Ship before she grounded and could have saved the men, a radio was supplied.”
The search for LV-6 was called off on February 18. The Hyannis Patriot reported, “Naval vessels have searched far and wide for the ship daily since she was swept from view in the midst of an ice field so extensive that it was impossible for steamers to force their way through.”
In early March 1918, the worst fears about the fate of the Cross Rip lightship were confirmed when fishermen aboard the fishing schooner Kineo more than 100 miles away on Georges Bank dragged up in their nets a small flag and a boat rudder stamped with the words “Cross Rip.”
More wreckage was dredged from the sea in 1933 by the government dredge W.L. Marshall while working at the eastern entrance to the Sound. According to the New Bedford Standard Times, “Workmen drew … attention to splintered bits of oak ribs and planks which blocked suction pumps several times. An eight-inch piece of a broken windlass was also sucked up.”
In the 1960s a New Bedford dragger found theship’s bell off of Nauset Beach in Orleans. The lightship’s wooden quarter board was found on the beach at Dennisport’s Depot Street in 1919, coincidentally the same street where mate Henry Joy lived. It is on display at the Josiah Dennis Manse Museum’s maritime room.
The missing Cross Rip lightship was soon replaced by a relief ship, and the last lightship in Nantucket Sound was retired in 1969, the need for the vessels done in by the Cape Cod Canal and modern navigational aids such as LORAN and eventually GPS.
The Viking explorer Erik the Red pulled an epic branding stunt in the 9th century when he named Greenland “Grœnland” to entice more Norsemen to its definitely-not-green shores from Iceland. Green it is not: save for a few meager patches of vegetation that struggle to survive along the southern coast in the short summer months.
As our President heads to Europe flexing his imperial ambitions to take Greenland away from the Danes, it’s worth revisiting the island’s history with America and revisiting Sloan Wilson’s great novel, Ice Brothers, about his experiences patrolling the frozen coast during World War II.
Colonialism and American Claims
One thing to note about the prehistoric settlement of the island is that the first settlements (which didn’t survive) were made by people migrating from North America. Also worth noting is that the present population of Inuits migrated east across the Northwest Passage in 1200, afterErik the Red established the first Norse settlements.
Those Viking settlements died out and it wasn’t until the early 1700s that the Danes sent missionaries to Greenland to convert whatever Norse people were living there from their pagan ways to Christianity. Finding no surviving Norse, the missionaries baptised the Inuit, set up some coastal trading stations and other than European whalers working in the Davis Strait, the place moldered until the 19th century when Danish interest intensified.
American made territorial claims on northern Greenland in the late 19th century when the Arctic explorer Robert Peary explored the coast and established for the first time that the landmass did not extend all the way to the North Pole. In 1917 the US conceded its claims to Greenland when it bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark.
World War II
Greenland first gained strategic importance during the Battle of the Atlantic. Henrik Kaufman, Danish minister to the United States, signed a treaty with the USA permitting the building of stations and bases on Greenland. Apparently Kaufman didn’t tell anyone in the Danish government about his concession and he was accused of “high treason” and fired. The Americans built 14 bases on Greenland in WWII, using them to ferry aircraft to Europe and as naval bases to counter the threat of German U-Boats.
The Germans also established weather stations on the east coast to provide them with early forecasts of weather systems moving across the Atlantic in what has been termed the “North Atlantic Weather War.” Sloan Wilson’s 1979 Ice Brothers is a fictional account of Wilson’s experiences with the U.S. Coast Guard and the cat-and-mouse game that took place between the Americans and Germans during the war.
I can’t, and won’t opine on President Trump’s designs on Greenland aside from pointing out the U.S. has enjoyed, for more than a century, a history of territorial claims, military bases, and a record of patrolling and supporting its frozen neighbor to the northeast.
I’ll end with Rockwell Kent’s painting, Early November, North Greenland, 1933
Bob Weir passed away today (1.10.26) at the age of 78. His Ace album was the soundtrack of one of my favorite summers in the early 70s. Singing “Black-Throated Wind” while hitchhiking back to college through New Bedford on a dismal grey day is a memory to hang onto.
The legendary yacht designer and builder Nathanael Greene Herreshoff once quipped: “There are only two colors to paint a boat, black or white, and only a fool would paint a boat black.”
Keep in mind Captain Nat was talking about yachts, not whaling ships, which were almost always painted black except for one special occasion.
Whaling ships in the 19th century were remarkable for their durability and uniform design, turned out by the hundreds at shipyards on the shores of Mattapoisett, Fairhaven, and New Bedford. They were factory ships constructed to last for two or three decades of continuous sailing, their rigging, decks, and copper sheathed bottoms revived in between voyages by gangs riggers and shipwrights. The last surviving wooden whaler, Mystic Seaport’s Charles W Morgan, was built in 1841 and retired from whaling in 1921 after 37 voyages over 80 years.
In my research for my book, The Marginal Sea, I assumed all whaling ships were painted black. Why not? Almost every painting of whaling ships depicts a black hull, or, on occasion, a white checkerboard scheme along the sheer of the hull to give the false impression of a warship’s gun ports to fool pirates and other marauders. Because many ships were owned by pacifist Quaker merchants, their fleet were usually piously painted all black.
Last winter, while touring the library at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, I happened upon a copy of a gorgeous book, O’er the Wide and Tractless Seaby Michael P. Dyer. I requested a copy through the CLAMS Library service and a few days picked it up from the Cotuit Library.
Published in 2017, the book presents the history of art produced during two centuries of American whaling, from scrimshaw and illustrated sailors’ journals to formal marine paintings. Dyer, the former Curator of History at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, invested two decades of exhaustive research into the work, and the text accompanying the lavish illustrations is, by itself, an important addition to American maritime history scholarship.
As I read the book I came upon a painting by the maritime artist Charles Sidney Raleigh (1830-1925) of the whaling bark Wanderer on her maiden voyage in 1878. What caught my eye was the color of her hull, a spectral, ghostly white.
Charles Sidney Raleigh’s painting of the bark Wanderer on her maiden voyage in 1878. Note the whaler in the background painted with the white stripe and fake gunport pattern.
Dyer’s caption explained that whaling ships were sometimes painted white on their maiden voyages — evoking the image of a bride in a white gown — a detail I had never known before. Evidently the ship would be painted the more practical black when she returned to New Bedford, as one would imagine a white hull would get very grimy after three years of hard whaling in the North Pacific.
My book describes the wreck of the New Bedford whaling bark Ocean Wave in a blizzard that swept over Siberia’s Shantar Islands in the Sea of Okhotsk. Captained by Hiram Baker of Pocasset, the Ocean Wave was lost with all hands — three dozen men — when she was caught by surprise on the lee shore of Elbow Island on the night of October 12, 1858. Baker “slipped his chains” and abandoned his anchors to make a desperate run for cover in the shelter of the Shantars. The ship struck the fangs of the Pinnacle Rocks where her wreckage was discovered the following spring when the whaling fleet returned to Southwest Bay to hunt bowhead whales.
Captain Hiram Baker’s cenotaph in the Cataumet Cemetery
The Ocean Wave was on her maiden voyage. But was she painted white? The only witnesses to see her before the wreck were the captain and crew of the Nantucket whaler Phoenix. None of the accounts of the wreck that night 167 years ago mention the color of the Ocean Wave, but it is the type of detail that I wanted to include in my book.
I wrote Michael Dyer to get his advice. Was the Ocean Wave painted white for her maiden voyage?
He kindly replied: “Without direct evidence, I would hesitate to state definitively that the vessel was painted white. There are as many examples of vessels launched that were not painted white as there are references to white-painted ones. On the other hand there are examples of vessels painted white on their maiden voyages, like the Hunter and a Charles S. Raleigh painting of the Wanderer and another of the Catalpa.”
The Catalpa
I don’t want to take poetic license with the historical record, and lard up my description of the Ocean Wave’s final hours with some purple prose like “…the ghostly white ship fought for her life in the foaming sea and gusts of Siberian snow” so I’ll follow Michael Dyer’s advice and speculate that the ship might have been painted white, but the only men who knew for sure are long lost to the sea and the past.
Here’s Michael Dyer’s 2018 lecture at the Nantucket Whaling Museum about his book:
I started this blog in 2001. It began on Google’s platform, a self-conscious diary that began with a post remembering an former colleague, the late Susie Forrest, who shared a desk with me at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune in the early 1980s, and went on to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1988 before dying far too young a few months after 9/11. I was working in a suburb of Zurich then, sitting in an office in Oberengstringen on a Saturday afternoon feeling the the urge to write some words, any words.
A couple thousand posts later — some best forgotten, some fondly recalled — I have never looked back at my archives to retrace the past. Sure, a blog post here and there when I’m trying to remember some incident or person forgotten along the way, but for the most part I’ve avoided re-reading and wincing over purple prose, typographical errors, or simple stupidity.
There have been prolific years when I posted nearly every day, and barren ones when I never posted, or rarely at all. The early years on WordPress were self-hosted, a nerve-wracking slog of manually updating, backing up, and weeding through waves of spam comments. I’ve been hacked. I’ve crashed. And eventually I migrated the whole affair over to Automattic, the corporate parent of WordPress and never looked back, grateful to them for managing the back end while I focus on the words and pictures.
Dries Buytaert, the inventor of the Drupal content management system, wrote a poignant explanation for why he continues to blog after twenty years. In his post, “A blog is a biography” he captures the reason I keep writing and hitting the publish button:
I never knew my great grandparents. They left no diary, no letters, only a handful of photographs. Sometimes I look at those photos and wonder what they cared about. What were their days like? What made them laugh? What problems were they working through?
Then I realize it could be different for my descendants. A long-running blog like mine is effectively an autobiography.
I’ve been working on a book about events that took place in 1858, one hundred years before I was born. The source material is a scant collection of memoirs, letters, ship’s logbooks, and newspaper clippings. The two men at the heart of the story left behind no more than a dozen photographs. From a few shreds of the past I’ve tried pieced together the story of their lives, but constantly have marvelled at how meager a record they left behind, and wrestled with how to honestly fill in the gaps without turning their stories into fiction.
I’m working on a story now about a Cape Cod whaling captain named Ebenezer Franklin Nye. Last summer I visited a graveyard in the village of Cataumet to look at the graves of two other sailors who died in a shipwreck. Near their stones stood Nye’s marker, a cenotaph to the man “who lost his life in the Arctic, winter of 1879-80. Aged 57 Years.“
Nye never wr0te his autobiography, memoirs, or reminiscences. As I dug into the story of his life I failed to find a single sentence written by him. He was quoted by others, his name appears in some newspapers, and his remarkable career is noted in a Nye family history, but so far I’ve been unable to find any photograph of the man nor any words written by his own hand. His life is forgotten, yet based on what little has been recorded, it was remarkable, a colorful career of shipwreck, survival, capture, escape and heroism.
In the 1990s digital cameras started to appear. I recall a quote by some Silicon Valley CEO who said the biggest impact of the technology (other than putting Kodak out of business) would be a profound change in the perceived preciousness of a snapshot. The cost and expensive process of pre-digital photography meant every picture was carefully composed before the shutter was pressed. A roll of film was finite. At best there were three dozen opportunities per roll. With digital cameras the CEO predicted, “My kids will probably take hundreds of pictures of each other’s butts.” Within a few years photographs went from prized memories to disposable jpegs.
In 1860 the taking of a single photograph was a major occasion that involved visiting a studio, wearing a Civil War uniform, posed stiffly gainst some evocative backdrop, head clamped into a brace to hold the subject still until the image could be magically applied to the chemically treated glass plate. The result was framed under glass, hung on the wall, and cherished as that person’s one and only likeness.
Contrast that venerated scarcity with the abundance of a Flickr galley, or the verbal breadcrumbs of a blog, and one has to wonder if our descendants will know us that much better than we know our ancestors? Or even care to see a picture of pastrami and rye we ate at Katz’s deli?
This blog isn’t my diary, it isn’t my memoir nor my autobiography, it isn’t handmade with quill and ink on vellum by candlelight. It’s ephemeral, it’s transitory, it’s a bunch of bits tenuously living in some data center somewhere. At least Ebenezer Nye’s final fate is carved into stone — “lost his life in the Arctic” — while ours flits by in a cacophony of ephemeral tweets and tik-toks.
In my previous post I shared a YouTube video about another blog from my past: David Hill’s Design Matters. That was a very good blog, something I am very proud to be part of, but it’s gone now, a memory captured in snapshots only preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Did it deserve to be preserved and remembered like Ebenezer Nye?
On this snowy morning of the first day of the new year, I leave you with this lyric by the late, great Lowell George:
It’s so easy to slip It’s so easy to fall And let your memory drift And do nothin’ at all All the love that you missed All the people that you can’t recall Do they really exist at all?
I had a chance to talk with David Hill, the VP of Corporate Identity and Design at Lenovo and the blogger behind Design Matters, Lenovo’s first blog that launched in 2006. Thomas Rogers at Laptop Retrospective invited us to reminiscence about the blog, how it came to be, and the impact it had. The blog was retired when Lenovo took another approach to social media, but lives on for the most part thanks to the Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive.
