Lashed to the mast
Allen Bragg, the quintessential washashore
Odysseus wanted to hear the Sirens, but their suicidal call was impossible to resist, so he ordered his crew to lash him to the mast and then plug their ears — a very different impetus from the fateful decision made by many mariners off our shores.
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At the most terrifying moment, storm overwhelming a ship, wind howling, waves pounding a hull slammed on the bars, deck awash, many a mariner has faced horrifying options:
*Abandon ship and take your chances trying to get through the surf.
*Go below for protection, hoping the cabin is not your coffin.
*Lash yourself to the mast to avoid getting washed overboard, praying the ship stays upright.
*Go one step further and climb into the rigging, get some space between you and the sea, hoping you don’t plunge into the rage or die like a frozen fly in a web.
Each strategy has worked many times, and failed many times.
Here’s a story of one time when lashing worked.
Don Wilding, whose book “Shipwrecks of Cape Cod” is a compendium of tragedy and heroism, says, “There can’t be more of a Cape Cod wash ashore than Allen S. Bragg.”
Bragg, born in 1873, grew up on North Carolina’s Outer Banks south of Cape Hatteras on the island of Ocracoke, a captain in his 20s (Fort Bragg was named for a relative).
On Thanksgiving weekend, 1898, he was plying south from Maine toward New York at the helm of the Mary A. Tyler, her cargo paper from the northern mills. This was the moment of the Portland Gale, the most destructive storm in New England history, named for the most famous ship lost that weekend.
Bragg said years later that he saw the Portland well offshore, passing so close he could touch her. Bragg was fighting for his own life, seven men onboard. Rather than wrecking on the outer shore of the arm of Cape Cod, as many did, he pushed farther southwest, past Provincetown’s hook into Cape Cod Bay. As he was driven into the shallow crashing waves at Paine’s Creek in Brewster, his ship broke in two.
Bragg chose to lash to the mast, with orders to his crew to do the same or similar in the rigging. Throughout that night, frozen, vomiting from seasickness, they were plunged over and over into the sea “like splinters,” Bragg’s daughter Miriam recalled her father saying years later. But they kept bobbing up.
Come morning, wind subsiding, tide receding, the boat was spied from shore. Captain Jeremiah Wixon, who lived on Stony Brook Road in Brewster, pulled together a rescue team. Struggling through foaming surf they rescued all hands.
Wixon took Bragg home to recover, while many in Brewster worked the shore in traditional fashion to scavenge rolls of paper washing in. “For many many years, that paper was used to produce the school newspaper,” Wilding reports.
Bragg not only recovered, he stayed put. Six years after the wreck he married his rescuer’s daughter, Margaret. They had several daughters and a son, calling Brewster home for the rest of their lives.
Bragg didn’t just sit around, reports Wilding; in World War One he was a Naval lieutenant commander leading transports, and in World War Two he took charge of a Michigan shipyard. Back home he became a cranberry grower, a Mason, and a pillar in the Harwich Baptist Church. He lived into his 80s, dying in 1956, buried in Brewster’s cemetery on Lower Road.
The day of his death was the very day he bound himself to the mast and saved his life 56 years earlier -- November 28.
Don Wilding’s “Shipwrecks of Cape Cod” is available at local bookstores or at dwCapeCod.com. He will be giving a talk (based on the book) June 15 at the Wellfleet Historical Society.
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Allen Bragg was my great grandfather. Ive heard stories throughout the years but only bits and pieces. Thank you sincerely for telling his story. He was some man!!
Nice story