Ghost Wave

by Chris Dixon

  The men beheld yet another alien world—what is now known as Bishop Rock lay directly ahead. The outline immediately reminded the elder navigator of the shaggy mammoths that roamed the island hills to the north. The three-hundred-foot-high peak possessed nearly sheer sides and a dark, domelike summit whose updrafts were ridden by circling cormorants. From a half mile’s distance, it became evident that the dome was not actually smooth, but a tortured, gothic landscape of vertical spires and canyons. The peak held scores of moving white dots, which on closer examination proved to be the heads of nesting bald eagles. At its base, a series of caves burped, steamed, and burbled in the swell.

  Another half hour’s paddling gave a view around the island’s eastern flank. The black dome transitioned more smoothly down to a flatter plateau whose shoulders then slumped toward the ocean. The island swept southward, perhaps a half day’s walk in length, with another dark mesa looming halfway down. A broad, sandy beach ran along most of the shoreline below low cliffs of blond sandstone. But there would be no landing here. The beach was blanketed with miles of angry, bloody male elephant seals, each battling for a small roosting spot. The waters here swarmed with shark, barking fur seals, and dive-bombing eagles and pelicans. The men paddled back around the dome and through the shallows along the island’s north end. Perhaps they could find a protected landing along the western flank.

  Yet the entire western shoreline was being pummeled by closely spaced, rugged breaking waves. The swell was not very big, only a few feet, but it would be impossible to tell how high the breaking waves actually were until you were in front of them. And once there, you were committed to a shoreward course. It was duly noted that the lowest stretches of land were covered with beautiful dunes that bore little vegetation. This meant regular scouring winds and perhaps an ocean that occasionally washed clear over the lowest stretches of beach. The scouts could probably bring their Ti’at in through the surf just ahead, as there were no elephant seals, but it seemed too risky. With only two boats, losing one in the surf would be a disaster.

  It was by now midday, and they paddled far enough offshore to partake of a meal. They discussed their situation and what they’d seen, bobbing together in the waves. This island clearly held the promise of clothing and trade in otter and fur seal, protein in the form of plentiful swimming ducks. The confluence of warm and cold waters between the eastern and western shoreline surely promised epic battles with swordfish and perhaps bluefin tuna. It was agreed they would return to these islands, but with more boats and men. They should land on the more protected leeward shore when the elephants had returned to the ocean. For now, it was best to paddle back to the protected side and its warmer waters for the paddle home before the fog rolled back in. It had been burned back by the sun but hovered in an impenetrable, wraithlike line about a mile offshore.

  Rounding the northwestern edge of the black dome of rock, the Ti’at began to rise and fall almost imperceptibly over undulations that took nine long breaths to pass—a new swell. These waves ran fast and deep but didn’t break. Strong eddies began to swirl beneath them. This water was too shallow.

  The men turned to paddle straight offshore, but they battled thick mats of kelp and a northerly current grown stronger with the rise of swell and drop of tide. The old raven perched on the bow of the lead boat, crowing orders at men who now rowed as if their lives depended on it. A new line of slate gray lumps surged in from the fog. The first steepened sharply, but rolled beneath the canoes without breaking. At its summit, tentacles of kelp released their grip, enabling faster paddling. The second wave was even bigger. The raven took to the sky, calling encouragement.

  Both teams sprinted to get over it. The elder pilots of the first canoe were outflanked by the younger scouts of the second. The wave formed a terrifying ridgeline, yet both Ti’at had a good head of steam. They powered up a near-vertical face as tall as three boats stood end to end. A gale of mist blew off the wave’s back, drenching the men and producing the curious sound of a rainstorm on a still pond. White water erupted in their wake. A third wave came, more massive still. The young scouts paddled with all their might as the wave crested, and they uttered great war whoops as their bow crashed down safely on the backside. Breathless with fear, they turned to urge on their elders. But the other boat was gone. Three more waves came, each bigger than the last.

  When the waves subsided, the terrified scouts made a fast, desperate paddle back toward the boiling impact zone. The elders were tough, long-winded watermen who knew how to survive. You couldn’t spearfish, abalone dive, or canoe off Kinkipar without occasionally dealing with terrible seas, and each had thus faced similar, if not quite such massive conditions many times. You breathed short and fast to flood your blood with air, dove deep, said a prayer, and gave yourself up to the wave. If the Great Spirit was willing, you would eventually be roiled to the surface. But the scouts found nothing. No men. No boat. No supplies. The God at the edge of the world played for keeps.

  The fog folded over the remaining canoe like a death shroud, and the scouts dug back out to deep water as a new set of even bigger waves thundered down behind them. The raven turned an arc in the clear air above the mist and flew back to the black rock. He planned to circle around in the updrafts with the cormorants and eagles, gaining as much elevation as he could, and then aim for Kinkipar, whose summit he could plainly see in the distance.

  The scouting team had ventured out to the edge of the world, to a sacred realm where the mortal dared not tread. They had, it seemed, reached the defined limits of human exploration. If the younger scouts were very lucky and made it home, their tale of the strange islands and their perilous journey might be told around Kinkipar firesides for thousands of years. If they never reached Kinkipar, the raven would help the shaman divine the details. Amid the wailing and heartbreak, heated debate would surely ensue. The cautious would argue that the islands were the sole domain of the Gods and the chief should pronounce them forever off-limits. The daring would make the case that the islands promised adventure and riches, and besides, what if someone had survived and was still out there? Regardless, the deadly islands surely continued to call to the Kinkipar like sirens even as they slowly slid into a rising sea.

  Eventually, the islands were buried by the waves and faded into Kinkipar legend. Yet humans did eventually return, using bigger, stronger boats that made it possible to approach a mysterious lost shoreline and to taunt a giant rising from the depths. Like the Kinkipar, they simply couldn’t help themselves from wanting a closer look.

  Chapter 3:

  PAWNS

  TO Bishop

  ROCK

  “I must shun this island of the Sun, the world’s delight. Nothing but fatal trouble shall we find here.”

  —Odysseus, from Homer’s The Odyssey

  In the eons after San Clemente Island was first settled, massive melting of the Greenland and Laurentide ice sheets poured trillions of gallons of water into the oceans. It became impossible for Kinkipar to land atop Tanner Island perhaps eight thousand years ago. When the Great Pyramids were completed, around forty-five hundred years ago, all that remained of Cortes Island was a wave-scoured dome perhaps ten feet high and a half-mile wide. By the mid-nineteenth century, Kinkipar culture had essentially disappeared. So had Cortes Island.

  Through these millennia, this uplifted mesa a hundred miles from the mainland transformed from a tantalizing destination for possible human settlement into a fisherman’s eden and a perilous shipping hazard, one that produced a truly frightening wave. Just how many ships might have been destroyed, before the mid-1800s, by some combination of enormous waves and the Bank’s shallow seafloor is, and probably will always remain, unknown. The first mapping of the California coast began with the seminal trek of Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542. But no Spanish map seems to have recorded the existence of either Cortes or Tanner Banks. In the 1981 printing of Shipwrecks of the Pacific Coast, James A. Gibbs noted that the gold-laden galleon Santa Rosa met he
r fate in 1717 atop the Bishop Rock in a nightmarish specter of foam and splintering wood. The book’s first 1957 edition makes no mention of the wreck, so how Gibbs later received this information, and its veracity, is one of the Bank’s innumerable mysteries.

  Indeed, even when it comes to the verifiable, written documentation that has been uncovered to date, the early modern history of Cortes Bank is rife with falsehoods, legends, and oversize characters. Its mystery and menace are writ larger than life—even its charting and naming. Once its territory was properly staked and mapped, by a charismatic but doomed man, its miles of sandstone and basalt would serve as a dangerous playing field for daring and ambitious mariners of all stripes.

  The first person we know to have recognized something unusual a hundred miles out was an American crewman aboard one of the most famous ships ever put to sea. James Alden was born in 1810 in Portland, Maine. He was a direct ancestor of Mayflower pilgrims John Alden and Patricia Mullins, a young woman reputedly cast into a love triangle between Alden and the Mayflower’s captain, Miles Standish. (The affair was immortalized in Longfellow’s scandalous nineteenth-century poem The Courtship of Miles Standish.)

  Alden was ballsy, irascible, and a talented navigator. During his early years, he was assigned to an epic survey of the South Seas under Commander Charles Wilkes. The mission charted some fifteen hundred miles of Antarctic coastline and made expansive forays through the South Pacific. At the expedition’s end, Alden was assigned as an officer aboard the USS Constitution. This legendary, seemingly indestructible frigate earned the name “Old Ironsides” in the War of 1812 for the confounding ability of her oaken hull to deflect British cannonballs. On the Constitution, Alden served alongside a famed and unbalanced captain, Jonathan “Mad Jack” Percival. Percival was a sailor’s captain, at least some of the time. During an 1826 visit to Hawaii, he risked his career by demanding island chiefs rescind a missionary-sponsored law that forbade local women from boarding ships, so as to ease the sexual tensions of visiting sailors, and yet later he became known for taking an almost maniacal glee in ordering subordinates flogged or even pistol-whipped at the slightest transgression.

  Alden and Percival sailed the world aboard the Constitution, becoming, among other things, the first Americans to attack Vietnam. Then in late 1845, rumors of war between the United States and Mexico reached the Constitution in Hawaii. Percival led a miserable passage that reached Monterey, California, on New Year’s Eve. The harbor was bereft of American ships, so the Constitution immediately made a fourteen-day run for Mazatlán.

  Strong, frigid northwesterlies propelled the ship at a clip perhaps as high as fourteen knots (16 mph). Her logs while off California carry characteristically simple entries that belie little of the drama or misery: “Got up the larboard chain and bent it—got the larboard anchor off the bows…pumped ship out…inspected the crew at quarters, exercised the 1st Division of great guns…Punished Wm Brackley (O.S.) with 12 lashes of the Colt for selling his clothes.”

  We’re thus left to ponder a late-afternoon conversation on January 5 among Percival, Alden, and Lieutenant G. W. Grant as the Constitution proceeded along a course that supposedly kept her well clear of navigational hazards. A log entry from Grant offers a tantalizing shard of information: “From 4 to 6 [4–6 P.M. ] moderate breezes and clear pleasant weather. At 4-20 [4:20 P.M. ] discovered breakers bearing N.E. about 10 miles distant.”

  The night before this strange sighting, the moon was at half phase. It disappeared below the evening horizon around midnight, leaving the Constitution sailing toward an uncharted seamount under a black sky. Were she gliding over a large groundswell, an adept watchman might recognize phosphorescent foam from breaking waves off her bow well before they created a hazard. But waves were not seen until 4 P.M. the next day. This speaks to a likely, sudden arrival of a powerful winter swell.

  Percival, Alden, and Grant surely extended telescopes, marveling and puzzling as giant, ghostly white horses galloped across an utterly empty ocean. Wonder would have been mingled with dread and relief. The Constitution drew 22 feet of water. Some sunken menace was clearly spawning the massive breakers, yet when the ship had first approached it, it seems nothing had been seen. Had Percival proceeded a little farther west at flank speed, the Cortes Bank would have done the job British cannonballs could not.

  After surviving alternating rounds of terrifying combat and ceaseless boredom during the Mexican-American War, Alden was offered a position with the western command of the U.S. Coast Survey. At the helm of a navy steamer, Active, he would lead the effort to map the vast swath of new United States territory along the Pacific Coast.

  It would be difficult to overstate the danger, importance, or maddening tedium of this work. The discovery of gold in 1849 created an explosion of demand for transit to California. Yet shoals, currents, and tides were largely a mystery, and maps—many of which dated to the seventeenth century and even before—were so dangerously inaccurate as to be worse than useless. Coast Survey captains navigated creaky, leaky ships along a strange and spectacular coast peopled by suspicious and occasionally hostile natives. To compound the thankless duty, sailors regularly abandoned ship for the gold mines. In 1849, gold-hungry crewmen beat senseless Captain William McArthur of the survey cutter Ewing and threw him into San Francisco Bay. He was saved only when a fellow officer spotted him drifting toward the Pacific and latched onto his hair.

  For anyone with a passing interest in California history, the writings of Alden and MacArthur are fascinating, for therein lie the first descriptions of a once nearly empty coastline today inhabited by millions. For our purposes, the most relevant passage is one Alden wrote describing the Southern California coast:

  From the last-named point [Point Conception] to Santa Barbara the coast is almost straight and runs nearly east and west. The passage formed by the islands lying abreast of this portion of the coast is called Santa Barbara Channel…

  We steered down to the southward and westwards, so as to get on the parallel of latitude well to the westwards of certain dangers said to exist somewhere between that point and the Coronados Islands. Our search was not entirely unsuccessful, for we fell in with a bank, where the shoalest [shallowest] water we found, however was forty-two fathoms [152 feet], fine white sand. For many reasons, our examination was limited…I should not, therefore be willing to say that there are no dangers existing in that quarter, particularly as one of the shoals that was discovered by the U.S. Frigate Constitution, in January, 1840 [Note: this date proved to be a typographical error and should have read 1845], and I happened to be one of the officers who believed they saw it at the time. I shall improve the first opportunity to give that locality a more thorough examination.

  Alden would eventually make good on this promise, yet in the meantime, he wasn’t the only one to witness the Bank’s strange specters. In their quest to reach the California gold mines, countless 49ers traveled over land, but scores more—perhaps spooked by horror stories of parties withering in hellish desert infernos or feeding on fallen comrades in Sierra snowfields—chose the longer but safer route by sea: sailing the Gulf of Mexico, crossing a lawless Panama, and then being ferried north along a route plied by ships that came to be called Panama Steamers.

  A January 1853 advertisement from the New York Times noted such an opportunity:

  The magnificent new double-engine side-wheel steamship CORTES (1600 tons) THOS B. CROPPER, Commander, will be in readiness at PANAMA to receive the UNCLE SAM’s passengers and sail immediately for San Francisco. The accommodations and ventilation of the Cortes are all that can be desired. Her speed (established on the voyage between New York and Panama and while on the Pacific coast) is unequaled.

  It seems that on this very January journey Cropper witnessed a baffling spectacle. Passing south of San Clemente Island in a heavy swell, he was astonished to find massive eruptions of white water in the middle of the deep blue sea. The Cortes ventured close, and Cropper became certain he was
above an undersea volcano. Upon reaching San Francisco, Cropper apparently met with

  Coast Survey officer W. P. Blake, who recounted Cropper’s direct words: “The waters were in violent commotion and thrown up suddenly into columns, at regular intervals of four or five minutes.”

  Alden’s Constitution sighting had been verified. He dispatched the U.S. Coast Survey cutter Ewing, now captained by Lieutenant T. H. Stevens, to investigate and chart the seamount. Yet for some reason, Stevens did not reach the strange shoal until mid-May 1853. By then, the powerful swells of the wintertime North Pacific were gone, replaced by punishing northerly winds and smaller, but relentlessly choppy seas. Stevens spent five awful days before reporting to Alden:

  Sir: I have the pleasure of reporting my return to this place from the shoal to the southward of San Clemente and San Nicolas, of which I have made a thorough examination, having been five days anchored upon it.

  The shoal, or bank, is latitude 32 degrees, 39 minutes north longitude, 119 degrees, 19 minutes, 50 seconds west. The island of San Nicolas bears NW by N, distant 46 miles, island of San Clemente bears NE ½N distant 43½ miles. The nature of the bottom is hard, composed of white sand, broken shells and coral. The least water found—ten fathoms—would be about nine, reduced to low water and the character of the soundings, as you will find upon reference to the chart which I send herewith, irregular and abrupt.

  The weather, while at anchor upon the shoal, we found different from that which normally prevails upon the coast in the vicinity, bearing a strong resemblance to that upon the banks of Newfoundland.