by Chris Dixon
Houtz says that Bresler’s dramatic photographs, presumably shot from Polaris from the backside of the waves, don’t actually do the scene justice. On the Jalisco, the distance from the top of the bow to the waterline was thirty-two feet. Below the waterline lay another twenty feet of ship. Before the wave hit, it drew the water down probably ten feet below her waterline, thus leaving only ten feet of water for a cushion above the rock. “Kirkwood was hit by that wave, blown off the deck, then he might have fallen forty-five or fifty feet before he even hit the water,” he said. “Then the waves landed on him.”
The miserable men had a while together on the tug before being dropped off aboard the Polaris. Houtz had a broken rib, but O’Malley’s internal injuries were worse, yet even he would quickly recover. Lesslie, Kirkwood, and Dan were merely, and incredibly, only battered and bruised. A small team of FBI agents reached Polaris by helicopter. They asked Houtz basic questions about his role in the operation, but reserved the bulk of their interrogation for Kirkwood, who faithfully spun his yarn about the ship striking the rock in the middle of the night and their then being forced to scuttle her. True or not, this is the story that stuck, and it kept Kirkwood and everyone else out of jail. Captain Cliff Miller and his crew, in fact, earned a Coast Guard citation for Whitney Olsen’s rescue work.
No mention of McMahan’s five rock barges appears in Kirkwood’s written account. Houtz maintained that when things went to hell, their captain wisely and quietly slunk back toward Ensenada. The seas, however, became so rough that at least one of the barges sank, carrying with it a fortune in boulders and a D-8 Caterpillar bulldozer, whose driver nearly drowned.
The Cortes Bank had almost killed Kirkwood, yet for months afterward, he lingered in the press, still broadcasting his grand plan for Abalonia. Other entrepreneurs floated their own nationalistic aspirations for Cortes Bank. Taluga would have been a glittering resort of three islands straddling the three shallowest shoals while the kingdom of Aphrodite would be built using classical Greek architecture with a government based on peace, tolerance, and love. Eventually, the U.S. Army Corps decided that the Bank lay on the U.S. outer continental shelf, and they forbade any further nation-building plans. Perhaps they realized that William Adger Moffett had actually claimed Cortes Bank for the United States back in 1911.
In the ensuing years, Jalisco would be pummeled by waves and eventually broken into three very jagged and very dangerous pieces. Despite this, she would become a popular spot for lobster and abalone divers. Today, she’s still down there, biding her time as more and more of her sharp, rusty rebar becomes exposed by the ocean and scattered across Bishop Rock. At least a portion of her hull seems to rest in a spot that, as future arrivals would eventually come to realize, makes surfing exceedingly dangerous.
Joe Kirkwood remained baffled over the United States’ demands that he cease and desist. “The most obvious reason for panic in the upper echelons of government is fear of another Cuba,” he wrote. “While I can see their reasoning in this respect, the thought is almost laughable, for never was there a more fervent capitalist than I. And not only because I’m a businessman with modest financial success in a capitalistic system. I sincerely believe that the need for possession is inherent in each of us, and any system which denies man gratification of that need, must strip him of all incentive, and eventually, a reason to get up in the morning.
“Washington had nothing to fear from me. My thinking leaned rather toward a monarchy, and probably a Constitutional monarchy, but in any event for the good of the people. One in which the spirit and intent of the law would be carried out, rather than, necessarily, the letter of the law.”
It would be easy to dismiss Kirkwood’s mania as crackpot, but he was not crazy. He eventually moved on, made a nice fortune for himself with a golf course on Kauai, and—as far as Houtz knows and I can figure—died of natural causes around a decade ago. Kirkwood was not alone in his obsession with Cortes Bank—for the freedom and riches it promised, for his “inherent” desire to possess and own it. This quality is shared by nearly every person who has encountered it. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche described a similar, universal sort of need back in 1886 when he wrote, “Every superior human being will instinctively aspire after a secret citadel where he is set free from the crowd, the many, the majority.”
You don’t find much more freedom than by building your own citadel atop a sunken island.
Houtz completely understood and in his own way strongly shared Kirkwood’s impulse, and it echoes in the stories told by Mel Fisher, Ilima Kalama, Bill Sharp, Sean Collins, and every surfer risking his thin neck on the Bank today. Kirkwood, in the grandness of his schemes, his efforts to defy if not destroy the wave, and his penchant to cast himself in the role of the benevolent monarch, perhaps fulfills the part of Ahab more than most, but as Melville makes clear, everyone on the Pequod hungered for the white whale.
And Houtz asks us to consider: Had he and Kirkwood reached Cortes Bank a day earlier, the seas would have been calm. With placid conditions, and time on their side, Houtz thinks it likely that he would have been able to work around the anchor issue by having Whitney Olsen simply motor Jalisco in the right spot and hold while ballast valves put Jalisco on the seafloor. With five barge loads of rocks then dumped off her bow, she would have been far better protected from the next day’s waves. Houtz isn’t certain she would have been protected enough. In fact, had he remained on board as planned, he probably would have died. But Cortes Bank would have become an island. Fierce legal battles would have made global headlines. Most likely, if that happened, the only person to ever ride a wave out there might have been Harrison Ealey in 1961; Bruce McMahan’s boulders would have surely ruined the break. Houtz, though, disagrees. He had planned on laying Abalonia’s rocks in a long, slow, upward slope, and so, he said, “You might have ended up with the longest, biggest point break on Earth.”
Today, Houtz doesn’t talk much about what happened on Cortes Bank, even though it’s one of the stranger episodes in U.S. maritime history with a cast of characters straight out of a movie. It’s just not his way. Still, as he thumbs through his scrapbook, stopping at a photo of Joe perched out on the deck of the Jalisco, he shakes his head and tells me he relives the moment Kirkwood was blown off the deck every day of his life. Kirkwood’s last words aboard the Jalisco still echo in his mind, their conviction so certain. “The wave’s gonna go by me. It’s gonna wash around me.”
“I’m just sitting there looking out at Joe, just going, ’You’re crazy,’” he said. “I still think the guy’s crazy. But then again, so was I.”
Chapter 5:
ROGUE
WAVES
The incidents in the life of a wave are many. How long it will live, how far it will travel, to what manner of end it will come are all determined, in large measure, by the conditions it meets in its progression across the face of the sea. For the one essential quality of a wave is that it moves; anything that retards or stops its motion dooms it to dissolution and death.
—Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, 1951
As Rex Bank, James Houtz, and Joe Kirkwood discovered, if you find yourself above the Bishop Rock on a calm autumn or winter’s day and don’t heed the distant early-warning signs, the first breaking waves of a new swell might well be the last thing you ever see. Seemingly out of nowhere, they will rise up above you—deep blue and terrifying—like a line of tsunamis. Even if you get the motor on your boat started in time, you still might not outrun them.
In your last moments, two existential questions might or might not arise: How is it that a line of North Pacific skyscrapers have appeared seemingly out of nothing, and how damn high can those waves go? For answers, we can learn much from the experience of the USS Ramapo. In 1933, the crew of this navy oil ship was granted a sight previously seen only by God or the dead. Trapped in the midst of what was to the time the most powerful storm ever recorded in the North Pacific, the ship somehow survived being overtaken by wha
t was believed to be a physical impossibility: a wave 112 feet high. This remains the biggest wind-driven swell ever reliably measured by an eyewitness from a position on a ship in the open ocean. When this same swell eventually reached Cortes Bank, it created waves that were in all likelihood taller, and today the Bank is considered almost uniquely without an upper limit. The Bank not only produces the largest surfable wave on the planet, but no one really knows just how high a breaking wave, under the right conditions, might reach—a thousand feet has been tossed out as possible.
The storm that created the Ramapo’s record-setting wave had its genesis in the loneliest reaches of the North Pacific—a vast, malevolent swath of ocean below the Aleutian Islands that lies directly in the track of a wintertime jet stream whose high-altitude winds can exceed two hundred miles per hour. Reports from particularly violent tempests in this zone are scarce—captains dodge them or don’t survive to tell the tale. That’s why the experience of the Ramapo, recounted by its executive officer Ross Palmer Whitemarsh in a 1934 article titled “Great Sea Waves,” is singularly unique. Understand the gauntlet run by these sailors, and you can begin to comprehend how a pair of equally mammoth storms seventy-five years later could send incomprehensible giants roaring into Waimea Bay; Maverick’s; Todos Santos, Mexico; and of course, the Cortes Bank. While mariners have learned to chart the conflux of weather, swell, and current to avoid these beasts, surfers have schooled themselves in these arcane arts for the exact opposite reason.
Ross Palmer Whitemarsh was born in Olympia, Washington, in 1895. He was a mathematical genius who graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1918 and went on to lead the sort of life that is the fodder for a Tom Hanks epic. Yet in “Great Sea Waves,” Whitemarsh recounts his almost unbelievable story in a somewhat dry, scientific manner. In short, the account doesn’t reveal much about who he was or what he was thinking during the experience. Fortunately, a few of his close family members were happy to shed light on their legendary patriarch.
His grandnephew James Whitemarsh—today, an auto shipping executive in his sixties who lives in West Palm Beach, Florida—remembers idolizing his great uncle before they even met. “I was reading this story of men and survival in the sea in a Time/Life Book,” James said during our interview. “And I was shocked to see his name. When I asked my mom who he was, she said, ‘Oh, that’s your uncle Ross.’”
James met his great uncle shortly thereafter in 1957, when James was eleven. By then a rear admiral, Ross Palmer had just retired and was visiting the Washington State side of his family. He was fit and robust, but James had expected someone taller.
“He was short, perhaps no better than five foot seven,” he said. “But being an officer and being so short, he had to have a big personality.”
The admiral regaled his young nephew with incredible stories of survival. At twenty-five, Ross Palmer had been assigned an unlikely duty as the senior naval officer on board the Dwinsk, a British freighter that ferried American troops to the European front during World War I. Dwinsk was returning home on June 18, 1918, when a German U-boat sank her around six hundred miles off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia. Everyone escaped to lifeboats, but rather than letting the men sail off, the U-boat captain decided to toy with them, using their lifeboats as decoys to attract other ships to torpedo—as a sniper might lure enemy soldiers by shooting one of their fellows in the knee. After a few harrowing days—during which other Allied captains learned what was afoot and refused to approach the lifeboats—the German captain left the men to die. For the next eleven days, through torturous drought and a journey into the eye of a hurricane, Whitemarsh was the glue that bound twenty desperate men.
“They realized that the sail on their boat was rotten,” said James. “But just as the men were getting ready to jettison the sails, my uncle told them to save them to catch the rainwater. In the end, that’s what saved them.”
James Whitemarsh, Executive Officer of USS Ramapo, veteran of World War I, a future veteran of Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima, and witness to the largest wave ever recorded from the deck of a ship in 1933, marries Rebecca Bird Caldwell Gumbes, future mother of Francis “Taffy” Wells. Photo courtesy of Whitemarsh’s great niece, Angie Gregos-Swaroop.
By the time Ross Palmer Whitemarsh set sail aboard the Ramapo fifteen years later, he was a seasoned mariner, a husband, and father of two young girls. One of his daughters, Francis “Taffy” Wells—today, a delightful, plucky octogenarian living in Honolulu—helped me reconstruct her father’s most legendary adventure.
Ms. Wells grew up both adoring and fearing her devoted father, whom she recalls as a fanatical golfer and strict taskmaster. “His favorite saying was ‘order, counterorder, disorder,’” she said. “I heard it hundreds of times. If you didn’t follow orders, there’d be disorder, and he hated that. I remember shagging golf balls for him as a little kid. I’d sit off to the side behind a palm tree, and when he’d hit all the balls, I’d run out and pick ‘em up. And you know, he had this dry, British humor. He’d tell a joke with a completely straight face. You’d sit and think about it for an hour, and then you’d just start laughing like crazy.”
Ms. Wells was three when her father set out from Manila aboard the Ramapo. The ship was a Patoka class oiler, built in 1919 at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock. She was 478 feet long (about one and a half football fields), sixty feet wide, and weighed 17,000 tons (better than three times heavier than Jalisco). She was also low slung and stable, drawing twenty-nine feet of water. Despite a pair of twin 2,800-horsepower steam turbines, she was, like Jalisco, a plodding ship. Laden with seventy thousand barrels of oil, she was barely capable of ten knots. This made her two-thirds as fast as the USS Constitution or, say, the Pequod under full sail.
Between 1929 and 1934, Ramapo made a great many crossings from San Diego to Manila. According to Ms. Wells, the journeys became incredibly monotonous. “The crewmen kept getting into fisticuffs and trouble,” she said. “Dad was trying to figure out something that would involve the whole crew and get them to stop bickering.”
Whitemarsh and Ramapo Captain Claude Banks Mayo had an advanced echo sounder brought on board, and they decided to teach the crewmen to use it and interpret the results. On each trek, the ship took a slightly different route, and after 17,239 soundings, her crew eventually produced a huge 3-D plaster of paris map of the midlatitude Pacific seafloor. It was stunning in detail, unveiling two trenches, the Nero and Ramapo Deep (now called the Japan Trench) that were more than thirty thousand feet deep. Mayo wrote that the map revealed “a submerged continent, with mountains, river courses, and plateaus, at an average depth of one mile stretching from the Hawaiian to the Barin Islands, east of the coast of Japan.” The map and its later, more-refined iterations became an instrument not only for geologists and oceanographers but for early surf forecasters like Walter Munk, who wanted to know how waves interacted with the seafloor. Countless mystics came to believe that Whitemarsh and Mayo’s map in fact exposed the outline of the lost continent of Lemuria.
When Whitemarsh set out in late January of 1933, the longstanding dogma since the days of Archibald MacRae was still held as a scientific truth. Wind-driven waves could only grow as high as 60 feet. Anything higher would be pulled down by simple gravity. Thus, all the tales of taller waves were categorized as wild-eyed, rum-laced myth.
After delivering a full load of fuel to the Pacific fleet in Manila, the Ramapo was following another of her great circle sounding routes. She was well north of the Hawaiian Islands and their ports, and her sole link to the outside world was a shortwave radio, whose antenna was stretched between a pair of masts.
Had that antenna given Whitemarsh the benefit of satellite imagery, he might have asked Mayo to steer a different course, for the Ramapo was about to become a tiny pawn in a global atmospheric upheaval. A La Niña weather event of epic proportions was already underway. Cold and snowfall records were being set from Belfast to Kamchatka to Manhattan. On January 11, a
hurricane-force gale had lashed the entire California coastline, destroying 130 oil derricks and spawning nearshore waves that swept sailors from the decks of four U.S. warships—including an aircraft carrier. Farther north, blizzards gave Crater Lake, Oregon, a January snowfall of 256 inches, and the mountain town of Seneca, Oregon, recorded temperatures of forty below—records that still stand. On the upside, a newly sworn-in President Roosevelt was about to repeal prohibition, allowing Americans to legally drown their sorrows, and they’d need to. That summer, twenty-one tropical systems—a record lasting until 2005—would form in the Atlantic Ocean, devastating the Chesapeake Bay, North Carolina, and Texas. By November 1933, ceaseless winds would begin scouring the topsoil from drought-stricken farms in the Dakotas and dropping red snow on Chicago. It was the dawn of the Dust Bowl.
The January storm began off the eastern coast of Russia, when a vicious surge of polar high pressure blasted Siberia and swept out across the Pacific at fifty miles an hour. In the wake of this surge, the temperature in a barren outpost called Oymyakon plunged to ninety degrees below zero—the coldest temperature ever measured in the Northern Hemisphere.
Within a few feet of reaching open Russian waters, minute vertical pressure changes in the air caused tiny, almost invisible deformations—scientists call them capillary waves—to form on the water’s surface. These gave a rough texture for the horizontal winds to grab, causing the water molecules to begin to vibrate in a circular motion. By a hundred yards offshore, that circular motion had manifested in the form of diminutive wind waves, whose peaks formed rows of miniature sails and whose troughs carried a rotating eddy of air that furthered them along.
By the time these sails, or swells, had been pushed twenty-five miles offshore, the insistent wind had morphed them into orbital columns—somewhat akin to a line of logs rolling downhill—around 11 feet high, with a period between their troughs and crests of seven seconds. Most of the energy of these swells was not at the surface of the water, but below it, reaching down at least as far as forty feet. After another 250 miles of wind, the swells were more gently rounded but were now averaging around 27 feet high with a far longer thirteen-second period and an energy column four hundred feet deep.