Pulphead: Essays by Sullivan John Jeremiah

Author:Sullivan, John Jeremiah [Sullivan, John Jeremiah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-10-24T21:00:00+00:00

When at last Rafinesque returned to North America—of course he did; destiny can’t be eluded, only perverted—his ship could not make port. She headed for Cape Montauk and was baffled by westerly winds. She tried to cut to Newport, but the wind changed and blew her back northeast, so she turned toward New York again.

Between Long Island and Fisher’s Island, across the bottom of the channel, lay a row of tremendous granitic boulders, absorbed by a glacier in Hudson’s Bay twenty thousand years ago and extruded as glacial moraine ten thousand years after that, at a place sailors still call the Race. The moon had just changed. There may have been as little as five feet of water above the tip of the biggest rock, which sheared off the keel. It was ten o’clock at night near the beginning of November. The longboat got tangled in rigging and for a moment seemed about to be sucked under, but the ship itself, “being made buoyant by the air in the hold,” stopped sinking partway. The passengers cut themselves loose and rowed two hours in the cold toward a lighthouse.

Rafinesque wandered for a period of days in a sort of catatonia. His later memory of the event seems confused—he says he walked “to New London in Connecticut,” though we know that’s where he landed. At one point some men rowed out to try to save the cargo. The passengers gathered hopefully on the shore to watch. But when the men sawed off the masts, to make the ship more manageable, they upset its equilibrium. It righted and sank “after throwing up the confined air of the hold by an explosion.” Rafinesque stood there and watched this occur, he watched the ship explode, saw his prospects all but literally hanging in a balance, then fate like some great sea god turning down its thumb, taking his work, his money, his clothes. The enumeration of losses is nauseating:

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