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Broken in Two Off Cape Cod

Writing in The Mysterious Sea, Ferdinand C. Lane says:

My earliest vivid recollection of the sea was of watching a huge wave curl over the iron ship Jason, from Calcutta, as she lay broken in two off Cape Cod. Only one member of her crew survived, riding the breakers to safety on a bale of jute!

Years later, on a leisurely hike from Provincetown to Highland Light, I counted fifteen great masses of wreckage, varying from a ship’s foredeck to an entire hull, for in the offing lurked Peaked Hill Bars, one of the graveyards of the sea. Often I listened to tales of shipwreck in beach shanties tapestried with lobster buoys and tarred twine, while in later years I observed wrecks in various latitudes; for the good ships hove to in Davy Jones’ Locker far outnumber all the sails and funnels now afloat. I recently deciphered in a Cape Cod cemetery a name, scarcely legible, a date, and the one comment, “Lost at sea”.

Of such, whose watery grave is in the deep, deep sea, but whose tombstone worn and almost undecipherable leans forlornly where summer’s sweet grasses grow and only the sorrowful sighing of the quiet mid-summer breezes is heard, we may well imagine were written these lines by Lord Byron:

“He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.”

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