On Feb. 19, 1927, the schooner Nancy anchored at Boston Light to ride out an expected storm. A wooden five-masted schooner, 259 feet long, she had just delivered a load of coal. Her hull was empty.
She headed straight for Harding’s Ledge, a shoal that had caused many shipwrecks.
The captain, E. M. Baird, ordered an extra sail set so the Nancy would clear the rocks. The maneuver worked, but the schooner then headed toward shore. The crew desperately tried to change her course, but failed.
From his home in Hull, Osceola James watched the schooner Nancy as it was driven onto the beach. A lifesaver himself, he was the son of legendary lifesaver Joshua James.
James ran out of the house without putting on a heavy coat. He commandeered horses pulling a snowplow and hitched them to the wheeled carriage that carried the surfboat from the Humane Society Station.
The horses brought the lifeboat to the beach, where hundreds of onlookers watched the grounded schooner Nancy. James picked out a crew from the crowd, men who knew how to row.
"We just went to work," James later told the Boston Globe. "I couldn't see any need of waiting. It was getting dark and those men on the vessel wanted to come ashore."
The men launched the surfboat into waves that broke as high as 15 feet. Fifty men held a line attached to the stern in case the surfboat capsized.
The crew jumped into the boat safely, including one sailor who held the ship’s ice-covered cat. The surfboat returned to shore safely after 20 minutes of rowing through the pounding surf.
The crew of the schooner Nancy had more luck than the eight men who died that night aboard the Coast Guard cutter 238, which sank off Highland Light on Cape Cod.
Being a resourceful chap, Captain Baird and his crew gave tours of the vessel, charging 50 cents admission to more than 400 people in a day. The Nancy soon brought in as much as $800 a week.
Attempts to float the Nancy failed.
In 1929, another storm drove her 10 feet inland. A sailor who lived aboard the Nancy and escorted tourists said the storm made him seasick. That 10-foot trip, reported the Globe, was the Nancy’s last voyage.
Over the years, arsonists set fire to the Nancy. Nutro drinks had an advertisement painted on her side in giant letters. Her bowspirit was taken off.
The schooner Nancy became such an eyesore by the Great Depression that Works Progress Administration workers dismantled her. The government gave the lumber to poor residents of Hull so they could heat their houses.
And so ended the faithful vessel.
As a boy, I lived in Hull for about a year, on the harbor side. We saw a small freighter washed up on the ocean side beach after a storm. Quite impressive.
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