Evening Star Newspaper, July 14, 1929, Page 85

( S T oacaRon SR Se DAl Tmsesa Oz _THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. €, JULY 1, ®20-PARY 7. [ o . Hozw the Dread Picaroons of New Jersey and Long Island Coasts Tricked Immigrants to Their Doom by “Riding the Mule’ on Stormy Nights, Recalled by “Ancient Mariner” of United States Coast Guard. BY STANLEY RUSHTON. FURTIVE figure crawls crablike over the beach hummocks in the midnight darkness, broken only by white splotches of high-fiung foam from the boiling surf and distant running lights of a tempest-tossed vessel off shoals which mark a graveyard of the deep. Brought to hands and knees by savage blasts of a nor'easter, tattered oilskins wind-whipped into the form of unclean plumage of a bird of prey, he snakes his way to the shelter of the dunes and with his sea boots kicks & tattce upon the swaying doors of clustered hovels— human buzzards' roosts, fashioned of timbers from skeletons of once-gallant ships and patches of drab canvas which once towered in snowy yramids above their decks. " “We're aridin’ of the mule this fine stormy night,” is the summons hoarsely shouted above m-mmolthzmlndthethnnderottho surf, which, like some eerie hocus-pocus chanted beside a witch’s seeting caldron, brings troop- ing forth into the night s motley nocturnal crew, the most inhuman and heartless ghouls known to mankind. An ancient and cackling crone pulls at a small boy with her clawlike hand, dragging him from his rude couch. Beside a high and closely thatched stack of salt hay the straggling line halts and out of the darkness a haltered mule is led. The whimpering child 1s tossed .to the ani- mal’s back and with one hand clutches the scrubby mane while with the other he raises a lighted lantern, lashed to a pole. THJB was the stage set 80 years ago by pica- L roons along the New Jersey and Long Island Coasts to lure ships to destruction by false bea- cons. At dawn the more hardy would plunge shoulder deep into the surf, not on a mission of regcue, but to salvage battered bodies of immigrants who had salled for America aboard clipper ships with their ‘life savings in their money belts. Along the beach women and chil- dren of the buszards’ roosts would seek lesser plunder amid wreckage which strewed the sands, or dig shallow graves in dunes for the stripped bodies of those cast up by the sea. " The grim and tragic trickery of “riding the mule”"—with lantern appearing and vanishing as the animal was led around the haystack— providled & beacon that gave off diminutive flashes exactly synchronous with the revolv- ing light of the Barnegat, N. J. lighthouse, northward from the lair of the wreckers. Une fortunate mariners, upon sighting the pin-point light of the lantern, would be deceived into believing that their ships were many miles oft Barnegat, safe in deep water. Once a ship was lured onto the shoals, her doom was certain. Wwilliam H. Alston, one of the oldest officers of the United States Coast Guard, who, as & youth, served as a surfman at a New Jersey life- saving station, recalls many instances when the shifting sands revealed heaps of human bones, the remains of those who had been tossed into shallow graves by the picaroons. He recalls, also, of having been told by elders of ghoulish scenes enacted on stormy beaches, now the sites of Summer resorts, when picaroons once lured a ship ashore and fought like jungle beasts for possession of each corpse thrown on the sands from the comber crests. . It was in 1848 that Representative William ‘A. Newell, of New Jersey, portrayed vividly to Congress the horrors of a shipwreck he had witnessed on those shores. It was Newell's eloquent plea which won an appropriation of a meager $10,000 to be used in erecting a thin line of huts alcng the Long Island and New Jer- sey coasts and equipping them with crude life- saving devices to cstablish communication with stranded vessels. N this manner th2 United States Life-Saving Service was bcrn and gradually extended to cover Atlantic and Pacific Coasts as well as the shores of the Great Lakes and Mississippi River, until it joined with the Revenue Cutter Service in 1915 to form the present Coast Guard. “Of this dangerous section of the Atlantic seaboard,” read the first report of the service, issued in 1876, “the coasts of New Jersey and Long Island present the most ghastly record of disaster. Lying on either side of the gate to the great metropolis of the Nation, they an- nually levy a terrible tribute upon passing com=- merce. The broken skeletons of wrecked ves- sels—with which the beaches are strewn and with which the changing sands are ever busy- ing themselves, here burying and there ex- huming—and the unmarked mounds sorrow- fully testify to the vastness of sacrifice of hu- man life and property these inexorable shores have claimed.” Even the establishmant of the huts, with life- boats to be manned by heroic volunteer crews, failed at first to drive the picaroons from their roosts amid th: dunes. There were “higher-ups” and “master minds” among these bands of human vultures. These operated from the ports, marking ships that were to clear with kegs of specie or bullion that might be salvaged from the splintered hull after the vessel had been lured to Barnegat Shoals or other traps. The existence of these inhuman beings, many of whom were believed to masque- rade as ship brokers or chandlers along the water fronts, was revealed in later reports of the service referring to sinister influences being used to drive the life-savers from beaches and end the Government “extravagance” of sup- + plying groups of heroic and honest fishermen with lifeboats. In 1889, it is recorded, an itinerant preacher, who was believed to have joined the picaroons, appeared on the coast, visiting the life-saving stations as a self-appointed chaplain. This al- leged preacher made a pretense of holding serv- ices of a religious nature, but merely sought to incite the surfmen to mutiny at such times as ships were in peril. Having some clever- ness in writing, this same manh contributed numerous articles to newspapers of that day, seeking to show the futility of maintaining such a life-saving service. “Lifeboats vanished from the unguarded life- saving stations. The stations themselves suf- fered from neglect and the equipment suf- fered from theft and vandalism. Disasters, at- tended with frightful loss of life, continued to occur in -the immediate neighborhoods of the stations. On being taken out, much of the ap- paratus was found useless; even lifelines had been slashed with knives by picarooning van- dals,” stated one report, issued prior to the time of manning the stations with paid crews. In the meantime, Fire Island and Barhegat remained synonyms of horror in the fo'c'sles of ships on the Seven Seas.” Vows were made with many a deep-sea oath that it were bet- ter to die aboard a ship, pounding to pieces on the shoals, than to become a castaway among the picaroons. Especially on foreign ships, suicide pacts were frequently made by entire crews rather than to fall among the wreckers, for even in an en- lightened age deep-sea superstitions pictured picaroons of Fire Island and Barnegat Shoals as possessing forms half vampire bat and half vulture. THERE was the ill-fated Spanish brig Au- +*-. gustine, for instance, which was driven on Monmouth Beach, N. J., during a memor- able gale of February 3, 1880, with her master, Capt. Aritz, at the helm. It was during the peak of this gale that the life-saving crew, re- turning to the station after a heroic rescue of the crew from another ship, sighted the square- rigger. Closer and closer to the beach raced the One of the modern lighthouses whic - Lured to Death by Set Beacons h dot the Atlantic coast of the United States at frequent intervals, serving to guide mariners into port or warn them of treacherous shores. aboard by unseen hands skilled in seamanship. Then the brig became like Longfellow’s then that a surfman went out to this phantom- like vesel in the breeches buoy. In the illumi- nation from jagged streaks of lightning break ¥ £ A contemporary drawing of one of. the early guns used by “the. United | States Life Saving Service to shoot a line out to a stranded vessel. ; ! Spanish brig, until her crew could be seen hud- dled in the shelter of the forward house. At the wheel stood the vessel's master, immovable as a statue of bronze upon the wildly pitching deck as-he kept the bow headed straight for the shore. The brig was lifted high on a comber crgst until the copper sheathing of her bottom was visible. It was then that Capt. Aritz let g0 the spokes of her steering wheel and, with an eloquent gesture of farewell to his crew, placed the muzzle of a revolver to his head and fired. The crew of the Augustine was rescued in a heroic manner, which won Treasury Depart- ment medals for Charles H. Valentine, keeper of the station, and his brave crew. Seamen from the wrecked ‘brig were speechless from fear even after their rescue. They later de- clared that their captain had mistaken the group of valiant life-savers for picaroons and ;:nd diought death rather than to fall into such ands. - On the night of April 30, .that same year, the German bark Melchior went hard aground a mile south of Sea Bright, N. J., so-close to the beach'that there was litle difficulty in shooting out the lifeline with a wreck gun. In- stantly this light line was seized aboard the Melchior and the whipline and tail block for rigging the breeches buoy were quickly hauled JPROBABLY the most appalling results from this superstitious fear of monsters lurking along the ‘Atlantic Coast occurred aboard the Italian bark Monte Tabor, of Genos, when & horrifying suicide pact was signed by the entire crew as the vessel struck hard on Peaked Hill ‘Bar, off Cape Cod, on the night of September ‘14, 1896, and her cabin bscame a shambles as throats were slashed. : i3 * Circumstances of this wreck gave promise of forming one of the great sea mysteries, with suspicion of sudden mutiny and murder, but the suicide pact to escape monsters jot'!ofc'l.lle in ‘the cabin. The cabin bey’s story was not believed by those ashore, but later a wine bot- tle washed up on the beach containing. the written suicide pact, signed, as the Monte Ta~ bor' was “to pleces on the bar, by E B One prayer frcm the finder for repose of the souls of they who are about to die. “THE CAPTAIN, GENERO.” day until the bark was lost with its suicide crew it had been buffeted and lashed by an ; series of gales and headwinds wvhich - ; : § : ; gees & B BREgEE.E TP P T R s §8 § 8 il E. £ gt E i § 1 & ‘another large shower would happen on Ne- ‘vember 13 or 14, 1866. The shower occurrsed This shows the connéction between ‘meteors and oomet:. and perhaps comets are being