“Got a storm brewin’ up.”

Reuben Mosman, a merchant captain from Thomaston, Maine, watched the vanishing horizon from the helm of his prized two-masted schooner—the Ann—as the first flakes of snow fell on the deck. The sails of the nearby Ranger and the two other schooners traveling with them had disappeared from view. There was a big ocean out there, but Reuben could not see it beyond the gray-white wall closing in.

The date was 22 March 1829, a Sunday. The four ships had departed Cape Cod early that morning from the town of Chatham, all bound for New York where, Reuben hoped, the Ann’s cargo of lime would earn him a tidy profit. The voyage, some 180 nautical miles, usually took three days.

Not this time.

#

In those days, lime was Maine’s largest export after lumber. Calcium oxide, also known as “quicklime”, had numerous uses: An ingredient to construction mortar, a soil conditioner for sugar plantations, for bleaching paper and dying textiles, and—perhaps most famously—theater lighting. Heated quicklime produced both candescent and incandescent light that, when reflected off a metal bowl, illuminated an entire stage. Quicklime is the reason we often say performing artists “enjoy the limelight”.

Reuben’s hometown in Maine produced quicklime from nearby limestone quarries. Purpose-built kilns heated the raw calcium carbonate to 900 degrees Celsius (1650F), triggering a calcination process that released carbon dioxide.

Cape Cod also produced lime, although in their case by cooking oyster shells, which have a similar chemical makeup.

Reuben probably didn’t care where the lime originated. Trade was his family business. His five-man crew included teenage sons Reuben Jr. and Elbridge, who served as mate and steward. At home Reuben had six more children—including two more boys—under the care of his wife Margaret, a third-generation descendant of Rhineland immigrants. Her family names included Steudle and Schumann and Schwartz. Margaret spoke German and accented English, which was not uncommon in the towns around her native Waldoboro.

Thomaston, which included present-day Rockland, was a booming port town rapidly becoming America’s shipbuilding capital. With a bilingual wife and a life of travel to far-flung ports, Reuben felt as cosmopolitan as anyone in New England, a breed apart from the farmers whose worlds barely stretched past their own town lines. The Revolution had broken Reuben’s father—Aaron Mossman—out of such a world in Sudbury Massachusetts and Reuben, I imagine, could not have been more grateful. He had prospered at sea in a way no farmer could. Data is scant, but here is one repeated claim: Two of the first seven recorded millionaires in the United States were Thomaston sea captains.

The sea trade was lucrative, to say the least.

But also dangerous.

#

More snow fell on the Ann and its crew. The wind picked up. White dust swirled across the slick timbers and collected on their clothes. The ship bucked in the waves.

Reuben considered his options. The seasoned forty-two-year-old captain had weathered late-winter storms before. He knew Nantucket lay somewhere to the west. If he tried to run before the storm he would almost certainly run aground. He might have heaved-to with a trysail or perhaps ordered out a sea anchor.

The storm came on so quickly he may have had no time for maneuvers. Temperatures plummeted as the snow fell thick and furious. Their wool caps and coats could not hold back the cold. Their fingers throbbed with pain, as did their ears and feet.

The storm grew violent. The captain of the nearby Ranger—a 28-year-old Salem man named Cornelius Wasgatt—later reported he could not see from the helm to the front of his ship through the thick falling snow. The howling wind and bitter cold drove them from their posts. Supposing their crew had taken shelter in the forecastle, Wasgatt and his mate abandoned the wheel and huddled in the aft cabin for warmth, leaving the vessel—and their own fate—to the whim of the sea.

The blizzard raged through the day. The Ann pitched in the roiling sea as the storm blew it westward, tossing Reuben and his crew around without respite, until finally the worst happened: The ship struck ground on the northeastern shore of Nantucket. The wrecked schooner lurched in the surf.

Reuben realized the vessel would capsize or break apart.

“Get yourselves off! Everyone off!”

Reuben and his crew staggered ashore.

Their predicament on land proved no less bleak that it was at sea. The empty beach ran for miles in both directions. They were completely exposed to the wind and snow. Wet clothing turned hard with ice. The crew, including the captain’s sons, trembled uncontrollably. Reuben recognized the danger.

“We will freeze if we don’t keep moving.”

#

Further along the coast, the Ranger also struck ground. Captain Wasgatt and his mate emerged from the aft cabin to find their three crewmembers dead, frozen before the ship struck land. Their minds and bodies must have grown so numb from the cold, Wasgatt reasoned, that they never took shelter. The young captain and his mate had no choice but to leave them. Abandoning the ship and its cargo of wooden spars, they sought shelter ashore.

The third vessel in the group (whose name is now lost) also crashed ashore, but the changing tide soon carried it off again. It was afterwards seen drifting toward the shoals, low as if full of water, with splintered stubs where the masts had been, with no sign of anyone on board.

The fourth ship never touched land. Reuben was the last to catch a glimpse of her. From her heading, he supposed she struck Bass Rip and went to pieces, with all hands lost.

#

The crew of the Ann climbed the dunes seeking shelter from the relentless storm. They saw no sign of any, not even a tree to break the wind. Blinding snow blew in all directions. The roar of the crashing surf drowned their calls for help.

Behind them, the Ann lay in ruin, with her cargo of quicklime washed away by the sea.

Most New England mariners knew Nantucket well enough to know its inhabitants lived on the western side, with only a few remote farms dotting its eastern shore. Not knowing exactly where they were, and realizing the nearest aid might be in either direction, the crew divided. Three marched south while the others plodded north.

Reuben stayed with his sons. They did not make it very far before Elbridge and Reuben Jr., who had both grown too cold to move, collapsed on the ground. They had even stopped shivering, which Reuben took as a bad sign.

“Keep moving,” he urged.

“We’ll be alright.” Their words came slow and slurred.

Reuben knew they wouldn’t. He hoisted one—probably Elbridge, who was younger and lighter—on his shoulders.

“Follow in my tracks,” he ordered the other.

He trudged through snow and sand with a boy on his back.

#

Men of that time regularly endured physical hardship all but unknown today. Reuben’s father, Aaron, a Revolutionary War veteran who carved a farm out of the Maine wilderness and built multiple mills, remained active at seventy. Reuben grew up hearing his stories, and his own years of hard labor on both land and sea had seasoned him for his current task. If his father could march from Massachusetts to Canada to New Jersey as an ill-fed, ill-equipped soldier in the Continental Army, then Reuben could march a few miles in the snow. If Aaron could carry everything he needed for a soldier’s survival on his back, Reuben could carry his son.

So that’s what he did.

#

Reuben glanced behind him. No one followed. The son he had ordered to walk in his footsteps was lost from view. Placing the other boy on the ground, he returned to find the second unmoved and mumbling incoherently. Reuben hoisted him on his back and trudged forward.

The storm howled without pause as Reuben proceeded to carry his sons alternately. Painfully slow going. To progress a mile he had to walk three as he carried Elbridge forward then returned for Reuben Jr. Inevitably, the master mariner entertained the thought that he could go no further. He kept going anyway. And at last, a light shone in the distance.

He had found a farmhouse!

“Almost there. Almost there.”

The boy on his shoulders did not respond. Reuben shook his charge to no avail. He shouted his son’s name, but the boy did not stir. Reuben lowered his burden to the ground. He checked for a pulse. Nothing. He held his hand to his son’s nose and mouth but felt no flowing air or moisture. He slapped his son’s cheeks. He pinched his nose. Nothing.

The boy was dead.

Reuben had never felt so tired. He looked once more at the farmhouse, then turned away and retraced his steps through the snow to his second son. He found that boy, too, did not move. Reuben shouted and shook him and slapped him to no avail.

Reuben had lost both his sons to the bitter cold.

The despondent father left his dead boy where he lay and staggered back toward the farmhouse. He reached the body of his other boy lying stiff in the snow. He tried once more to revive him. He gave up and, leaving his two sons behind, waded through drifting snow toward safety.

Fatigue finally overtook him. He collapsed to his knees.   

Reuben crawled forward on hands and knees.

The storm blew hard and long into the night.

#

Of the two dozen men aboard the four ships that left Chatham, only five remained. Captain Wasgatt and his mate of the Ranger stumbled upon a shed and rode out the storm in relative comfort. Two crewmembers of the Ann also survived. So did Captain Reuben, thought he might have wished he hadn’t.

The six deceased men from the Ranger and the Ann—Reuben lost a third crewman in addition to his sons—were brought to town on the west side of Nantucket and buried in a common grave. A long procession followed the hearse and horse carts to the burying ground. The Nantucket community could barely contain their shock. The report in the Nantucket Inquirer said the island had buried seventeen seamen in the past four months, more than the total number lost since 1760. Seventy years’ of tragedy in one devastating season.

A newspaper account from April 7 stated: “Captain Mosman throughout this scene of suffering, which has deprived him of two hopeful sons, and much property, has evinced a spirit of fortitude and resignation which entitles him to high commendation and recommends him to the consideration of a sympathetic community.”

Neither the Ann nor its lost cargo were insured.

Leaving his dead sons buried on that windswept island, Reuben returned home to Thomaston alone, a poorer man, to tell his wife of their sad misfortune. Untimely deaths of children were not uncommon in those days, but even so the Mosman’s two surviving sons and many daughters could not console their parent’s pain. The tragedy marked a break in their family.

In 1831, Reuben went back to sea and never returned.

Some say his ship was lost off the coast of England, although no Maine newspaper seems to have carried that story, and other records show England was where Reuben was born, not where he died. Perhaps he simply couldn’t go home again. Illinois property records show “Reuben Mossman” bought land there in 1832. In 1860 a man with the same name owned a farm in Granger Township, Ohio. Different men, probably, yet no Reuben Mosman appears in US Census records after 1830, nor does Ancestry.com turn up birth records for anyone else by that name.

An 1860 record says Reuben was “supposed to be dead.”

However Reuben met his end, the fate of his wife appears certain. Margaret Studley Mosman died in Thomaston around 1836, five years after her husband’s disappearance, when their youngest was under seven years old.

Margaret was 48.

Legacy

Reuben and Margaret’s son Gardner was fifteen when his father disappeared. The new head of the Mosman household grew to become a ship captain in his own right, although evidently never on his own account. A trustworthy man, if not a rich one.

The seas remained treacherous in Gardner’s time, and in more ways than violent storms. In 1854 the brig under Gardner’s command were seized in a shakedown by Mexican authorities. For more on that story, see the 1854 New York Times article, “The Imprisonment and Robbery of Captain Gardner Mossman.” The police confiscated some $700 of Gardner’s personal property

Yet unlike his father, Gardner did not live a tragic life. He married Emeline Genthner, another descendant of German immigrants. They resettled in Massachusetts and raised a family, first on a Billerica farm and later in Watertown, where Gardner occupied himself as a carpenter. He died in 1901, age 85.

Emeline, for her part, had occasion to sail the world with her husband. She shared those stories until her death in 1909.

Their daughter, Lulu, was my great-great-grandmother.

Sources

The original shipwreck story, including Reuben’s fruitless fight to save his sons, ran in the Nantucket Inquirer. Several reprints are available on Newspapers.com:

• The Eastern Argus, 3 Apr 1829, p3
• The Recorder, 7 Apr 1829, p2
• The Springfield Weekly Republican, 8 Apr 1829, p2

Eaton, Cyrus, History of Thomaston, Rockland and South Thomaston Maine, Vol I, 1865, p365: Shipwreck retelling; Vol II, p336: Biographical info.

Gardner, Arthur H., Wrecks Around Nantucket 1664-1915, 1915, p33-34: Shipwreck retelling.

Ancestry.com: Family Relationships, plus Birth, Death, and Marriage Records for Reuben Mosman, Margaret Steudle, Aaron Mosman, Gardner Mosman, etc.

Revolutionary War Muster Rolls: Aaron Mosman’s service records

https://www.dw.com/en/hypothermia-what-happens-when-your-body-freezes/a-63891663