The Wreck of the New Era

Troubled History on the Strand

New Era anchor, St. Andrew's by the Sea, Allenhurst.

It was a dark and stormy night. No, really, it was a dark and stormy night. Come with me to 1854 and a stretch of New Jersey beach in Monmouth County. At the time this was a very rural place - the strip of beach towns along the coast here developed after the Civil War.

I direct your attention to the beach near Great Pond, now called Deal Lake, at the northern edge of what is now Asbury Park. The date: November 13, 1854. And, yes, it was dark, and there was quite a storm going on. Was it a hurricane? I don't know. The National Weather Service wasn't founded until 1870. 

The people heard a bell ringing. The bell belonged to a sailing ship called the New Era, which was in dire straits out on the water. 

I'll spare you the rest of the story, beyond saying that a lot of people died. 

For recent articles, click here and here and here. The definitive account is Julius Friedrich Sachse, The Wreck of the Ship New Era Upon the New Jersey Coast, November 13, 1854 (1907). It is available at several locations online. 

Bad things happen at the beach, and that's been going on for a long time.

So the next time you're on the surfers' beach at the head of Deal Lake Drive, look out to sea for a minute, think of the New Era and a dark and stormy night. 

Memorial plaque next to the anchor.

Through a Sailor's Eye

It's also worthwhile to take a moment and look at the beach the way a sailor does, from the sea. Let's dial back about 2,700 years and visit with Odysseus as he approaches the shore of Phaeacia, seeking a safe haven. At this point Poseidon has destroyed his raft, and he's swimming in the surf near the shore.

A heavy sea covered him over, then and there

unlucky Odysseus would have met his death -

against the will of Fate -

but the bright-eyed one inspired him yet again.

Fighting out from the breakers pounding toward the coast, 

out of danger he swam on, scanning the land, trying to find

a seabeach shelving against the waves, a sheltering cove,

and stroking hard he came abreast of a river's mouth,

running calmly, the perfect spot, he thought ... 

This is in Book 5 of Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, as translated by Robert Fagles (1996), lines 479-487. 

Odysseus does make it to shore, finds a comfortable spot, and falls asleep. He's been swimming for more than two days (l. 429).

Meanwhile, the local princess, Nausicaa, and her attendants have come to the riverbank to wash some clothes. They also have a picnic and throw a ball around, and in due course they encounter Odysseus. 

It's true that we're on a riverbank here, but it's not far from the sea, and I think we've established that the waterside was considered a nice place to go and frolic 2,700 years ago. Maybe even meet someone new.

Danger in the Surf

When did people start to swim for pleasure, as opposed to Odysseus, who was swimming to save his life? 

At Coney Island circa 1868 (Brooklyn Museum).

I don't know. I do know this: Around 1800, as Charles Denson tells us, people in the New York City area were taking boating excursions to Coney Island, and having picnics. This did not always turn out well. An 1801 news clip told of a party of about forty people from Newark, who took a sloop to Coney Island to go bathing; three of them drowned in the surf there. (Charles Denson, Coney Island: Lost and Found, 2002, p. 5.) 

From Denson, p. 5.

What Was She Wearing?

One of the persons drowned was a woman, and this of course raises the perennial fashion question - what was she wearing? I don't know. But if we fast-forward from 1801 to 1897, I can show you a young woman in Coney Island.

The long road to the maillot (Library of Congress).

These costumes were usually made of wool, and they were considered suitable for bathing, which I understand to be walking into the water anywhere from up to your ankles to up to your neck. And possibly frolicking a bit. But when it comes to actually swimming, they would clearly be problematic.

And it is clear that women had started swimming at the beach well before 1900. An 1893 story in the Philadelphia Inquirer puckishly reports that "big, athletic clubmen" were teaching "pretty shop girls from the big Market Street stores" how to swim at the beach in Atlantic City. Thus, mixing of the sexes and, perhaps even more transgressive, mixing of the classes. (Charles E. Funnell, By the Beautiful Sea: The Rise and High Times of That Great American Resort, Atlantic City, 1975, p. 54.) 

And, sure enough, women's bathing costumes began to evolve, to the point that an 1898 Inquirer story can tell us the current swimsuits "would scarcely fill the much talked of collar box." (Funnell, p. 42. I personally think this is an exaggeration, but it is funny, and the evolution continued, in time producing the maillot, or tank suit, that we know today.) 

Beach at Casino, Asbury Park, 1909.

The Greek goddess Aphrodite (known to the Romans as Venus) would have been very happy with the evolution of women's swimwear. Certainly the painter Winslow Homer was not blind to the erotic aspects of life in the water. His 1886 painting Undertow, reportedly inspired by an incident near Atlantic City, is ostensibly about two lifeguards rescuing two women from the surf, but it does seem to be more about sex than survival.

Winslow Homer, Undertow, 1886.

(There's a good recent article about Winslow Homer in the New Yorker. I had been unaware of Undertow before I read this article. Homer seems to focus more on survival in his 1884 painting The Life Line, which is in the Philadelphia Museum of Art but not currently on display.) 

A Digression

Fixing the bathing suit was part of a much larger movement to reform women's clothes, which in turn was part of the women's rights movement that got started in the early nineteenth century and continues to this day. Central to clothing reform were women's educational institutions, most notably Mount Holyoke, founded in 1837. Mount Holyoke had "calisthenics" classes from the beginning.  

It was in these schools' gym classes, away from the eyes of men, that women were able to experiment and find more sensible approaches to clothing. 

The main impediments to free movement were the corset and the long skirt that touched the ground. The gym suit that developed over the years ditched the corset, raised the hem of the skirt, and eventually replaced the skirt with baggy trousers. 

While all this was happening behind closed doors, women were also starting to go out of doors and play games with men. This started with croquet and ice skating in the 1850s, expanded to lawn tennis in the 1870s, and then in the 1890s confronted two things - swimming at the beach and bicycling. These two activities demanded much greater modification to women's dress and notions of modesty than any of the earlier sports. Resistance was fierce, and success did not come until well into the twentieth century.

(See Patricia Campbell Warner, When the Girls Came Out to Play: The Birth of American Sportswear, 2006. See also Evan Friss, The Cycling City: Bicycles and Urban America in the 1890s, 2015, chapter 8.)

A Few Underlying Themes

Pardon the digression. There are a lot of threads to the story of humanity's relationship with the sea, but I perceive a few underlying themes.  First of all, I think of the danger. And I think I'm not alone. But then there's the awesome power of the sea, and its essential, hypnotic strangeness. Here's another: unpredictability. And finally, with a nod to Aphrodite and the boys and girls of Atlantic City in the 1890s, there is the concept of liberation. 

I don't think I'm original with any of these themes. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Henry David Thoreau gives us a window onto several of them in his book Cape Cod, which relates several trips he took in 1849, 1850, and 1855. (The book was published posthumously in 1865. I read the 1987 Penguin edition, with an introduction by Paul Theroux. Thoreau tells us about the dates of his visits on page 3.)

Here's Thoreau approaching the east front of the cape, where it runs north and south and faces the full power of the open Atlantic. Actually, let me set the scene first. He and a friend who is accompanying him on the trip are walking along in the rain. The wind is at their backs; they have umbrellas, and as they walk along they are reading accounts of the early history of Cape Cod. (Pp. 36, 48.)

"At length we reached the seemingly retreating boundary of the plain, and entered what had appeared at a distance an upland marsh, but proved to be dry sand covered with Beach-grass, the Bearberry, Bayberry, Shrub-oaks, and Beach-plum, slightly ascending as we approached the shore; then, crossing over a belt of sand on which nothing grew, though the roar of the sea sounded scarcely louder than before, and we were prepared to go half a mile farther, we suddenly stood on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Atlantic. Far below us was the beach, from half a dozen to a dozen rods in width, with a long line of breakers rushing to the strand. The sea was exceedingly dark and stormy, the sky completely overcast, the clouds still dropping rain, and the wind seemed to blow not so much as the exciting cause, as from sympathy with the already agitated ocean. The waves broke on the bars at some distance from the shore, and curving green or yellow as if over so many unseen dams, ten or twelve feet high, like a thousand waterfalls, rolled in foam to the sand. There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe." (Pp. 65-66.)

Later, having had time to ruminate on his impressions, Thoreau has this to say about the beach: "There is naked Nature, inhumanly sincere, wasting no thought on man, nibbling at the cliffy shore where gulls wheel amid the spray." (P. 218.)

(Thoreau also visited the beach at Long Island's Fire Island in 1850. For stories, click here and here. For a transcript of his notes about this journey, click here.)

Unpredictability

So we've covered danger, power, strangeness, and liberation. How about unpredictability?

When he was two, my grandson decided he was afraid of the water. Specifically, he was afraid of little octopuses in the water. His grandmother actually remembers little fish. His mother is diplomatic, saying it may have been both, and we decided not to ask him. Why stir up old fears when you can instead have a story that looks like a short version of the movie Rashomon? (His grandmother did eventually talk him into the water; he loved it, and he's fine now.)

Anyway, Graham's fear of octopuses (or little fish, or baby crabs) put me in mind of a fellow named Laocoon, a Trojan priest who appears in Book Two of Virgil's Aeneid. The siege of Troy is near its end. The Greeks appear to have packed up their boats and departed, leaving behind on the beach a large wooden horse, perhaps as some kind of peace offering. Laocoon doesn't trust the horse or the Greeks, and utters a famous line usually rendered as "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." This annoys a goddess Virgil calls Minerva (Homer calls her Athena). Her counterstroke is pretty dramatic:

"Laocoon, the priest of Neptune picked by lot,

was sacrificing a massive bull at the holy altar

when - I cringe to recall it now - look there!

Over the calm deep straits off Tenedos swim

twin, giant serpents, rearing in coils, breasting

the sea-swell side by side, plunging toward the shore, 

their heads, their blood-red crests surging over the waves,

their bodies thrashing, backs rolling in coil on mammoth coil

and the wake behind them churns in a roar of foaming spray,

and now, their eyes glittering, shot with blood and fire,

flickering tongues licking their hissing maws, yes, now

they're about to land. We blanch at the sight, we scatter. 

Like troops on attack they're heading straight for Laocoon -

first each serpent seizes one of his small young sons,

constricting, twisting around him, sinks its fangs

in the tortured limbs, and gorges. Next Laocoon

rushing quick to the rescue, clutching his sword -

they trap him, bind him in huge muscular whorls,

their scaly backs lashing around his midriff twice

and twice around his throat - their heads, their flaring necks

mounting over their victim writhing still, his hands

frantic to wrench apart their knotted trunks,

his priestly bands splattered in filth, black venom

and all the while his horrible screaming fills the skies,

bellowing like some wounded bull struggling to shrug 

loose from his neck an axe that's struck awry,

to lumber clear of the altar ...

Only the twin snakes escape, sliding off and away

to the heights of Troy where the ruthless goddess

holds her shrine, and there at her feet they hide, 

vanishing under Minerva's great round shield."

(Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles, 2006, Book Two, lines 259-289. For the previous paragraph, see lines 17-62. There is a famous sculpture depicting this episode. It is in the Vatican Museum.)

Laocoon at the Vatican.

Even on a calm, sunny day, danger can be lurking just below the surface of the water. We've known this for quite a long time, and each generation learns it anew.

The sea attracts, and the sea kills. And so we come to the place warily but also eager, and we quietly confront deeper issues that are often hidden in our daily lives.

The little boat above is sailing near the spot where the New Era went down.

Two things I haven't gone into in this story are the concept of seasideness and the idea of transitional, or liminal, spaces. 

Seasideness attempts to explain why people are attracted to the shore, and as such is a branch of the larger study of sense of place. For an interesting academic article on this topic, click here.

The concept of transitional or liminal spaces (and times) has been around for quite a while. A particularly nice application to Henry David Thoreau's Cape Cod may be found on the Thoreau Society's blog. To see this story, click here.

See also City of Lights, Layers at the Beach Front.