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Yarning awhile ago about the perils of shooting the fifteen-part silent serial Bride 13 on Salt Island and the Back Shore in the fall of 1919 was such a gas, let's see what else Cape Ann has contributed to the cinematic art.
Aha ... here's something, in the yellowing pages of the Gloucester Daily Times of October and November 1914. World War I has just burst forth, and Germany and the Allies are locked in the Battle of Flanders. America is very very neutral, and the motion picture industry is very very young, experimental, energetic and extremely silent, for the talkies are thirteen years in the future.
Mild excitement in East Gloucester. The Harbor View has been taken over by a movie company. They checked in around the twentieth of October, twenty of them, actors, actresses, director, photographers, equipment, the works -- the Peerless Feature Producing Company of New York, only six months old. Director Frank Crane had picked Cape Ann over that other cape to shoot more than two-thirds of a five reel feature to be called As Ye Sow, and for the next two weeks these peerless pioneers of the celluloid dashed about our shores putting together the dramatic components of their production.
The plot never thickened enough to be immortalized in the newspaper. Only subliminal vignettes have survived.
One day the cameraman was in a boat off Magnolia, grinding away at two grappling figures poised on the brink of Rafe's Chasm. Silhouetted against the sky, the villian gets his and is cast into the sea. Other scenes were made at Magnolia and Freshwater Cove, and some along the Back Shore of Eastern Point and Bass Rocks. Annisquam folks got into a sequence of worshippers entering the Village Church.
Late in October the photographers shot some offshore stuff on board Gorton-Pew's schooner Mystery as she sailed off on a halibuting trip, then were taken off and brought home by Captain Forrest (Bunch) Bickford of Rocky Neck, one of the best inshore mariners on Cape Ann, in charge of the Massachusetts Humane Society's weatherbeaten old lifesaving station at Brace Cove.
Then there was the day the rumor flew through town that the movie guys would pay $500 to anyone who would drive an automobile off the end of Dog Bar Breakwater if he'd furnish the car. Several would-be takers showed up, but Director called it a hoax. It's a wonder he didn't work it in.
The lead in As Ye Sow was played by none other than Miss Alice Brady, who graced Gloucester with her effervescence after a season on Broadway starring in What is Love? some of the real old-time performers in the company I never heard of were John Hines, Emma Trentinni, Walter MacLean, Beverly Wett, Lydia Knott, and Otto F. Hoffman ... but maybe the roster will moisten the eyes of some of you mellower readers.
And of course every heart was captured by that darling child, three-year-old Jane Lee, "her fat little cheeks encircled with golden curls," as the Times ecstasized ... more likely a perfect brat.
Early in November the Peerless people departed to make some scenes in New York and wait for the good rousing easterly gale that would bring them back on the run to shoot the spectacular climax of the film -- a grand shipwreck scheduled for Brace Cove.
The moguls had acquired the decrepit old schooner lighter Island Home from Thomas E. Reed, and she was ready and prepared for her date with fate, having been fitted out at Gorton-Pew's Reed & Gamage wharf in East Gloucester with spars, sails and the gear needed to make her look like something fancier than she was. But the weather balked from the east, and with time a'wastin' the director returned to Gloucester the week before Thanksgiving, prepared to settle for something less than a whole gale.
Thus dawned the twenty-third of November, 1914. The 8 a.m. shore check showed not much sea running. The wind was strong, though from the sou'west -- enough, mebbe, to make up into something by noontime.
Go ahead, said Crane and at 11 a.m. Captain Andrew E. Jacobs took the wheel of the steam tug Eveleth, gave a blast on the whistle and shoved out from Reed & Gamage with Island Home in tow.
At the helm of the creaking old schooner for her final voyage was Charles S. Martin Jr., with William Sawyer, Cornelius Linnehan and Salvatore Puglisi for crew. Third in this bizarre flotilla was the lifeboat of the Massachusetts Humane Society from the Brace Cove station with Captain Bunch Bickford, Henry Bickford, Charles Osier Jr., Everett Osier, Albert Bates and Orrin Douglas.
It was hard going and Island Homemade bad weather of it in Gloucester Harbor in spite of the steadying influence of double-reefed main and foresails and but a single jib.
The seas were much heavier outside the Breakwater, and the ancient schooner careened unsteadily into the rising sou'west chop behind the rolling Eveleth. She had no ballast -- for why waste good round rock on the bottom of the Cove? -- and this made her something awful to steer. Captain Martin and his hree men had a terrible time trying to keep their charge from foundering round Eastern Point Light.
When the Boston-to-Portland steamer, passing offshore, spotted this strange, balking safari, with Captain Bickford and the lifeboat bringing up the rear, she hove to and stood by, as did two of our Gloucester fishing steamers, Bethulia and Thelma.
It was 11:30 in the morning now, and the sea enough was pounding by the Point in this pre-Thanksgiving sou'wester to provide Director Crane and his cameramen all the realism they could use from their vantage on Brace Beach, where hundreds of the curious had gathered for the show.
The plan was to have Eveleth drop her tow outside the Brace Rock. Captain Martin and his boys would shape her sails and lash the helm on a course for Bemo Ledge, that wicked backbone of rocks that jags halfway across the entrance to the Cove from the north shore. They would take to their dory and be picked up by the lifeboat, while the cameras caught the gallant vessel throwing herself on her deathbed.
As planned, the towline was dropped, and the tug steamed off camera. The schooner, under double-reefed main and foresails and jib, rounded in.
Precisely then, in a flash, Captain Martin saw that Island Home, unballasted and high and clumsy as a barn afloat, could not steer herself. She'd not hold on the wind if they abandoned her and would drift out to sea or pile up somewhere down the coast, clear out of range of the cameras. So he and his men did what you'd expect of true Gloucestermen in such an emergency; they stuck by their ship. By gee, they were being paid to wreck this old basket, and that's what they were going to do if they had to swim ashore! Little did they know...
Now she was right on target, lumbering into the Cove on a broad reach, breakers ahead as scheduled ... and now, just before she rises on a lifting swell, now is the time to get the hell off!
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Salvy Puglisi leaped into the dory. Bunch Bickford's crew bent to the oars; the lifeboat swept alongside, and in he jumped. linnehan was next in the dory. Again the lifeboat darted in amongst the rocks.
But this time a fraction of a second made the difference. The whole show was on the very point of dashing itself onto the ledge, and the dory struck first, lifted up and whacked down on a piercing point of rock. The bottom burst with a crack and a spray of splinters, and the sea poured in. Bickford brought his lifeboat to the edge of disaster. Hands reached out and grabbed Linnehan and pulled him aboard ... and where he had been there was naught but white water.
Island Home struck Bemo Ledge bows on with a great blow and ground up on her forefoot and poised there pointing the finger of her bowsprit at the sky. She settled on her stern as if her last short, unwilling voyage had tuckered her out, this old girl born before the Civil War, and she lay there exhausted and moribund while the waves broke over her tail.
She flapped her clipped wings like a dying gull cast up on the beach. She was stuck on the ledge, but she refused to give up, and since the seas made no apparent impression on her, Captain Martin and Billy Sawyer sat down on her cabin house and waited for Bickford to find a way to take them off.
All the while, Chet Lyons and Hall Young, the Peerless photographers, were cranking their cameras like crazy on the beach.
It seemed that Island Home was coming to something less than the apocalyptic end that had been plotted for her when all of a sudden and without any warning at all an extra high swell, lifted by the coming tide, raised her on the ledge.
Receding, it drew her back into the deep water and floated her, and then another rolled in, spun her around, flung her on high and dashed the poor old girl broadside onto the rocks of Bemo with a crash and a cracking of arthritic timbers that resounded across the strand and clutched a gasp from the throng of spectators.
The wreck filled fast, settling at the stern. Now the wild waves broke clear of over the rail and swept the after deck.
Martin and Sawyer fled to the sharp pitched bows of her. Isolated from shore, marooned on a movie prop that yearned now to visit the bottom at any moment, they were in desperate real-life trouble. Many the man had left his life this very way on this same ledge. There was not a second to lose.
Wading out from the north shore of Brace Cove with a life line, Henry Bickford tried to reach the hulk, but it was no use against the breakers and coming tide, and he retreated.
Time after time Bickford and his men oared up toward the wreck, only to be thrust at the jagged rocks by the surge of white water and the pressing wind.
The stove-in vessel was barley balanced on the ledge at best when a heavy sea foamed in and threw her on her side. Shrouds snapped and the main mast swayed, split and toppled by the board, carrying gaff, sail, and a skein of rigging with it. She settled into her grave and flooded fast, and the seas poured over her, drenching the two figures that clung to the forestays.
The hundreds of Gloucester folk and movie people clustered on the beach stared in helpless anguish.
Another great sea smashed in, and the Island Home groaned and lurched again on her bier. The foremast whipped and snapped off above the deck and over pitched gaff, canvas, shrouds, halyards, boom, sheets, forestay, jib and all. She was nearly submerged now, at times entirely hidden from the tense watchers on shore by the waves that slammed her against the ledge. The two figures gripped her upraised bow like life itself.
It was now or never.
Police Officer Jack Mehlman, one of the smartest small boat sailors around, raced up the beach to the boathouse of the Massachussetts Humane Society in the lee of where Bemo ledge makes out, yelling for his crew as he ran -- Archie Fenton, Warren and Charly Brown, Mel Trefry, Alex Lyle, Jack Riley and Jack MacMillan. Bunch Bickford already had one of the lifeboats out there, grasping so futilely for the wreck. Mehlman and his crew launched the second, jumped in over the gunwales and bent to the oars.
An exchange of shouts between the two boats over the wind and hiss of surf, and Bickford steered for the Eveleth that had towed Island Home from Gloucester Harbor, only to lie helplessly at the entrance to the Cove while disaster unfolded. He got a line from the tug and while his huskies pulled back into the Cove, tied one end to his stern. They met up with Mehlman's boat, threw them the line and the policeman's bow man bent it to his thwart.
The Bickford crew rowed upwind until the line became taut. Then with the neatest kind of oarsmanship they eased and drifted, dropping the Mehlman boat toward the breakers and the bow of the sea-swept schooner. Like mountaineers descending a cliff, one hanging from the other, the two boats let themselves downwind. Closer and closer.
Now Mehlman was so near the wreck's bow he could have touched it with an oar. The rocks were a fathom away. Each sea bore the lifeboat nearly to the bulwarks of the wreck, then abandoned it in the trough.
Martin and Sawyer had one chance. They crawled out on the broken foremast which cantilevered over the rail, draped with the sopping foresail. They balanced there on the spar, inundated by the breakers.
Up soared the stern of the lifeboat, brushing their white faces. The crew played their oars, holding the craft fixed in it's vertical track like an elevator. Down it plummeted. Up it bounced again, poised on the crest, and down once more, and the men in the life boat yelled. The two jumped in a heap on top of them.
At the other end of the line Bickford's gang dug their blades into the foaming seas, and their muscles cracked and they buckled their backs and the rope came taut. Out from under the hulking wreck the rescue boat was drawn away from the ledge of rock.
It was done. They made shore. The rescued men were taken to the warmth of their homes. Less than two more hours, and the schooner Island Home was driftwood on the beach.
The Peerless Feature Producing Company packed up and left for New york, the filming of As Ye Sow finished to their satisfaction.
But wouldn't you know that the two Peerless cameras failed to record the real-life rescue?
Perhaps they were under orders not to waste film on anything that wasn't in the script.
November 15, 18 & 22, 1968
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