In the Tradition of Edward Rowe Snow – A Christmas Commentary
By Jock O’Connell
When I was a lad growing up on the Maine coast in the years when Harry gave way to Ike who then gave way to JFK, a stormy evening in winter would often find me curled up with a book by Edward Rowe Snow, a Massachusetts writer who had served in the merchant marine after high school before becoming the oldest freshmen in his Harvard class of 1932. As an author, Snow was known for his tales of shipwrecks, unexplained disappearances at sea, lost treasures, and pirates. Popular titles included: “Storms and Shipwrecks of New England”; “New England Sea Tragedies”; “Marine Mysteries and Dramatic Disasters of New England”; and “The Romance of Casco Bay”.
As a regional celebrity, Snow was known for being the “Flying Santa”. Nearly every Christmas between 1936 and 1980, he hired a small twin-engine plane and dropped holiday packages to lighthouse keepers and their families up and down the New England coast. Snow’s only child, Dolly Snow Bicknell, described these flights to a Harvard alumni magazine as “bumpy, rough, and scary.” Flying at what would be illegally low altitudes today, cutting the speed to ensure accuracy, the plane would circle the lighthouses three times: once to signal Snow’s arrival, once to make the drop, and a third time to check that Snow’s aim had been true.
Snow has been gone now – flown west, as old-time pilots would say – for almost as many years as he dispensed his own brand of Christmas cheer to those responsible for guiding mariners to safe harbors along the New England coast.
For me, there was a geographic immediacy to Snow’s stories. Casco Bay was just down the hill from our house, and on my way to school each morning I could usually spy the flickering beam cast by the beacon at Portland Head, probably the most photographed lighthouse in the country.
To those of us who lived along the shore and especially those who made their livelihoods from the sea, there was also a personal immediacy to his tales of maritime tragedies. My mother’s people were involved in Maine’s once-flourishing sardine industry, and more than one family friend or acquaintance drowned.
My grandfather’s brother, John O’Connell, was among the 192 passengers and crew who perished when the side-wheel paddle steamship “Portland” went down in a storm the weekend after Thanksgiving in 1898. According to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration: “The ‘Portland Gale,’ named after the ship, wrecked more than 400 other vessels, killed more than 450 people, and left much of New England in shambles. The convergence of two high-energy, low-pressure systems, one from the Gulf of Mexico and the other from the Great Lakes region, conspired on the night of Nov. 26 to spawn into one of the most treacherous and deadly storms New England had ever seen.”
My great uncle was 27, and a veteran of the recently concluded Spanish-American War. He was returning to Portland after visiting a couple of young ladies, his “Boston cousins” as the euphemism of the time would have described them. Presumably, he was in excellent spirits as he boarded the ill-starred vessel. His body was recovered near the tip of Cape Cod several days later after a subsequent storm shifted the sand which had covered him when his remains initially washed ashore. He was buried with full military honors and a couple of bottles of whiskey.
There were other reminders that the ocean is a treacherous environment. On the evening of April 10, 1963, the Portland television station we were watching interrupted a broadcast with a solemn announcement that all military personnel were to return to their posts, immediately. No reason was provided. As this came just six months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, my parents and I were justly alarmed. Predictably, telephone lines were instantly clogged. It was only the next afternoon that word finally came that the USS Thresher and her crew of 129 had been lost during a test dive off the Massachusetts coast. The nuclear-powered sub had sailed the previous day from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, Maine, where it had been built.
Some of the stories Snow used to entertain his readers did not resonate as well as accounts of lives lost at sea. The seldom bloodthirsty pirates of whom Snow wrote often came across as quasi-sympathetic figures swaggering their way through a distant age of rampant lawlessness. They were more Jack Sparrow than Henry Morgan or Blackbeard, and they hardly appeared to be flesh-and-blood threats. As a grade school student in the 1950s, I was infinitely more unnerved by polio and atomic bombs than the prospect of a pirate seizing the ship in Narragansett Bay. Even now, in an age where satellites and radar track vessel movements and where heavily-armed navies police seaways, piracy surely could not exist.
And yet, there they are.
Not in New England (although lobstermen in Maine and New Hampshire occasionally charge each other with the crime), but mostly in the waters off poor or failed states. The International Maritime Bureau’s latest annual Piracy and Armed Robbery Report documented a rising number of attacks on commercial shipping worldwide. Especially worrisome were the incidents in which crews were taken hostage. Those jumped to 73 in 2023 from forty-one recorded the previous year.
The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) maintains a live map displaying the locations of all reported piracy and armed robbery incidents. While attacks on shipping in the Rea Sea by Houthis in North Yemen or bandits operating out of the Horn of Africa have received the most press attention, more incidents actually occur in the Gulf of Guinea. Those waters off Africa’s West Coast accounted for “75% of crew hostages taken” in 2023, according to the ICC. The Singapore Straits, Malacca Straits, and waters around the Indonesian archipelago also account for a sizable share of attacks on shipping.
Just a year ago, Houthi rebels seized a car carrier off Yemen. A couple of days later, a chemical tanker, the M/V Central Park, was boarded by armed individuals in the Gulf of Aden. An American destroyer, the USS Mason, interceded and took five suspects, described as Somali pirates, into custody. Last month, two other U.S. Navy destroyers, the Stockdale and the Spruance, returned fire from the Houthis. Last week, the Stockdale and another American destroyer, the O’Kane shot down Houthi rockets and drones that had targeted merchant ships in the Red Sea.
I’m thinking that Edward Rowe Snow might smile at the odd bit of symmetry here.
Among the lighthouses he would visit as the Flying Santa was the one on Sequin Island, a couple of miles off the mouth of Maine’s Kennebec River. The light was established in 1795 but rebuilt in its present form in 1857. Its role is to safeguard access to the Kennebec and to the naval shipyard ten miles upriver. As it turns out, Mason, O’Kane, Stockdale, and Spruance were all built there at the Bath Iron Works.
So thanks, Mr. Snow, for a rich trove of childhood reading.
And Merry Christmas to all and special best wishes for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year to all who go down to the sea in ships.
The commentary, views, and opinions expressed by Jock O’Connell are his own and do not reflect the views or positions of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association. PMSA does not endorse, support, or make any representations regarding the content provided by any third party commentator.