"Many Brave Hearts Are Asleep in the Deep"
1897 sea chantey
The ferocious February nor'easter that severely disrupted Atlantic shipping more than a half-century ago nearly took the life of a Baltimore merchant mariner who was aboard a crippled oil tanker.
The gale that snapped the SS Pendleton in two off Cape Cod in the early morning hours of Feb. 18, 1952, inflicted a similar fate on another T-2 class tanker, the SS Fort Mercer, that was steaming some 30 miles southeast of Chatham, Mass.
The Pendleton, a Boston-bound tanker loaded with a cargo of kerosene and heating oil, separated at 5:50 a.m., leaving its crew adrift on the orphaned bow and stern sections. Failing circuit breakers made it impossible to send an SOS., and the fate of the officers and crew remained unknown to the outside world as they drifted amid 60-foot seas and 70-knot winds.
The 10,000-ton Fort Mercer, also filled with kerosene and fuel oil, had sailed from Norco, La., and was bound for Portland, Maine. Onboard were several dozen men, including quartermaster Louis D. Jomidad of Baltimore.
At 8 a.m., crewmen aboard the Fort Mercer reported hearing a snap and then seeing oil surfacing on the vessel's starboard side near the No. 5 cargo tank.
Sensing some urgency, Capt. Frederick C.C. Paetzel slowed the Fort Mercer and, because the ship's radio was still working, ordered the operator to notify the Coast Guard.
Survivors floating on the two halves of the Pendleton heard the Fort Mercer's distress call on their radio receiver, as Coast Guard cutters Eastwind and Unimak, 120 miles away near Nantucket, Mass., began steaming to the stricken Fort Mercer 's side.
At 10:30 a.m., came another crack.
Twenty minutes later, Paetzel ordered a message calling for nearby vessels to stand by for possible assistance.
It was 11:40 a.m. when a third crack reverberated throughout the ship.
This time, the crack was accompanied by a seam of parting steel that crawled up the starboard side just above the waterline, immediately causing oil to begin hemorrhaging from the No. 5 tank into the sea.
Like the ill-fated Pendleton, the Fort Mercer lunged and parted, leaving the bow section partially submerged, while the stern section floated free.
"It happened suddenly at 12:10 p.m.," Alanson S. Winn, a Fort Mercer crewman, told The New York Times. "It happened like that - there was a noise as though a ship had rammed us. Then she lifted out of the water like an elevator," he said. "She gave two jumps. And when she'd done that, she tore away."
