The December 1927 nor’easter was a massive storm. At sea, the National Weather Service issued an advisory blanketing the entire state of North Carolina and prompting an Atlantic storm warning from Norfolk, Virginia, to Wilmington, North Carolina, on December 1.
On land, newspapers reported at least four people froze to death in the storm as sleet and snow blanketed the state.
But the real horror was at sea, where two ships ran aground off the Outer Banks, and if not for the extraordinary resourcefulness and bravery of the Coast Guardsmen, the loss of life would have been horrific.
As it was, four crewmen of the Greek flagged Kyzikes (also spelled Kyzikos) were swept off the ship as waves battered the ship.
The Kyzikes
By 1927, the Kyzikes was an aging ship of little use to Sun Oil Company, which sold the vessel to the Greek shipping firm Costi Xydia and Sons. Launched in 1900 as the SS Paraguay, the ship spent two years carrying ore across the Great Lakes before being bought by Sun Oil and converted to the company’s first oil tanker.
For the next 20 plus years, the ship made regular trips between West Texas and Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, carrying crude oil. But by 1927, technology had bypassed the Paraguay and Sun Oil sold the aging tanker to Costi Xydia.
The sale of the ship was approved by the United States Shipping Board with the stipulation that the ship would not make port at any US location.
On November 28, with Captain Nickolas Kantanlos in command, the Kyzikes left Baltimore bound for Seville, Spain, with a full load of crude oil.
Almost immediately, it was apparent that the Kyzikes was barely seaworthy. The ship began leaking badly, and Captain Kantanlos headed back to Baltimore to effect repairs. On November 30, the ship was again at sea, and the following day, December 1, as the Kyzikes steamed south, the seas were rising, the wind was steadily increasing, and the ship again began to leak.
According to the article Archaeological Investigation of the S.S. Kyzikos and the S.S. Paraguay written for the ECU Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology magazine Stem to Stern by Wendy Cole, Captain Kantanlos seemed to be aware of the National Weather Service warning but “decided to race the storm for Cape Hatteras where he would turn due East and head for Spain.”
However, Cole wrote, “the Captain misjudged the speed and intensity of the storm and instead of sailing in calm waters toward his home port in the Mediterranean, he was now desperately trying to keep his ship afloat.”
The crew attempted to pump water out of the ship, but it was leaking too badly, and at 4:30 p.m. on December 3, the captain ordered a distress call.
“Leaking fore and aft badly. In need of assistance. Position latitude 36-35 north, longitude 75-50 west. Unless you get to us quickly we may not be here. We tried to steer westward but drifting southward. Heavy seas running.”
That location placed the Kyzikes about 30 miles due west of Kill Devil Hills.
Knowing the desperation of the Kyzikes, five ships braved the heavy seas in a vain attempt to reach the vessel. The Coast Guard Cutter Carrabassett, based in Norfolk, joined the search. The Coast Guard cutter, though, could offer little help according to a December 4 New York Times article.
“The Coast Guard Cutter Carra Basset (sic), the largest vessel of that service in the region, reported that she was having great difficulty in making headway to the tanker from (Norfolk),” the Times reported.
On the foundering ship conditions were worsening.
Soon after the transmission a huge wave struck the ship taking four crewmen with it and crushing the lifeboats. Another wave tore the radio antenna from its mooring, leaving the Kyzikes with no means to broadcast their position. Surging seas extinguished the boiler, leaving the ship without power and unable to steer. Without the boiler for power, the ship’s lights were extinguished, making it all but impossible for rescue craft to see it at night.
The freighter City of Atlanta was close to the area and kept broadcasting an SOS, but the stricken ship was drifting at the mercy of the wind and waves. The British steamer Baron Harries reached the last reported location of the Kyzikes, but the ship had drifted far to the southwest by that time.
Early in the morning of December 4, the ship grounded off Kill Devil Hills, the stern of the ship striking the sandbar first. The force of the grounding was so great that the ship broke in two, the bow breaking off and coming parallel to the stern.
Crewmen on the stern saw lights through the mirk and thought they would soon be rescued, but the lights were the flashlights of the Kyziskes crewmen trapped on the bow. Realizing the bow was floating free and moving to shore, a gangplank was lowered and the crew united on the bow, according to Cole.
In the early morning light, Coast Guard Surfman Jep Harris from the Kill Devil Hills station saw the form of the ship’s bow and signaled help was on the way.
Although the Kyziskes ran around close to the Kill Devil Hills station, Coast Guardsmen from Kitty Hawk and Nags Head assisted in the rescue. Reports include a note that off duty surfmen from Caffey’s Inlet on the north end of Duck were also on hand.
Attempts to launch a rescue craft in the heavy sea were unsuccessful and a Lyle gun was brought into action. A mortar shaped cannon, the Lyle gun fired a shot with a line attached to it that would be secured on the ship. Crewmen were brought to shore in breeches buoys.
By 7:00 p.m., the 24 surviving crewmen of the Kyziskes were ashore and safe.
The Grounding of the Cibao, bananas and rum
Even as the men of the Kyziskes were being rescued, Coast Guardsmen of Hatteras and Creek Hill Stations were battling the surf, desperate to save the crew of the Norwegian flagged freighter Cibao, trapped in the shallow waters of Diamond Shoals.
The December 5 New York Times article recounting the rescue of the crews of the two ships that night, minced no words in describing how harrowing the rescue of the Cibao crew was.
“The rescue of the crew of the Cibao was far more thrilling, for the twenty-four men were dragged through a raging surf from the ship to the shore at the ends of ropes,” the paper reported.
The Cibao was a relatively small freighter, just 694 tons, and was heading north from Jamaica, its holds filled with bananas. With sustained winds reported to be 70 miles per hour, the wind, waves, and current overwhelmed the ship.
“It was 4 o’clock in the morning when we struck the beach,” First Officer Orum of the Cibao told the Virginia Chronicle for the paper’s December 12, 1927 edition. “We had been battling the storm for many hours. We were probably 100 miles below Hatteras when the gale came upon us, and from that time until we struck the ship was practically at its mercy.”
Hard aground at Diamond Shoals, the crew waited for daylight, hoping as the day lightened they would be seen.
“It was 7 o’clock or perhaps a little sooner…Then we could see the shore. We were stranded about four miles from the beach. We saw the signals of the life savers and we knew they would come to us,” the captain said.
The Coastguardsmen were able to bring their motorboats alongside the Cibao, but the fore of the waves were so great that the boats were in danger of being crushed against the side of the freighter. Desperate to save the crew, the rescuers told the crewmen to tie a rope around their bodies and lower themselves to the raging sea.
One by one, they came down and were then lashed to the side of the motor boats and brought to shore through the raging seas. At least one of the boats had to make a second trip to the grounded vessel, with Captain Mejlanders, master of the vessel, the last to leave. The Associated Press reported “several (rescued crewmen) were unconscious when pulled out of the surf…” with the New York Times writing, “eight of the men were unconscious or partly so when they were landed on the beach.”
The Cibao, however, was not a loss. Although grounded, it was relatively undamaged. Its cargo of bananas was certainly lost, and the fruit was jettisoned to refloat the ship. There are unconfirmed stories of children on Ocracoke and Hatteras Village eating bananas until they were sick.
The ship was towed to New York for repairs.
The Stories Do Not Quite End Here
The heroics of the Coast Guard crews were recognized beyond the borders of the United States. The Elizabeth City Independent in a May 3, 1929 article reported, “The Greek Government has conferred its Naval Medal for the rescuing of human lives on W. H. Lewark, officer in charge of the Kill Devil Hills Coast Guard Station, S D. Guard, officer in charge of the Kitty Hawk station and Walter G. Etheridge, officer in charge of the Nags Head station” for their actions rescuing the crew of the Kysikes.
The article also noted, “The Government of Norway presented similar medals to other Coast Guard men in January in recognition of the saving of the lives of the crew of the Norwegian steamer Cibao…”
Bananas, as it turns out, were not the only cargo in the Cibao’s hold. The ship was also transporting “21 cases of choice liquor,” the Elizabeth City Independent reported.
1927 was the height of Prohibition, and the 21 cases of choice liquor had been consigned to the ship by the Bolivian embassy in Washington, DC. International law was clear on the subject—within the embassy, Bolivian law was in effect, and Bolivia had no laws against liquor consumption.
“And so when the Government took over the liquor, the Government had the responsibility of seeing that it got safely to its rightful owners. Uncle Sam had to deliver the goods,” the Independent reported.
There is another twist to the story of the Kyziskes.
In 1929, the US Army sent six of its Keystone bombers to use the Kyziskes for target practice. Dropping bombs from various heights, the bombing run was considered a success.
Adding to the story: The Sinking of the Carl Gerhard
Later that same year, 1929, the Swedish-flagged ship Carl Gerhard ran aground at precisely the same location. If it wasn’t for the potentially deadly implications of ship running aground and breaking apart as it is battered by the sea, the last voyage of Gerhard could be viewed as something from poorly written movie script where everything that could go wrong, did..
The ship left Mabou, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in early September 1929, bound for Tampa, Florida, carrying 18 tons of gypsum.
Mabou is now a small community on the northwest coast of Cape Breton Island, well north of Halifax, the province’s major city. Except for 1200 or so residents and a few pubs, there isn’t much there now, but in the 1920s, there was a nearby gypsum mine, and Florida, where there was a building boom in progress, needed the gypsum for plasterboard.
The Gerhard didn’t quite make it out of port before running aground as it passed the Mabou Harbor mouth. Two hundred tons of gypsum were dumped into the water, hoping it would be enough to refloat the ship.
It wasn’t, and it took a week for a tug from Halifax to reach the ship.
Undamaged by the grounding, the Gerhard resumed its voyage south.
On September 14, as the ship passed New England, gale winds began to blow, and the seas rose. The ship began to take on water, but was still seaworthy. The skies, though, remained overcast and gale force winds and fog lingered for over a week.
Unable to see the stars, moon, sun or land, or even a lighthouse, master of the ship, Captain Ohlsson had no visual means to navigate and could only guess at where he was.
By September 23, 1929, Ohlsson, with none of the modern navigation aids taken for granted in the 21st century, placed his ship east of Diamond Shoals at Cape Hatteras and well offshore. He was, as he soon discovered, 60 miles north and 50 miles west of where he thought he was.
At approximately 7:00 a.m. on September 23, the Carl Gerhard ran aground, slicing through the remains of the Kyziskes and cutting the Greek tanker in half.
Personnel from the Kill Devil Hills station quickly spotted the ship, the AP reported on, writing on September 23, “The stranded vessel was sighted by Coast Guard patrol and is less than 300 yards off the beach in a terrific sea about 7:15 a.m., today.”
The surf was much too rough to launch a rescue craft, and a Lyle gun was brought out to fire a line to the ship and attach a breaches buoy to bring the crew to safety.
Invented in 1877 by Army Lt. David Lyle, the Lyle gun was a mortar like cannon that fired a weighted line from the shore to a ship in distress.
The Kill Devil Hills crew worked quickly, aided according to reports, by personnel from Nags Head, Paul Gamiel’s Hill (located in what is today Southern Shores) and Bodie Island Coast Guard Stations.
“Before 9:30 a.m., the life saving apparatus had been rigged and a woman, one of the 21 persons aboard the ship, had been hauled to the beach,” the AP wrote. “Two men were next brought ashore. Rescue work was being carried forward with all speed possible, for the vessel was receiving a terrific pounding and in danger of breaking up, Coast Guard men said.”
That woman, the New York Times reported, was “Mrs. Ethel Adehard, wife of First Mate Adehard.”
Underscoring how difficult that rescue was, the Times reported “the line sagged considerately, and several of those who took the ride in the (breeches buoy) basket were dragged through the sea for several feet.”
Pointing to the widespread acclaim for the skill and bravery of the Gerhard’s rescuers, W. O. Saunders, publisher of the Elizabeth City Independent, wasn’t shy about pointing out the Coast Guard’s true mission was rescuing stranded mariners, not enforcing the Prohibition laws that were then in effect.
“Already the praise of the maritime world and the recipients of medals, decorations and citations…the U. S. Coastguardrmrn of the Seventh District maintained their reputation and added to their fame and glory Monday, when they rescued…twenty-one men and one woman from the Swedish steamer Carl Gerhard,” Saunders wrote, going on to observe, “While U. S. Coast Guardsmen of other districts, in Florida, Detroit and New Jersey, are engaged in the business of helping the Government enforce the odious Eighteenth Amendment, the Coastguardsmen of the Seventh District are busily engaged in furthering the principles for which Coast Guard Service stand.”
The 18th Amendment was repealed by the 23rd Amendment in 1933.
The two ships, the Kyziskes, now lie a few hundred yards off Kill Devil Hills beach and are known as the Triangle Shipwrecks, a popular diving site.
