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Don Wilding For many years, this columnist has tracked down and chronicled all things related to Henry Beston’s classic book, “The Outermost House,” which was written during the scribe’s seclusion in a seaside cottage in Eastham during the mid-1920s. The house, which Beston referred to as “The Fo’castle,” became a shrine of sorts to those who took his message to heart, even after it was destroyed by the great storm of Feb. 6-7, 1978. Today, that message still shines through at places such as the dune shacks of Provincetown, the beach camps of Nauset Beach and Sandy Neck, and, ye...

Don Wilding When the steamer Portland was lost off the coast of the Outer Cape during Thanksgiving weekend of 1898, it was the greatest maritime disaster that New England had ever seen. The disaster also proved to be the inspiration behind a poem, “The Loss of Steamer Portland,” which was written by Captain Frederick R. Eldredge and Hydrographer George Eldredge of Chatham. The 326-word poem opened with the lines: “On the twenty-seventh of November, In the year of ninety-eight, A northeast blizzard swept the sea, Death following in its wake.” Nearly 450 people perished at sea during th...

Don Wilding When it came to the 1907 wreck of the Alice T. Boardman near Handkerchief Shoal, tragedy was unavoidable, no matter what the crew did. The two-masted schooner out of Calais, Maine, was enroute to Hyannisport on Jan. 3, when she ran into trouble off Monomoy. When the crew opted to try to row to shore in the Boardman’s dory, Thomas Henry was knocked overboard and lost, causing his shipmates to give their effort a second thought. “The shipwreck would doubtless been unattended by fatality had the hapless sailor remained on board,” the U.S. Lifesaving Service summarized in its 19...

Don Wilding There aren’t many people who have been aboard a sinking vessel 390 miles at sea, then stayed adrift in stormy conditions for eight days and nights, and lived to tell about it. Not only did Ulah Deer of Chatham achieve just that, she and the crew of the Fred Richards managed to get back to land just in time to celebrate Christmas in 1890. According to a letter that she wrote to her mother on Dec. 23 that year (published in 1947 by The Cape Codder), Deer (who died in 1960) and her then-husband, Captain William E. Reed, were aboard the vessel Fred Richards when the stormy seas over...