Wrecks
One of the saddest events to befall the island happened when the Annie Jane, a three-masted immigrant ship out of Liverpool bound for Montreal, Canada, struck rocks off West Beach during a storm in September 1853. Within ten minutes the ship began to founder and break up casting 450 people into the raging sea. In spite of the conditions, islanders tried to rescue the passengers and crew.
There were only a few survivors rescued. A small cairn and monument marks the site. The inscription reads: "On 28th September 1853 the ship Annie Jane with emigrants from Liverpool to Quebec was totally wrecked in this bay and threefourths of the crew and passengers numbering about 350 men women and children were drowned and their bodies interred here."
Two Chinese seamen from the SS Idomeneus which sank on 28th September 1917 are also buried somewhere near the monument. There is a commemorative headstone in Cuier Churchyard.
The remains of a Catalina flying boat that crashed on the slopes of Heishival Beg in 1948 lie in a stream bed near the shore.
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Famous quotes containing the word wrecks:
“There are wrecks on the fore-beach,
wind will beat your ship,
there is no shelter in that headland,
it is useless waste, that edge.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality,
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)