An Island to Call Home

From a 1985 Gazette article by Janet Bosworth:

One stormy night in May 1888, the schooner Onrust in ballast, bound from Fall River for Calais, brought up hard and fast on Schooner Reef, on the shore of Cuttyhunk. All aboard were rescued by the Cuttyhunk members of the Massachusetts Humane Society. The next day, the second mate, Tom Jones, looked around at the island, liked what he saw and decided to remain.

Living ashore, even on an island, was a new experience for Tom. Ever since he had run away to sea at the age of 12 to escape a brutal stepfather in South Boston, he had been a sailor. He had gone from Boston to Bombay, to Europe, to California, to the Mediterranean, to Japan and China and finally to Rio. He returned to the United States and had gone coasting, only to be wrecked on a friendly island.

Capt. Dave Bosworth hired him as an assistant in his fishing boat, but it wasn’t many months before Tom hired a boat and made traps of his own. In 1889 Captain Bosworth was made captain of the newly established U.S. Lifesaving Service. He selected Tom to be a member of the first crew, all of whom were as experienced as he, having been fishermen and life savers in the Humane Society. They had rescued ships and crews in the wildest of gales and coldest of winter nights.

Tom remained in the service after it became the Coast Guard until 1905. For the first time he had acquired a home, a large cottage, a little money in the bank and, most important, a devoted wife.

Records say that few lifesavers on the bleak coast of New England had a better record than Tom Jones or helped save more seamen from a watery death. Part of the duties of a lifesaver were to patrol the shores of Cuttyhunk every night, except for June and July, and every foggy day. Each man carried a lantern, a Coston light, and rockets. One night Tom saw a red and a green light coming directly on shore near the Cuttyhunk Clubhouse and very close. In five minutes she would have struck, but he flashed the bright red glare of the Coston signal. The ship, which proved to be a large passenger steamer, veered off with a deep whistle of “Thank you” and anchored.

In an interview Tom gave in 1905, he answered the question of how he felt when starting out in a violent gale to row several miles to rescue a shipwrecked crew, by stating: “Why, I don’t rightly know, I never gave any attention to it. Of course we know it’s dangerrous, but it’s got to be done, so what’s the use of fretting about it. It’s a case of pulling hard enough to overcome the sea. Once you’re started, you don’t have time to think about the danger, and before you know it, you’re back safe and sound.”

A few of the wrecks Tom told about were first the Bob and Harry, which went ashore on a terrible night in March 1892. The volunteers from the Humane Society had rescued two of the crew, but their boat had been badly damaged. Capt. Bosworth ordered the men to launch their boat again, but two men refused, “not Cuttyhunkers” said Tom, but the others with Tom among them were able to bring off the two remaining men.

He told of the George Davenport from which the crew was rescued in January 1901. The mate refused to leave the ship until the next morning, when he was taken off, and two cats as well, which had clung to the rigging. One of the most difficult rescues and one of the oddest was made in the winter of 1897 when a schooner from the West Indies went aground on North Ledge in Buzzards Bay. After a bitter row of three hours, the crew managed to pull alongside and take six men aboard. They would not leave, however, until some of their valuable cargo was saved. This turned out to several monkeys and two wild bears. Lassoing these, roping them and getting them aboard the heavily laden lifeboat was no mean trick, to say nothing of placing them so they could not claw the mens’ legs. It was done, and the whole boatload returned to Cuttyhunk without mishap.

Finally in 1905 Tom was hired by William M. Wood, head of the American Woolen Company, who had begun buying up as much of Cuttyhunk as he could, to be what the newspaper called “General Marine Adviser to Head of Woolen Trust.” Since he was resigning from the service and would be only on Cuttyhunk in the summer in the future, one assumes that Tom and his wife moved to Andover, where Mr. Wood resided. Tom returned to Cuttyhunk in the summer, where he was to teach sailing and boating to young Cornelius Wood. Later he managed Mr. Wood’s Cuttyhunk properties. He lived in several of Mr. Wood’s houses on Cuttyhunk. One of these became known as the Jones Cottage. William Wood was so fond of Tom that he had a cement path constructed between his house and Jones Cottage and a porch added to the cottage so that he could sit there and play cribbage with his manager.

Thus Tom returned to Cuttyhunk, the only place he ever called home.

Compiled by Cynthia Meisner

library@mvgazette.com