There would have been agave-hibiscus margaritas at the beach party, but someone lost the bag of ingredients in the sand.
We know this because one of the kids and I found the bag while looking for piping plover chicks west of Indian Wells at dusk on Monday. Inside it were a dozen limes, a citrus squeezer, and a hand-labeled bottle of agave syrup infused with hibiscus blossoms. We added this to our collection of detritus and eventually left it in a town trash can in the parking lot.
All sorts of things end up on the beach following summer weekends, whether drifted in on the wind or dropped from a hand or truck. Contemporary treasures don’t measure up, though, to what came ashore in the days of sail.
It was February 1893 when a schooner of 172 tons burden, the Elsie Fay, struck the rocks east of the Ditch Plain Coast Guard Station. It was the middle of the night during a heavy snowstorm, but the crew of seven made it off the ship, riding one at a time in a breeches buoy. The ship’s parrot did not survive; according to the men, its final words were, “We’ll all go to Hell together, boys!”
Wooden ships go quickly to pieces on the rocks. As the Elise Fay broke up, her cargo of logwood and coconuts came loose and bobbed to the beach. For about a year, Montaukers ate coconuts in every style.
To this day, beachgoers will sometimes find treasures from an even earlier wreck — the Pacific, which ran aground late at night near East Hampton Main Beach in June 1871 with all sails set. The following morning, a Sunday, there were few congregants in the town church because everyone was at the beach, gathering clay pipes and tiles thrown overboard to lighten the ship’s load. Every 10 years or so we still hear about someone picking up a pipe or fragment.
Oddly enough, there is a different account of the Pacific’s brush with The East Hampton shore. In an edition of The Sag Harbor Express published the following week, its cargo was described as pig iron and drainpipe. It is likely that drainpipe, iron, and smoking pipes went over the side. At any rate, both accounts agree that the ship sailed away to great rejoicing.
I have never found a beach pipe, but over the years have noticed fragments of tile along the ocean, not thinking much of them. Now I wonder if they, too, might have come from a ship that touched here and was gone one day 148 years ago last month.