Like many of you, I recently saw The Finest Hours, a fine movie about the Chatham Coast Guard’s rescue of the crew of the Pendleton in 1952. Watching it, I thought of my old Brewster neighbor, Charlie Ellis. Charlie must have been in his seventies when I knew him. He was a Brewster native and a born story-teller. One day he told me that he had served in the Cape’s Coast Guard Service for many years.
“I served from 1923 to 1946,” he said. “Served at most all the stations during that time – Race Point, Peaked Hills, Highland, Pamet, Coast Guard, Old Harbor. At one time I was in charge of four stations – yes, yes.”
He said he served as first officer at the old Coast Guard Beach station when Henry Beston was staying in the Fo’castle, writing what would become his masterpiece, The Outermost House. “Henry was a nice fellow,” he recalled. “Used to make coffee for us, and make trips up to the station with his rucksack.” Charlie said that Beston mentioned him in The Outermost House, but I could never find his name in my copy. Another neighbor of mine who knew Charlie considerably longer than I did, cautioned me that Charlie was “not the most reliable” source.
Charlie told me he spent much of his Coast Guard career at the Old Harbor station on Chatham’s North Beach. One February day, he recalled, they got a distress flare from a brigantine. The ship had been rounding Race Point when strong northwest winds tore the sails to pieces and pushed them back down off Chatham. With a small crew Charlie rowed out from Old Harbor to the ship twelve miles offshore.
“Fingers almost froze, but I kept working ’em hard all the way out. The swells keep throwing ice up onto my hands. When we reached her, the captain looks down at my fingers and says, ‘You must be cold.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I says, ‘I am.’ They made us coffee in the galley. It was all they had. It must have been reheated fifty times, and I don’t like coffee anyway, but it tasted good – yes, yes.”
Charlie also claimed credit for the current station at Eastham’s Coast Guard Beach, which was built in 1938. One weekend during a storm, a woman he knew and a visitor took shelter in the old station.
“‘Do you know who this is?’ she says to me. ‘It’s your boss’
“‘My boss?’ I says.
“Turns out it was the Secretary – of the Treasury. We were under the Treasury Department in those days.
“So the Secretary says to me, ‘Son, how would you like a new station?’
“‘I’d like it just fine.’
“‘Well,” he says,” you’ve got it.’ Yes, yes.”
Charlie has been gone for many years now, but I have always thought of him fondly, especially as a story-teller. I took his tales as reflections of the character of the old Cape without necessarily being factually accurate. Then one day recently, I was leafing through my first edition of The Outermost House and came upon a foreword not reprinted in subsequent editions. In it Beston thanks many people, including “Bosun’s Mate Charles Ellis, the present No. 1” of the Nauset Station crew, “for the thousand kind and friendly things they did to help me.”
So, Charlie, it seems I owe you a belated apology. You did know him, and Beston knew you – and in retrospect I do believe that you were (at least partly) responsible for getting the new Eastham Coast Guard station built. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.
