ed. It capsized, taking the cargo and several crewmembers with it. All but one of the crewmembers was saved.
The wreck of the Desdemona was visible for many years until one especially hard winter when it sank out of sight into the sands that now bear its name. Gibbs mentions that it is unknown whether Williams ever received his new Sunday suit.
USS Shark 1846
The quaint Oregon coast town of Cannon Beach got its name from a cannon that drifted ashore from the 1846 wreck of US Naval Survey schooner, the Shark. The ship, under the command of Captain Schenck, arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River as part of a surveying fleet in August, 1846. According to James A. Gibbs, author of Pacific Graveyard, a cook claiming to be a bar pilot came out to meet the ship and offered to guide it across the bar. The cook was supposedly a survivor of the Peacock shipwreck five years prior.
But just twenty minutes after taking over as pilot, the cook stranded the ship on a sand bar. The weather was calm and as the tide came in, the ship drifted free and escaped a watery grave for a short time. The ship was then safely anchored near the Astor Colony, and the crew began surveying the land for safe passage across the bar. Because of tense relations and anxiety over borders between the United States and Great Britain, many crewmembers began deserting and replacements could not be found. The crew’s work was rushed in order to finish the job before more men deserted.
Without proper preparation, the ship began crossing the bar on September 10. It quickly hit Clatsop Spit, Oregon, and was hit hard by breaker waves in rough weather. In an attempt to free the ship from the spit, Captain Schenck ordered all three of the masts to be chopped down and the ship’s twelve cannons to be thrown overboard. But before this job was finished, the Shark began to break apart from the constant pounding of waves. By the next day, it was completely in pieces. A section of the wreck carrying one of the cannons came ashore south of Astoria. In 2010, two more cannons, possibly from the Shark, were found near Arch Cape, Oregon.
All of the ship’s crew managed to reach shore safely; however, before leaving for San Francisco, California, they inscribed the date and details of the wreck on what is now known as Shark Rock, currently on display at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria, Oregon.
[caps]F[/caps]or many years, the beach approach at Ocean Park, Washington, was marked with a war memorial created by two large metal masts from the wrecked ship Arrow that came ashore near the small coastal village in February 1947.
The ship was originally known as the Belfast and was built in 1909. It was used for many years as a pleasure steamer on the East Coast between Boston, Massachusetts and Rockland, Maine. The ship saw a variety of uses, during which its name changed to Arrow, until it was eventually bought by the army in 1942 and became a passenger liner in the Hawaiian Islands.
In 1946, the army decided it was time for the Arrow to retire, but the ship had different plans. In February of 1947, the ship was being hauled by a tug from Seattle, Washington, to join a fleet of mothballed ships near Astoria, Oregon. But during the voyage they hit rough waters and the towline to the ship broke. The tug crew attached a new towline, but that too quickly broke. Risking their lives, they attached a third towline but when that also broke, they decided it would be too dangerous and useless to try again.
The ship came ashore on the Long Beach Peninsula in Washington and locals quickly got to work picking items from rope to toilets and sinks off the ship. After a day, the army arrived with a group of soldiers to guard the ship until it could be properly salvaged, but the ship settled rapidly in the sands before any work could be done.
A number of years later, the city of Ocean Park, Washington, bought the masts of the ship and placed them as a memorial at the entrance to the beach. After many salty storms, the rusty masts were removed.
Vazlov Verovsky 1941
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