Corpus Christi History by Murphy Givens

Mustang Island's pilots at the bar

   (This is the first of a series of columns on the Mercer logs.)
  
   The captain made a bad decision. He decided to rely on his own knowledge of the channel and guide his ship in. He would save - and perhaps could pocket for himself - the pilot's fee. But his ship, the sidewheel steamer Mary, ran into a storm.
   The ship arrived off the Aransas bar the night before as a fierce norther hit. A passenger said the ship plunged and dipped from side to side. It was impossible to anchor in the crashing seas, when the captain decided to take her in over the bar and through the pass himself, as he had done before. Then came disaster.
   In making the attempt, the ship struck a buoy, opening a hole in her side, and then struck the bar, pounding her bottom out as high waves foamed and lashed the stricken ship.
   Mrs. S. G. Miller, whose husband owned a ferry on the Nueces River, was on board. She had been visiting relatives in New Orleans. After the ship struck the buoy and scraped its bottom on the bar, water rose underfoot in her cabin and the bulkheads began to pull apart.
   "I heard terrific noises all over the boat. The chambermaid came running and cried: 'Get up! The boat is sinking!' Dr. East (her brother) ran in and told me to run for my life to the pilothouse. He caught my hand and we waded through water pouring through the ship like a mighty river. When we reached the pilothouse, we found everybody huddled there awaiting his doom. As a last resort, we were to try the lifeboats, a dangerous undertaking in such a sea. Crested with great banks of foam, the waves dashed over the sides of the ship as though they were great monsters."
   The Mary was flying distress flags when pilot John Mercer, his brother Ned, and two others (Tom Brundrette and Tom Lacey) finally reached the ship with the pilot boat the Doaga, but they couldn't get close enough to make the rescue.
   "Trial after trial was made to get to us," Mrs. Miller wrote, "but each time the great waves carried our rescuers beyond our reach. At last, after three or four hours of hard work, the rope was caught by one of our men, and the small boat was lashed to the Mary by her gangplank.
   "In order to reach this gangplank, we waded through water waist-deep on deck. As I started across the gangplank, the Mary broke away from the pilot boat and down I went into the sea. As I fell, the heel of my shoe caught on one of the slats. This broke my fall and enabled me to catch hold of the two sides of the plank with my hands. Scrambling to a sitting position on the gangplank, I bobbed up and down as each big wave struck. It seemed an eternity before the sailors caught hold of it again and I was helped into the rescue boat. The rescued party filled the boat to capacity, and the outgoing tide and the terrific gale made sailing very difficult. We managed to get across the bar at last while waves that seemed mountain high were rolling and lashing the unfortunate Mary.
   "Before we could reach the pilot's house, we had to walk the length of a 300-foot wharf made of two 12-inch planks. We suffered an agony of cold as the blizzard whipped about us in our wet clothing. Upon our arrival (at the pilot's house)," Mrs. Miller wrote, "we found a roaring fire in the fire place, and there we sat and dried our clothes. Our hostess served us a hot meal, and after this we went out on the beach to watch for a ship."
   That was Nov. 30, 1876, when the steamship Mary, bound for Rockport from Galveston, wrecked on the Aransas bar. At the scene of the wreck, barrels of flour, bolts of calico, wagon wheels, a dentist's chair, washed ashore. The Corpus Christi Gazette warned people not to sample the contents of unlabeled bottles because the cargo included 500 bottles of strychnine. At the wreckmaster's sale, the Mercer family bought most of the cargo for $245.
   The lucky passengers of the Mary were not the first or last shipwreck survivors to meet the Mercers. This family of bar pilots had been rescuing shipwreck survivors and guiding ships over the bar for two decades, and would do so for two decades more. Besides being the best known bar and bay pilots at the Aransas pass, they were salvage operators, beachcombers, and ran a ranch on Mustang Island. They were also the founders of Port Aransas.
   The father, Robert Answorth Mercer, a lawyer from England, settled on Mustang Island in 1855. He was a bar pilot and lightered goods to Corpus Christi. His two sons, John and Edward (called Ned) and a son-in-law followed as bar pilots after the Civil War. Robert, the patriarch of the clan, died months before the wreck of the Mary.
   We know a lot about the Mercers because the father and his sons kept logs of the ships that came and went, of the weather conditions on the coast, of the depth of water on the bar, of deaths and marriages and events in people's lives in the 1870s and 1880s on Mustang Island. The Mercer logs represent an amazing record of an almost lost period of our history.
  

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