39OCNJMAGAZINE.COMNovember/December 201338 OCNJMAGAZINE.COM November/December 2013

IT WAS a dark and stormy night… Okay, this literary opening has had prolific use. Washed up clichéd rhetoric it is, but, if the shoe fits…

And this shoe is dark and stormy – but that is just a forecast – we will get there. First, a riddle: What do John D. Rockefeller, the Titanic and Ocean City all have in common?

Survey says – an Irish lass weighing 3,000 tons and 329 feet in length. She was an iron-hulled, four-masted sailing barque. Her name was Sindia. Reports show she was named for Mahadaji Scindia, also referred to as Mahadaji Shinde, a Maratha ruler

in Central India. Scindia was referred to by a biographer as, “the greatest man in South Asia in the 18th Century,” as he played an integral role in establishing Maratha supremacy over North India.

Sindia, the vessel, was the kind with character and skill – the kind that was becoming obsolete. Her endangered disposition was modest but for a brief time she was the swiftest of her kind. She was adorned with sails, meager means of navigation and no fancy motors to speak of. These cloaked vessels were being replaced in her day. Assuming the former role of these beauties were motorized vessels equipped with better navigational aids. This did not stop John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil from purchasing the Sindia in 1900. And the riddle unfolds…

The Sindia was born in 1887 to the same company that built the Titanic, s h i p b u i l d e r s Harland and Wolff

in Belfast, Ireland. As the luck of the Irish would have it, while still going through puberty, the Sindia met her demise, a decade and some months before the Titanic, at 14 years of age, in the wee hours of December 15, 1901, the year John D. Rockefeller was ironically deemed, “King of the World,” in a cartoon.

John D. once said, “I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.” Opportunity did not knock on the door of this tragedy, save for the bottom-dwelling sea creatures of the Atlantic Ocean – it just left us nautical lore. And so

the Sindia’s bravado will never be forgotten.

She was without incident and at the home-stretch of her five month, 10,000 mile voyage from East Asia. A newspaper from the day following the wreck described the weather that night as a winter gale bringing strong winds, a rainstorm, and angry waves effectively removing anything on deck.

The icy storm hit as she passed Cape May and forced her closer and closer to the shallow water of the shore. The most violent phase of the storm came at witching hour while the storm besieged the vessel as if there were Sirens on shore luring the ship forth. She was unable to breach the vortex.

King Neptune and the fickle sands smote her in tag-team fashion. The merciless King overthrew the boat cracking the steel hull over his knee and the fickle sands swallowed her. At 2:30am, the first distress signal rockets were launched. The S.O.S. declaration was noticed by the Ocean City keeper Harry Young from the Ocean City Life Saving Station and authorized by Captain J. Mackey Corson and Edward Boyd at the mainland’s Middle Station; crews were deployed and rescue proceedings commenced. Efforts to save the Sindia were futile but Captain Corson and a dozen other men from the Life Saving Station rescued the entire crew of 33 despite the chilling temperatures, relentless rain and unforgiving waves. The Sindia, parked forever 150 yards seaward from the beach between 16th and 17th Street, was effectively inducted into the Graveyard of the Atlantic Club.

Though he was saved from the wreckage, the Captain of the ship, the esteemed and trusted Allen McKenzie, would not technically survive the wreck. He was tried in hearings that started less than two weeks later at a British Naval Court and found guilty of, “failing to exercise proper and seamanlike care and precaution.” Gossip speculated that he and his crew were tipsy but it was met with denial and comments about an attrition of grog on board. Poor Captain McKenzie was broken when he was deemed dishonorable and his certificate was suspended for six months. Just before that sentence

expired he died never to have mastered a ship again.

If the British Naval Court only knew, shipwrecks off the Jersey shore were not unusual, especially during winter months. There is a reason it is nicknamed the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Shifting sand bars and weather are responsible for 2,000 shipwrecks off the Jersey Coast alone. Or was this the work of a Buddhist pox – one that released the Kraken on her? One legend speaks of retribution for the looting at a Buddhist Temple during the Boxer Rebellion that occurred until 1900 – a place and time proximal to the Sindia’s last port of exit. The curse was heavy, for the supposed items in the ship’s hold included gold, jade, porcelain, and a two-ton statue of Buddha.

Though not pulled by reindeer, the ship was told to be carrying items for Christmas sale such as silk, porcelain, fine china and camphor. The ship was, per its manifest, loaded with a conglomerate of cargo including matting, screens, wax, linseed and other “curios.” The ship’s manifest was found suspect listing the lower hold or hull as filled with crates of Manganese ore, a mineral in plentiful supply in this region, thus setting off a surrogate theory about stowaway Buddhist temple loot in the lower hull. A local legend was born.

The Sindia exhibit at the Ocean City Historical Museum bears artifacts, photos, and at the head of the display is the ship’s figurehead; a wooden head of a mustached man with a turban, sharing a striking resemblance to the ship’s namesake Mahadaji Scindia. It was reported that a man swam to the wreck piggybacking a saw to retrieve it.

Today she is more than six feet under. Beach replenishment buried her by at least 20 feet of sand.

She is a treasure trove now benthic and curse-protected from grave-robbers or treasure hunters. Efforts have been made to raise the Sindia, not by séance, but by investors pooling funds to give her a proper resurrection. The efforts to raise her have been fruitless and those to court her spoils – lootless. The state of New Jersey declared her nautical catacomb an official historic site in 1969 and the curse, well, it runs security.

sindia iPhoto courtesty of Ocean CIty Historical Museum

OCEAN CITY’S MOST FAMOUS LEGEND

by kelly tjoumakaris