The Treasure Ship

Hold on there a minute, and look left through those trees, toward the water. That's Frenchman Bay, and one morning in the summer of nineteen fourteen, it held the last thing anybody in Bar Harbor expected to see. She was a German ocean liner called the Kronprinzessin Cecilie. The Crown Princess. She had sailed from New York for Europe with fifteen hundred people aboard, and down in her hold she carried better than ten million dollars in gold and silver. Then, out in the middle of the Atlantic, Europe went to war, and that ship and that gold became the fattest prize a British cruiser could dream of. Nobody told the passengers. They found out the way you'd find out in a bad dream. Folks out on deck one night noticed the moon had moved. It had been on one side of the ship, and now it was on the other. The captain had swung her around in the dark and pointed her back at America. He masked her lights. He sent volunteers up with paint to black the tops of her buff funnels, hoping she'd pass for the Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic. Then he ran her through thick fog at full speed. Two years, mind you, since the Titanic went down. The passengers begged him to slow up. He wouldn't give them one knot less. One of the men aboard was Clinton Blair, who summered in Bar Harbor and knew Frenchman Bay, and he helped the captain bring her in. In the early hours of August the fourth she dropped her anchor out there, between the steamboat wharves and the Porcupine Islands, and the sun came up on her. A Mrs. Hinkle stood at the rail with her daughter. The two of them were bound for Europe, and they took that shore for the Azores. They looked and they looked, and little by little the shape of a house came clear. It was their own Bar Harbor cottage. And the pair of them stood there and wept. Well, folks called her the Treasure Ship, and a hotel put a notice in the papers that you could see her from the table over an excellent Sunday dinner. I've looked out at that bay in a fog, and I don't look for the gold. I look for two women at a rail, an ocean away from where they meant to be, crying at the sight of their own front porch.