in late October of 1838. It was a famous event at the time. The steamer, a wooden side-wheeler, caught fire just after midnight, during a sudden snowstorm. The fire itself may have been caused by so simple a mishap as a tipped lamp, but the storm winds caught and spread it before it could be contained, and the deck of the steamer was quickly blanketed in flame.
The captain of the Clarice Monroe was a drinker. The fire was almost certainly not his fault, but it was his undoing. He panicked shamefully. Without waking the passengers or crew, he ordered the one sailor on watch to lower a single lifeboat, in which he, his wife, and the young sailor rowed away. The captain left the doomed Clarice Monroe, his passengers, and his cargo to burn. The three survivors in the rowboat became lost in the storm, rowed for a full day, lost the power to row any further, and drifted for one day more. When they were picked up by a merchant marine vessel, the captain was dead of exposure, his wife had lost her fingers, feet, and ears to frostbite, and the young sailor had completely lost his mind.
Without her captain, the Clarice Monroe, still burning, had drifted against the rocks off Fort Niles Island, where she broke up among the waves. There were no survivors among the ninety-seven passengers. Many of the corpses drifted over to Potter Beach, piling up in the brine and mud alongside the charred and battered wooden wreckage of the steamboat. The men of Fort Niles gathered the corpses, wrapped them in burlap, and stored them in the icehouse. Some were identified by family members who came to Fort Niles throughout the month of October on ferry boats to collect their brothers and wives and mothers and children. Those unfortunates who were not claimed were buried in the Fort Niles cemetery, under small granite markers inscribed, simply, DROWNED.
But the steamboat had lost other cargo.
The Clarice Monroe had been transporting, from New Brunswick down to Boston, a small circus made up of several remarkable items: six white show horses, several trick monkeys, a camel, a trained bear, a pack of performing dogs, a cage of tropical birds, and an African elephant. After the ship broke up, the circus horses tried to swim through the snowstorm. Three drowned, and the other three reached the shores of Fort Niles Island. When the weather cleared the next morning, everyone on the island turned out to see the three magnificent white mares gingerly picking their way across the snowy boulders.
None of the other animals made it. The young sailor from the Clarice Monroe, found in the rowboat with his dead captain and the captain’s devastated wife, driven to delirium by exposure to the storm, said upon his rescue—insisted!—that he had seen the elephant jump over the railing of the burning wreck and swim strongly through the waves, its tusks and trunk lifted high above the churning, icy water. He swore he had seen the elephant swimming through the salty snow as he himself rowed away from the wreck. He saw the elephant swim and swim and then, sounding one last mighty trumpet, sink beneath the waves.
The sailor, as noted, was out of his mind at the time of his rescue, but there were those who believed his story. Senator Simon Addams had always believed it. He’d heard the story from his earliest childhood and had been fascinated by it. And it was the tusks of that circus elephant which the Senator now sought to recover, 138 years later, in the spring of 1976.
He wanted to put at least one tusk on display at the Fort Niles Museum of Natural History. In 1976, the Fort Niles Museum of Natural History did not exist, but the Senator was working on it. He’d been collecting artifacts and specimens for the museum for years, storing them in his basement. The whole idea was his. He had no backers, and he was the sole curator. He believed a tusk would make a most impressive centerpiece to his collection.
The Senator, obviously, couldn’t search for the tusks himself. He was a sturdy old man, but he was in no condition to dig around in the mud all day. Even if he were younger, he would not have had the courage to wade out into the loose soup of seawater and shifting mudflats that extended from Potter Beach. He was much too afraid of the water. So he