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Nightmare nears end for teen afloat in Gulf
Published August 10, 2009
Still floating in the Gulf for what seemed a lifetime after the 1915 storm destroyed the Surfside lifesaving station, Minnie Florea opened her eyes for what she felt was the first time in hours.
What she saw raised some hope of survival. The rain had stopped and the sun was shining hot on her face, even though she could see the rain falling in three different directions over the Gulf and the waves seemed even higher than they had earlier.
The position of the sun told the 16-year-old it was mid-afternoon, and now she could tell she was drifting north. Somewhere in that direction would be Galveston Island, and the possibility someone on shore or aboard a ship might see her.
“But any elation or hope that I felt was short lived, for instantly it occurred to me why the waves were getting higher. I was nearing the breakers!” she said a few weeks later.
“As … exhausted as I was it seemed impossible that I could live through the breakers; but all the same I clung to my board and rode the waves.”
In a short time, she was able to see the “dim, hazy outlines that I knew meant land,” she said, “but if anything it seemed farther off than before.”
Then she was in the midst of breakers that she described as “big, angry and hungry … raging, plunging monsters” that came in threes.
“One would hit me with terrific force and raise me (it seemed to me) 100 feet; no sooner had it begun to lower than another struck; and before I could get even a gasp of breath, the third one would lift me high and then bury me,” she told Bess Whitehead, a Houston newspaper reporter.
Clenching her jaw and holding her nose through the triple-threat waves, she was able to hold her breath long enough to avoid inhaling the seawater.
“I’ve no idea how long I was in the breakers,” Minnie said. “I had no idea of time and almost forgot that land was just beyond. I had no time to think of anything except that the awful waves were coming and that I must hold my breath through three of them.”
Even though she was not troubled with seasickness or dizziness, she said her heart would fail her and her head would whirl as she looked from the top of those waves down into the trough below.
Equally frightening was the time when she was in the trough and could not even see the sky without bending her head back to a point that was painful.
The time when she was in the breakers “was the only time of the whole night and day that I was really thoroughly frightened and terrified,” she said. “Later on I felt keener despair, but never such awful, sickening fear.”
While she was in the breakers, Minnie lost the large box lid that had been keeping her afloat, “and for long intervals had nothing at all to hold to,” she said. “Now a plank would whirl by and I’d hold to it a minute before it was snatched from me, then other objects came by … but I never held to the same one more than a few minutes at a time.”
Not once during this terrible time did Minnie open her mouth, she said, explaining she was sustained by determination, prayer and the nonsense verse, “Three men on a raft, three men on a raft …” that had kept her afloat for so long.
“It was a shock when my feet touched bottom for the first time, but a sensation that I had no time to enjoy,” she said.
When she reached a place where the water was only knee deep between the waves, she realized she could not make her legs move.
“I didn’t walk a step until I came to the drift,” she said. “It would seem that the long struggle was over when I … could see the outline of a two-story house on the short … but … I couldn’t walk through the drift.”
Too exhausted to swim, even if that had been a possible solution to making her way through the logs, planks, boxes and unknown objects of all sizes that became weapons in the plunging waves, she said she “lost the last vestige of hope” and expected to die “with my feet on bottom and in plain sight of land.”
At that point, she said, she realized the meaning of despair. “For once in my life, if never again, I have been in the very depths of physical and mental anguish,” she said.
Even so, she fought — sometimes not consciously. “I forgot that my arms were aching, that my head was like lead, that my legs and feet were entirely numb, and that my back was almost literally broken,” she told the reporter.
She had not spoken since she passed her family friends, Dr. Newton and his sister, as they all floated in the Gulf just off Surfside Beach about midnight Monday night.
And since she had strangled a few minutes after they had passed, Minnie had not opened her mouth at all.
“But now I began to talk,” she said, “just to babble,” as she fought her way through the drift and out of the waves until she was out and on the shore of Galveston Island.
Next week: Minnie walks to seek help.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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