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Teen girl clings to life during raging tempes
Published August 3, 2009
Having lost sight of all of the 21 people who had taken refuge in the lifesaving station at Surfside during the 1915 storm, Minnie Florea was battered by what she called “monster” waves as she floated through the Gulf from Surfside, losing all sense of direction and of her whereabouts.
“Sometimes I’d think I was in the channel and knew I would soon be dashed to death against the jetties,” she told Bess Whitehead, a newspaper reporter to whom she recounted her story several weeks later.
“Then it seemed that I was reaching the breakers and I knew I’d never live through them to reach the land that must be but a little way beyond.”
During brief lulls of the wind and waves, she could “reason nothing except that the horrible expanse of water had no beginning or end and that I was drifting far in its midst where no ship could live and no human would ever come alive,” 16-year-old Minnie said.
In answer to the reporter’s questions, however, she said she was “not terrified or panic stricken or anything of this kind.”
Rather, she said, “I had no expectation of ever seeing land again, and really had no sensation of any kind much. You might describe it as the calmness of despair, but I didn’t suffer any mental anguish as one would think.” She later described her feelings as being “indifferent” to the death she expected.
Actually, she said, she was so tired she wanted to drown. “Sometimes I would have to hold my hands with the jacket in them up as far as I could and lay my head over on them to rest my neck; for it seemed like my neck would come entirely off my shoulders every minute.”
At other times, she would feel compelled to rest her arms by letting them down, she said, describing the ache in her back as “feeling like red hot wires were around it and then sharp knives plunged into the marrow of my spine.”
This pain was so severe she cried, and “death seemed a thousand times preferable.”
As to why she didn’t simply give up and die, she said it seemed that would have been the easiest thing.
“But you know I simply do not believe one can deliberately drown himself,” she said, explaining that even as she turned loose and started to open her mouth to the water, she would find herself fighting to hold onto the planks and keep her head up.
“I believe that a suicide by drowning always fights after he is in the water. If he drowns it is because he can’t help it and not because he tries to. He may want to, but that is different; I wanted to. I had seen some of the others go down, and I knew if the rest were not lost already they were in the same condition that I was and would never get to land again.”
Remembering her family, she said she could not picture life without them, but when she would despair of reaching safety, she would realize it would not always be dark, and when morning came, she might see a ship that would save her.
“You know, they say that when your life is in danger you think of everything mean that you ever did and said. Well, I didn’t. It certainly was not … because I had never done anything mean, either,” she said, “but such a thought simply didn’t occur to me. I didn’t think of very many things, but the same ones over and over.”
Minnie said she wondered if her body would ever be found, and about how soon her married sister, who was not at the beach with the rest of the family, would hear of their deaths.
She also wondered if any ships were in the storm’s path, and if they were all dashed to pieces like the dredge boat in the channel that she saw before the station went down.
She thought of sharks and devil fish (sting ray) and wondered “if being eaten by a shark would be any worse than (being) dashed on the jetties,” she said. “I wasn’t particularly afraid when I thought of all that, just indifferent.”
One constant thought that kept her from giving up was she knew “the Bible says that a suicide’s soul will not go to heaven. …” She reasoned with herself if her family had died they would go to heaven, and if she gave up it would be committing suicide and she would not be able to join them there.
Throughout her ordeal, Minnie had hope her brother, who was an exceptionally strong swimmer, might save himself, even though she was sure everyone else was gone.
“Finally, I was so completely worn out and exhausted that I could not struggle,” she said. She took a new hold on her planks and life jacket and went to sleep. It was a light sleep, of course, and “every time a piece of driftwood would hit my planks or a snake crawl by my legs (and there were thousands of them it seemed like) I would wake.”
When dawn finally came, she almost was sound asleep, and the light startled and aroused her.
She had lost one of her boards during the night, and after dawn “a malicious wave snatched the other one and hurled it” beyond her reach.
Left with only her lifejacket — which sometimes got away from her, only to turn up again — she was heartened when a big board washed close enough for her to grab it.
She quickly realized it was the lid to a cedar chest, and though it was too wide for her to hold onto, she turned it around and found a strap that must have served as a hinge.
That was Tuesday morning, she said, but it was still overcast, with a rain beating down. She considered her “capture” of the chest lid a hopeful sign, and began repeating, “God helps those who help themselves.”
Either in a dream or a fantasy, she heard her father’s voice saying, “Hold on, Minchins, you are only 30 feet out.”
Another recurring thought was “Three men on a raft, three men on a raft.”
She told the newspaper reporter that when a big wave came down with a swoop that day, “I’d meet it with ‘three men on a raft’ at its crest, then go into its trough holding to the strap of the box lid to the refrain of ‘three men on a raft.’”
Next week: Hitting the breakers.
Marie Beth Jones, a published author and freelance writer based in Angleton, is chairwoman of the Brazoria County Historical Commission.
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