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The Great Gale of 1879 and a Daring Nantucket Rescue

The Great Gale of 1879 showed why Nantucket earned the nickname the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The storm, which began on March 31, disabled dozens of vessels in the waters off the island. The townspeople picked bodies off the beach for several days and cared for 40 shipwrecked mariners who were brought ashore.

Thomas Sandsbury earned a silver lifesaving medal and $25 for bringing one of them in. And then the U.S. Treasury gave him a gold medal.

The Great Gale of 1879

The Great Gale made landfall on the evening of March 31. The storm grew more violent though the night. Ferocious winds, dense fog and storm tides that nearly swamped the docks. The sea grew white and the elements raged, according to an Inquirer and Mirror story when it finally ended on April 5.

The U.S. Coast Guard later reported 68 disabled vessels off the coast of Nantucket on April 1. The island sat right on a busy maritime highway along the East Coast. There were schooners and brigs from Philadelphia, New York, Boston, New Jersey and Maine, and they were sailing to Boston, New York and Philadelphia. They carried coal, sugar, lumber and lime.

Dozens of vessels sailed past the north and south coasts of Nantucket every day. As the Great Gale of 1879 approached, they hunkered down in the lee of the storm. But when the fog lifted enough for people on land to see what had happened, they saw many, many vessels in distress.

At first light on April 2, 1879, Town Crier Billy Clark told Capt. Thomas Sandsbury that the storm had left four vessels in distress off the west end of Nantucket near Tuckernuck Island.

Lifesavers

Sandsbury volunteered for the Massachusetts Humane Society. The MHS, founded in 1786, relied on volunteers to risk their own lives to save others. As an incentive, the Humane Society awarded silver and gold medals, as well as cash, for heroic rescues at sea.

The federal government then created the U.S. Life-Saving Service in 1848, modeling it on the Humane Society.

By 1871, the Massachusetts Humane Society managed 78 lifeboats and 92 huts, boathouses and other structures along the coast. Like many Humane Society leaders, Thomas Sandsbury was later hired by the Life-Saving Service. He served for several years as the first keeper of the Muskeget Life-Saving Station beginning in 1883.

Town crier Billy Clark. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

But in 1879 Sandsbury was still a volunteer, and after he got the word from Billy Clark he summoned seven other volunteers. They would spend the next 32 hours out straight, rescuing mariners in distress.

Sandsbury hired a team, and the men hitched a dory to it and drove it six miles to Eel Point. There they launched the dory. The men rowed three miles through the fog and the roiling waters to Tuckernuck. They reached the island and then rowed to the schooner John W. Hall. The schooner had sought shelter in the sound, but the storm broke her anchor chains and she hit rocks near Muskeget. The John W. Hall crewmen had lashed themselves to the rigging until the rescue crew arrived. Sandsbury’s crew took four men off the schooner. According to one account, they carried them in the surfboat to Muskeget. Or perhaps they rowed with them to other distressed ships.

Emma J. Edwards

They then rowed out to the incapacitated schooner Emma. The crew wasn’t in grave danger, Sandsbury and his men then spotted a ship bouncing on the waves about four miles off Tuckernuck Island. They rowed out to it and found the nearly capsized Emma J. Edwards.

Fifty-eight years later, Marcus Dunham, the last surviving crewman, recalled the ordeal of rowing four miles in rough seas to the Emma J. Edwards.

“The seas kept breaking over us all the time we headed her into the wind. It was cold and the water was like ice. We couldn’t get anywhere near the schooner at first. She was lying on her side, her masts lifting to every sea and, as she had all sail set, every time she come down she’d sent the spray twenty feet into the air.”

A shipwrecked schooner

“The condition of this vessel was dreadful,” according to the Massachusetts Humane Society citation. “She was capsized and full of water. Enormous seas continually poured over her, and at each one she would roll, thrashing the water with her topmasts, which would rise again fifteen or twenty feet, and flail the water anew, so that it was almost impossible to get near her. “

They spotted a man lashed to the upper cross-trees, making weak hand gestures. Two dead men lay under him.

The rising and falling masts threatened to smash the surfboat to bits, but Sandsbury, with difficulty, maneuvered the boat out of danger. Then George Coffin fastened himself to a line, jumped into the water m to the cross-tree. He then cut loose the survivor, tied his line around him and lowered him into the sea. The others hauled him into the boat. Then, after some effort, he freed the dead bodies and lowered them into the sea where the others could retrieve them. Then he jumped into the sea himself and got pulled into the surfboat.

Sandsbury realized the overloaded boat couldn’t make headway against the violent wind and surf toward Tuckernuck. So they maneuvered the boat before the wind and rowed 11 miles to Nantucket.

More Rescues During the Great Gale of 1879

The men then deposited the bodies with the medical examiner and took the survivor to shelter. The storm still raged, and they knew they had more work ahead. So they wheeled a surfboat to Madaket on the western end of the island and rowed out to Muskegat Island. There they spent the night under the boat for shelter.

Muskegat Island

At daybreak they towed out to retrieve the crew aboard the Emma. According to some accounts, it was then that they took the J.W. Hall mariners off the vessel. They then rowed their overloaded surfboat back to Madaket, arriving at 3 p.m.
For their bravery, they each received $25 and a silver medal. Sandsbury also got the gold medal. You can see one donated by Marcus Dunham at the Nantucket Shipwreck & Lifesaving Museum.

With thanks to the “A Legacy of Infamy and Heroism” by Olivia Jackson for the Egan Maritime Institute. This story updated in 2022.

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Richard More, The Pilgrim Saint Who Sinned a Lot

Richard More was just six years old when his embittered legal – but not biological – father packed him off to the New World on the Mayflower, along with his brother and two sisters.

Indentured to William Brewster, he was the only one of the More children to survive past the first terrible winter in Plymouth. He returned to the sea at age 14 and spent most of his life as an enterprising ship captain. Richard More may have been the last of the First Comers to die, having lived long enough to witness the Puritan experiment go awry with the Salem witch trials.

The Mayflower in Plymouth Harbor by William Halsall.

During the course of a colorful lifetime he sailed the Atlantic, carried supplies to infant colonies, fought naval battles, fought King Philip’s War, ran a tavern and married at least three wives, not all sequentially. As a First Comer who survived the Ancient Beginning, he enjoyed certain privileges. He took full advantage of them.

Richard More

Richard More’s legal parents were Katherine and Samuel More, landed gentry in Shropshire, England, on the Welsh border. His real father, though, was probably Jacob Blakeway. Katherine and Jacob were betrothed before her father arranged a marriage with Samuel More, when Samuel was 17 and Katherine 25. Katherine had four children in quick succession: Elinor in 1612, Jasper in 1613; Richard in 1614; and Mary in 1616.

Mayflower plaque in St. James Church in Shipton, Shropshire commemorating the More children baptism. courtesy of Phil Revell.

By the time the youngest came along, Samuel More began to notice they looked more like Jacob Blakeway than him. He accused Katherine of adultery, seized the children and stashed them with a tenant. Katherine didn’t deny the charge. She argued her betrothal to Blakeway meant she’d married More illegally. After years of court battles, Samuel More won the right to pack the children off to the New World on the Mayflower – a likely death sentence.

He didn’t care. He called the children “a spurious brood” and justified his cruelty by claiming to send them away from their home, where “great blotts and blemishes may fall upon them.”

First Comer

By the end of the first winter in Plymouth Colony, Elinor, Jasper and Mary had all died.

Six-year-old Richard, the lone survivor, grew up a servant for elder William Brewster. He lived in the Brewster household with his two sons, Love and Wrestling, who were about his age. Later two older children, Patience and Jonathan, joined them. Richard helped the family with chores, learned to read and write and attended Sunday meeting, where William Brewster often presided.

William Brewster

His indenture ended in 1627, when he turned 14. The next year he was apprenticed to Isaac Allerton, a merchant seaman. Allerton married one of William Brewster’s daughters, Fear, who arrived in Plymouth in 1623. Richard sailed with Allerton up and down the coast buying and selling fish, grain, tobacco and other commodities.

Sometime in the 1630s, More sailed to England — exactly when and why is unclear. He then returned to Plymouth in 1635 on the Blessing. Romance must have bloomed on the voyage, for a few months after his arrival he married a fellow passenger, Christian or Christiana Hunter.

They lived on a 20-acre farm in Duxbury, where the Plymouth settlers had distributed land and begun to spread out on it. The Mores didn’t stay long, but sold their property in 1637. They then moved 50 miles north to another Puritan settlement, Salem Neck. Together they would have seven children.

From Stranger to Saint

When Richard More boarded the Mayflower as a six-year-old child, he did not belong to the tight-knit group of 40-some Separatists who called themselves Saints. He belonged to the other, secular group of about five dozen people called Strangers.

Signing the Mayflower Companct 1620 by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris.

As time passed, the Mayflower settlers took on a mythic aura. They had suffered and survived the “Ancient Beginning.” So in 1643, Richard More became a Saint when the Puritan congregation in Salem admitted him as a member.

But for a Saint, he had a good deal of the sinner in him.

He became a sea captain and pursued the coastal cargo trade he’d learned from Allerton, delivering provisions to colonies in Virginia, New York, the West Indies and Nova Scotia. He probably carried tobacco, grain, salt fish, lumber and fur to England and the West Indies. In 1674, he started a tavern in Salem, selling beer and cider.

Bigamy?

In 1645, 10 years after his marriage to Christian, a “Richard More of Salem” married Elizabeth Woolnough in St. Dunstan’s Church in Middlesex, England. That “Richard More of Salem” left town in a hurry after he was charged with drunkenness in the company of a prostitute. Historians don’t agree on whether it was the Mayflower Richard More who cut that swathe through Middlesex in the 1640s. Whether it was or not, that Richard More had a daughter named Elizabeth, after her mother.

While still in his 30s, the Puritan elders considered Richard More an “Ancient Freeman” and gave him land in Plymouth. A fighter as well as a lover, he fought a naval battle against the Dutch near New York in 1653. The next year he joined a fleet of English ships to capture the French fort at Port Royal. And in 1675, after King Philip’s War broke out, he marched with a thousand-man militia to what is now South Kingstown. There he joined in the Great Swamp Fight, a massacre of as many as 1,000 Narragansett Indians, mostly noncombatants.

Christian More gravestone in Salem.

Christian died in Salem during King Philip’s War, in 1676. Samuel quickly remarried Jane Crumpton. Two years after her death, the 72-year-old man was caught performing “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. The Salem elders censured him.

According to the records of the First Church of Salem, Old Captain More had been for many years “under suspicion and a common fame of lasciviousness at least some degree of incont[in]ency.” Sundry brethren and elders spoke to him several times about his debauchery. However, they had no proof and could go no further.

Then, left to himself, three witnesses saw him commit “gross unchastity” with another man’s wife. Justices of the peace censured old Captain More for his scandalous sin, and the church elders cast him out of the parish.

Salem Witch Trials

Richard repented, however, and returned to the church in 1691. In 1692, he witnessed the hysteria of the Salem witch trials – a second perversion of Puritan zealotry during his lifetime. The first had sent him to Plymouth Colony, an orphaned, six-year-old servant.

Richard More gravestone in Salem.

Richard More died sometime between April 1694 and April 1696, possibly the oldest surviving First Comer. He lies buried in the Charter Street Burial Ground in Salem.

With thanks to Mayflower Lives by Martyn Whittock.

Images: Plaque By Phil Revel, Shipton, Shropshire – https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/6809987125, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269228. Christiana More grave marker By Max Anderson, Chicago IL – https://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/6809950259, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18269206. Richard More grave marker By eagle.dawg – Richard More, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18184059. This story updated in 2022.

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The Branded Hand of Jonathan Walker: Emblem of Slave Stealing or Slave Savior?

In 1844, Florida slave-holders believed Jonathan Walker deserved the punishment of a branded hand. Walker, after all, had tried to steal seven of their able-bodied workers.

One slave-holder watched with delight as a federal marshal pressed a red-hot branding iron into the palm of Walker’s hand. For 15 seconds it made a spattering sound, like salt in a fire.

But the slave-holders’ cruelty toward Jonathan Walker only backfired. He took his branded hand on the road, where it created a sensation. Walker would wade into the audience with his callused seaman’s palm outstretched. People could see the letters “SS” – for slave stealer.

A daguerreotype of Jonathan Walker’s branded hand was also reproduced many times in books, broadsides and newspapers. John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a poem about it, proclaiming “SS” stood for ‘Salvation to the Slave.’

Walker suffered other atrocities at the hand of the slave-holders. But when he died in 1878, Frederick Douglass remembered the branded hand. “It was one of the few atrocities of slavery that roused the justice and humanity of the North to a death struggle with slavery,” he wrote.

Pensacola

On June 4, 1844, Jonathan Walker sailed into Pensacola, Fla., in a little green sloop. He immediately aroused suspicion. A Cape Cod native, he had lived in Pensacola before with his wife and many children. The community leaders remembered how he’d befriended the colored people. Some had even cautioned him about it.

Though Pensacola was a backwater, it had a cosmopolitan, interracial population. As a port city on the Gulf of Mexico, it offered plenty of jobs for free black and white fishermen, mariners, lumberjacks, stevedores, shipwrights and carpenters. People of different ethnicities and racial makeups competed for jobs, but they also cooperated.

Jonathan Walker

That caused a problem for the slave-holders of Pensacola. They knew the Underground Railroad ran south as well as north. Fugitives from slavery in the Deep South often fled to Pensacola for refuge – and passage aboard a ship to freedom.

The reappearance of Jonathan Walker therefore aroused some concern. A circular later described him as ‘a man of large frame, about six feet high, with dark hair and dark complexion, a suspicious countenance, slouchy person, stooping shoulders and a swinging, rolling gait–is lame in one arm from a gunshot wound.’

He had boarded with a colored woman, and he worked on his boat in her yard. “He seems to have had no reasonable or proper business here,” the circular read.

Jonathan Walker

Actually, Jonathan Walker did have business there. He intended to raise a sunken wreck for its copper.

The gunshot wound? He’d been sailing along the Gulf coast, carrying cargo, when he ran aground and robbers shot him. During that time he had also carried fugitives from slavery to Mexico.

He was born in Harwich, Mass., on March 22, 1799, to Seth and Marcy Walker. He went to sea at 17, and continued for 19 years, sometimes staying on land and working in a shipyard. He built his own boat, so people called him captain.

Along the way he met and married Jane Gage, and together they had nine children. They named each after a famous abolitionist of the day: Lloyd Garrison Walker, George Fox Walker, Nancy Child Walker.

By 1844 he had moved his family back to Cape Cod.

While in Pensacola, three men approached him and asked him to take them to the Bahamas.

Missing Slaves

One day Jonathan Walker laid in bread, pork, molasses, cheese and water. On June 22, he set sail before daybreak one day. Two fishermen asked him where he was headed, and he said to Mobile – but headed in a different direction.

That same day, seven black men, all enslaved, disappeared with nearly all of their clothing.

“The belief exists that Jonathan Walker has carried these slaves off in his boat,” read the circular. Slave -holders R.C. Caldwell and George Willis offered a reward of $1,000 for his capture and conviction.

One rainy July day, Jonathan Walker returned to Pensacola on the steamboat General Taylor – under arrest. Despite the downpour, a large, noisy crowd greeted him at the dock. He could barely walk.

He had taken ill from sunstroke on the voyage to the Bahamas, and his boat drifted until a salvage sloop overtook him. The captain of the sloop arrested them and sent them back to Pensacola.

The courtroom overflowed with onlookers as a magistrate charged Jonathan Walker with stealing four slaves. He set bail at $10,000, which Walker couldn’t pay. He collapsed on the way to jail and had to be carried in a cart. The jailer bound his legs in irons. For days he slept and ate on the hard floor.

Prison Horrors

Jonathan Walker would spend four months in prison. His jailer put him in heavy irons, made him sit and lie on the hard floor and charged him $25 rent.

His sickness and severe treatment reduced him to a skeleton. “Many a time I have grasped round my leg above the knee joint, over my pants, with one hand so as to meet thumb and finger,” he wrote.

He could see into the filthy kitchen, where the dogs licked the cooking utensils and cats walked on the cutting boards. The cook was enslaved, and the jailer’s wife beat her frequently with a rawhide whip, from 20 to 50 strokes at a time.

Though sick and starving, the screams of the children bothered him most. The cook had a child, the jailer had three, and they all screamed for six hours at a time, causing him severe headaches. “There is a vast difference between crying naturally and occasionally, and screaming at the top of one’s voice with rage and passion,” he wrote.

After a while he moved to another cell, where fresh blood stained the door. One of the men he had tried to take to the Bahamas killed himself by cutting his throat and belly with a razor. He’d been falsely accused of stealing; the item turned up after someone else had moved it. The man who committed suicide hadn’t done anything wrong.

Illustration of the branding of Jonathan Walker’s hand

Sentenced to a Branded Hand

In November, Jonathan Walker went to trial in federal court for stealing Anthony Catlett, Silas Scott, Charles Johnson and his brother Moses. He was found guilty, to no one’s surprise. The judge sentenced him to the pillory, the branded hand, a fine and more prison time.

A silent crowd watched as Jonathan Walker stood in the pillory. Then George Willis, one of the slave-holders, snatched a handkerchief from Walker’s head, where it shielded him from the sun. He took two rotten eggs from his pocket and, wrote Walker, “He hurled them very spitefully at my head.” That ‘excited a burst of indignation from the bystanders.’

After his hour was up he washed his head with water, then went to the courtroom. The marshal tied his hand to the railing. A blacksmith had made a special branding iron for Walker after two had refused to do it. The marshal pressed the brand against his hand firmly for 15 or 20 seconds. The pain was severe, wrote Walker. Only a few watched, but George Willis ‘feasted his eyes upon it.’

His ordeal didn’t end there. While still in prison, he was charged with stealing the other three fugitives. A jury found him guilty. Jonathan Walker finally received some mercy, though. The jurors assessed him a fine of $5 for each offense.

Finally, after a year of suffering in prison, Jonathan Walker went home to Plymouth, Mass., with his branded hand. He endured it all, he wrote, for ‘an act of kindness towards some of the down-trodden of some of my own countrymen.’

The Man With the Branded Hand

Walker continued his fight against slavery, traveling the abolitionist lecture circuit. He wasn’t much of a speaker, though, so after speaking for a few moments he held up his branded hand. He called it, ‘the seal, the coat of arms of the United States.’ Then he walked into the crowd to show them his hand.

His abolitionist activities kept him in poverty, though. Once, when two fugitives from slavery and their small children arrived in Plymouth, Walker was furious that his neighbors did little to help them. He invited them to stay in his small cabin, but he had little food or heat and they soon left.

Eventually the Walker family moved west. He died on May 1, 1878 in Muskegon, Mich. A monument was erected on his grave at Evergreen Cemetery. The Harwich Historical Society erected a plaque in front of Brooks Academy commemorating Jonathan Walker.

With thanks to Matthew Clavin for his book, Aiming for Pensacola. Also to A Short Sketch of the Life and Services of Jonathan Walker: The Man with a Branded Hand with a Poem by John G. Whittier and an Address by Hon. Parker Pillsbury, One of Walker’s Anti-slavery Friends, and a Funeral Oration by Rev. F.E. Kittredge and Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola. This story was updated in 2022.

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Capt. Austin Bearse, Conductor on a Watery Underground Railroad

Austin Bearse sailed the waters of the southern coast of America between 1818 and 1830. The sea captain of Barnstable on Cape Cod had started out as a mate on coastal schooners. In the winter months, the schooners would often linger in the South. They then served the ports between Baltimore and New Orleans doing warm-weather duty.

The trips gave Bearse an up-close look at slavery in the United States, and a fervor for the abolition movement.

The ships would travel up rivers to plantations to pick up rice and cotton to come to market. They would also bring the necessities for the plantation, including at times slaves sent to the fields. Sometimes they brought one or two and sometimes as many as 80.

Bearse later recalled how slavers separated them from their families and connections “with as little concern as calves and pigs are selected out of a lot of domestic animals.”

Austin Bearse

The traffic grew to disgust Austin Bearse.

“Our vessel used to lie at a place called Poor Man’s Hole, not far from the city. We used to allow the relatives and friends of the slaves to come on board and stay all night with their friends, before the vessel sailed. In the morning it used to be my business to pull off the hatches and warn them that it was time to separate, and the shrieks and cries at these times were enough to make anybody’s heart ache.”

Bearse’s travels took him around the world. and he knew about slavery in foreign ports. And in the American South, he saw the brutal conditions of the plantations. While northern visitors to southern cities might meet an occasional domestic slave, they rarely saw the way the slaves on plantations lived and died.

“My opinion is that American slavery, as I have seen it in the internal slave trade, as I have seen it on the rice and sugar plantations, and in the city of New Orleans, was fully as bad as any slavery in the world — heathen or Christian.”

Austin Bearse

Resolute Fellows

On one voyage in 1828 aboard the brig Milton, two slaves boarded the vessel in South Carolina, bound for New Orleans.

“When we were in the Gulf Stream, I came to the men and took off their handcuffs. They were resolute fellows, and they told me I would see they would never live to be slaves in New Orleans.

“One of them was a carpenter and one a blacksmith. We brought them into New Orleans, and consigned them over to the agent. The agent told the captain that in forty-eight hours afterwards they were all dead men, having every one killed himself as they said they should. One of them I know was bought for a fireman on the steamer “Post Boy,” that went down to the Balize. He jumped overboard and … drowned.

“In my past days, the system of slavery was not much discussed. I saw these things as others did, without interference. Because I no longer think it right to see these things in silence, I trade no more south of Mason and Dixon’s line.”

Smuggler

After Austin Bearse converted to the abolitionist movement, he began taking more direct action. And by July of 1847, now a captain in his own right, Bearse could do more. He began a long career as a smuggler of slaves to freedom.

Lucretia Mott, one of the Mott sisters

“In July, 1847, I sailed with a loaded vessel bound to Albany, N. Y. On my arrival there, I called on the Mott sisters, ladies well known to the Anti-Slavery friends in Boston and elsewhere. Miss Mott told me they had a slave secreted just out of the city, who was in danger. His name was George Lewis.”

A court had issued a writ for him, she said, and she wished Bearse to take him to Boston.

“As soon as I was ready to sail, she brought him to my vessel at night, with his baggage and I stowed him away. In three days I passed New York, and on getting into Long Island Sound, I told George Lewis he could safely show himself on deck, which he was glad to do.”

George Lewis

On the passage, he told Bearse his story, and Bearse found him very intelligent. George Lewis was not only a Baptist preacher, but a house and ship carpenter and bridge builder. Enslaved at City Point, Va., his master was his half-brother.

“He had a wife and seven children, and being entrusted with all the overseeing, often made trips to Washington, where his eldest daughter Lizzie was living with his master’s mother,” wrote Bearse. “In his absence, the Baptist minister came and took his second daughter from his house for base purposes.”

Lewis cried out upon his infamy, and the minister had him hauled up and flogged. George, who had never before been whipped, told his wife he could do nothing more for them. He must leave them, he said, to go to a land of freedom.

The North Star

“At night he kneeled down and prayed with them. He then took his saw and a bundle of clothes, and went to the ferry. The ferryman pulled him across James River, and. hiding by day, and travelling by the North Star at night, he reached the Potomac River, where he found a sloop loaded with wood bound for Alexandria. The captain, knowing him, took him on board, and after dark George made his way over the long bridge to Washington, where his daughter Lizzie hid him in her mistress’ attic all winter.

In April, wrote Bearse, George Lewis took the newly-completed Underground Railroad for Baltimore. He bade Lizzie good-by, and she told him she should soon start herself for a land of freedom.

“At Baltimore, he was continued on by the same mysterious route to Philadelphia, and so on to New York, where friends forwarded him to the care of the Misses Mott, at Albany. They procured him work, and protected him from the hunters. His master heard of him in this way.”

“When the warm weather came, Lizzie took the same railroad, and followed her father to New York; there she lost track of him, and the Anti-Slavery friends concluded to send her to Boston. A coast survey steamer came into Boston for repairs. One of the crew, a colored man who had known her in Washington, met her where she was stopping, at Mr. Thacker’s in Southac Street, and found out from her that, her father was in Albany. He told an officer on board the “Bibb,” who was a brother of the master.”

Austin Bearse Reminisces

“George Lewis heard of his daughter’s being in Boston from the Rev. Mr. Grimes, who was at a meeting near Albany, and said, to the father’s great joy, Lizzie was safe in Boston. He also took the news to Lizzie that her father was in Albany.

Rev. Leonard Grimes

“When we reached Boston, Mr. Wallcutt took us to Southac Street, and while we were looking for the number of the house, I heard someone say “Well, there’s father!” We turned to look, and it was indeed Lizzie calling “Father!”

The next day, Bearse took George Lewis to Samuel Hall’s shipyard in East Boston. Hall then employed him for three years. Some of his ship carpenters left on account of it, but Hall kept George.

“When George’s master found he could not get George back from Albany, he sold his wife and five children to Richmond, Va. The money was raised, and Rev. Mr. Grimes went on to Richmond and bought them, and brought them all to Boston, when George was made a happy man.”

“In 1850, George Lewis went to Nova Scotia, afraid to stay in Boston after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. He stayed in Nova Scotia till the Proclamation of Emancipation. His daughter Lizzie married Mr. Richard S. Brown, of the Boston Custom House, well known as a good citizen, and a credit to his race.”

After delivering George Lewis to Boston, Austin Bearse made many more interventions during his career. He set them down in his memoir, Reminiscences of Fugitive-Slave Law Days in Boston.

This story was updated in 2023. Image of Austin Bearse By Unknown – Original publication: UnknownImmediate source: http://www.masshist.org/database/viewer.php?item_id=862&img_step=1&mode=large, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54788043.

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Joshua Hempstead, Diarist of Colonial New London, Conn.

Joshua Hempstead throughout his long life in colonial New England pursued many business activities, some of which carried perils almost unimaginable today. Misfortune could strike at any time, and the early colonists knew well the vicissitudes of life.

He was a model New Englander of the era, a devout, hard-working tradesman, dedicated to his family and to his community.

A page from Joshua Hempstead’s diary

Hempstead worked as a surveyor, shipwright, gravestone carver, lawyer, local official and — always — a farmer. Like 90 percent of colonial New England men, he could read and write, and he kept a diary for most of his life. He used it to keep track of his many business and civic activities. He noted the weather, baptisms, engagements, deaths, military trainings, court sessions, ship traffic, town meetings, thanksgivings, fasts, feasts and his travels. The New London County Historical Society published it in 1901. Historians for many years used it for its references to events like the Boston fire of 1711 and the Great Awakening of the 1740s.

As historians got more interested in the lives of ordinary people, the diary drew more attention. Today, the Connecticut Historical Society views his diary as an important source about colonial life in Connecticut.

Joshua Hempstead

Joshua Hempstead was born Sept. 1, 1678 in New London, the only son of Joshua Hempstead and Elizabeth Larrabee. His grandfather, Robert Hempstead, had entailed the house to his oldest son. That meant oldest sons in perpetuity would inherit the entire estate.

The Joshua Hempstead House

Joshua’s father, a wheelwright, died when he was only 10, and Joshua inherited the house. His descendants lived in the house until 1937.

As a boy he entered into apprenticeship with a shipwright, then the aristocrats of the wood-turning trades. Around 1698 he married Abigail Bailey of Long Island. They had nine children. Abigail died in 1716 a few days after giving birth to their last child. Joshua Hempstead never remarried, but reared the children with the help of relatives and women hired to help with the housework.

Joshua Hempstead, 1711

New London had been founded in 1646 by John Winthrop the Younger, son of the Puritan leader of the Massachusetts colony, and several dozen planters of the middling sort. One of them was Joshua Hempstead’s grandfather.

The young Winthrop died in 1676, and his sons inherited his vast landholdings. Joshua Hempstead acted as their agent, managing their affairs when the head of the family was away.

John Winthrop the Younger

New London grew into a busy village of farmers, merchants, shipbuilders and mariners. The town did a brisk trade with the West Indies, and Hempstead often notes the arrival and departure of ships from Barbadoes. Within 50 years the population would grow to more than 3,000 people.

In 1711, Hempstead had a growing family, a farm and civic responsibilities. During the fall of that year he had to harvest his crops and work on building a ship while serving on a jury.

Oct. 2, 1711 I picked out Corn & made a Platform to Lay ye husks on & I gathered some corn. A great fire in Boston this night.
He continued to gather and husk corn.

It took five days to find out more. On Sunday, Oct. 7, 1711 he wrote,

mr white Preached in ye forenoon & mr. Hunting in ye afternoon. the sad news came of a great fire in Boston burnt from ye School house Lane to Almost ye heart of ye Town Dock both sides ye Street about 100 houses burnt & 8 or 9 sons Lost.

Death in 1716

John Winthrop the Younger practiced medicine on the side when he wasn’t governing a colony. He diagnosed and medicated about 500 Connecticut residents. His son Wait followed in his footsteps, serving both as governor and doctoring on the side. On August 4, he tried to heal Joshua’s wife, Abigail, who had given birth to their ninth child, Mary, on July 29.

On Aug. 4, 1716 he wrote,

I was in ye yard about Town al day. my wife very Ill. Mr. Winthrop come to visit her in ye Evening used means for her Relief & Mr Miller Let her blood in.

On Sunday, Aug. 5, he wrote,

my Dear Wife Died about half an hour before Sunrise. I was at home al day except in the Evening I went to ye burying place.

Her body was buried about 2 p.m. the next day. He carried the newborn baby to Mary Trumans at night to Nurse. The next day he went to look for a nurse.

Two days later he noted that his 17-year-old son Joshua had taken ill with a sore throat and fever.

On Friday, Oct. 10:

my Dutyfull Son Joshua Died about Noon like a Lamb being 17 years & 20 days old a pattern of patience.

He buried Joshua next to his mother. All three now rest in New London’s Cedar Grove Cemetery.

Cedar Grove Cemetery, 2021. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Joshua Hempstead, 1724

At the age of 46 he decided to travel to Stonington, Conn., to deliver gravestones and pick up some cider. Today the trip is a 20-minute drive. In 1724, it took quite a bit longer, even by boat, the preferred method of transportation along the coast in those days.

On Nov. 12, 1724, Joshua Hempstead set out for Stonington with his son Stephen. He reported in his diary, as usual, on the weather. It started out fair, but didn’t stay that way.

I Set out for Stonington in Jos Coits Longboat with Stephen in order to fetch Cyder. I carried 10 pr gravestones. 7 for Wm Wheeler, 1 for Ebe Wms & 2 pr Not Sold. ye Wind was high about W S W & a great Sea that I dare not venture Round Long point. I put in for Mumford’s. But got on the flatts was forced to put most of the Stones overboard & yt got a Shore. Lay out al night under a Hay Stack.

The weather improved the next day, and Hempstead and his son visited the famously hospitable George Mumford. Wrote Hempstead:

In ye Morn wee went up to Mumfords on Mr Winthrops farm Stayed for the Tide to Rise got ye Stones in about 2 Clock & got up with them about 6. I Lodged at Mr Wms & Stephen at Bennats with John.

Adam Jackson, 1727

On Sept. 21, 1727, Joshua Hempstead bought a slave, Adam Jackson, for 85 pounds.

“I bot Adam for £ 85,” he wrote.

It wasn’t unusual for people in coastal New England towns to own an enslaved person or two. Nearby Rhode Island, the slave-trading capital of New England, provided a steady supply of kidnapped Africans to work in bondage.

Jackson, born in Africa, lived in the Hempstead house with him for 30 years. His children did too, as well as other members of Hempstead’s family.

They worked side by side.

On a cold spring day in 1728, “I was on the Island with Nathll & adam cutting wood.”

In July of 1730, “wee Carted the Ld of hay to Stewarts & Carted 2 Ld in the lot & Stackt it & mowed the oats only my Self & Adam.”

In the fall of 1747, “In the foren[oon] I went to mamacock with adam & Jonat & finisht Raking the Salt hay.”

And as late as 1754, when Hempstead was 75, “helpt adam Load up 4 pr of gravestones at Picketts wharf…”

James Davenport, 1743

Many New England towns were caught up in religious fervor called the First Great Awakening during the 1730s and 1740s. A cross-eyed English minister named George Whitefield helped start it all, touring the colonies to give fiery speeches.

James Davenport and others followed in Whitefield’s footsteps. They preached that people could find salvation through spiritual rebirth – a rebirth that started with public weeping, groaning and howling. A Yale graduate from Stamford, Davenport’s career nosedived when he threw his pants into a bonfire of the vanities in New London.

Joshua Hempstead took notice of Davenport and his followers, who called themselves New Lights. The preacher did not impress Hempstead when he went to hear him on Feb. 27, 1743.

I went to Town to Meeting to hear Mr Davenport, but it was Scarcely worth the hearing. the praying was without form or Comelyness. it was dificult to distinguish between his praying & preaching for it was all Meer Confused medly. he had no Text nor Boble visable, no Doctrine, uses, nor Improvement nor anything Else that was Regular…he Calld the people to Sing a New Song &c forevermore 30 or 40 times Imediately following as fast as one word could follow after another 30 or 40 times or more & yn Something Else & then over with it again. I cant Relate the Inconsistance of it.

George Washington, 1756

Hempstead died on Dec. 22, 1758, 17 years before the American Revolution started. He did, however, catch a glimpse of a 24-year-old George Washington, who rode through town during the French and Indian War.

George Washington by Charles Wilson Peale.

The sight of Washington in New London on March 8, 1756, caused him to wax unusually descriptive.

Col. Washington is returned from Boston and gone to Long Island, in Power’s sloop; he had also two boats to carry six horses and his retinue; all bound to Virginia. He hath been to advise with Governor Shirley, or to be directed by him, as he is chief general of the American forces.

By then Hempstead had trouble with his hearing. On Aug. 20, 1756, he recorded a trip to the doctor in his diary:

fryd 20 fair. In the foren(oon) I rid out & Joshua to John Stubbins’s & Wm Manwarings & there had Doctor Wm Hough to Try to help me in hearing. he Seringed my Ears & drew out a Large gob of Ear wax out of my Right Ear & then I could heard my Watch click which I could not before. Chappel & adam finish Stacking the last hay att the Lowerend of the Lot.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Joshua Hempstead House By Jerrye & Roy Klotz, MD – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35972709.

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Daniel Webster Tells Dr. Samuel Merritt to Go West. He Does, With No Regrets.

In 1849, Samuel Merritt was making a name for himself as a physician in Plymouth, Mass. Merritt, originally from Harpswell, Maine, completed a difficult operation on a friend of the aging statesman Daniel Webster. Webster lived in nearby Marshfield at the time.

Impressed, Webster befriended the young doctor. As they spoke, Merritt admitted his fascination with the gold rush drawing people to California. Webster advised him, “Go out there, young man; go out there and behave yourself, and, free as you are from family cares, you will never regret it.”

Samuel Merritt

It was the nudge Merritt needed.

He was 26 years old. He decided to head west, making a business venture of his journey. Merritt bought a small sailing vessel and filled it with provisions. California was flush with gold, but it lacked supplies to build camps and roads and to feed and clothe miners.

As Merritt planned his departure, he had one regret. His efforts to procure nails for sale failed, and he had to leave without them. Though the nails would have brought him a fine profit, it hardly mattered. He left in September of 1849, equipped with letters of reference and an introduction from Webster. He sailed around the tip of South America, stopping for two weeks along the way.

When he arrived in San Francisco harbor, the city had just suffered the calamitous fire of December 1849. Its gambling houses and hotels were in ashes. The owners of these lucrative properties were desperate to rebuild. When Merritt’s ship showed up with supplies, they set upon him with offers for everything he had brought at prices far exceeding his expectations.

The enormous windfall encouraged Merritt to continue expanding his trading efforts. He leased another, larger ship. This time, his plan was modelled on Massachusetts’ Frederic Tudor’s ice business. Tudor took ice harvested from New England ponds and shipped it around the world.

Merritt believed San Francisco, with its healthy thirst, would welcome ice in the warmer months. And so he dispatched his new boat and its captain to the Puget Sound region with a crew to harvest ice and return with it.

When they returned, the captain had disappointing news. It was not cold enough to freeze the ponds in the Puget Sound area, and he had returned without ice. But he had not come back empty handed. The clever captain had bargained with the Native Americans he encountered to let him harvest timber, and he had filled the boat with lumber.

Successful Ventures

The trade was extremely profitable. Merritt would load his ship with goods for the Native Americans and return with lumber to fuel the exponential growth in San Francisco. Merritt kept the details of his transactions to himself while his ship made several more highly profitable trips. He next decided to get into the coal business.

Lake Merritt, 1890

He dispatched a ship to Newcastle, England, with instructions to load up with coal and return. Again, his clever captain made a wise decision. Upon arriving in Newcastle, the captain found the docks so crowded that he would have to wait a long time before loading. In addition, he realized the load of coal would be too small to make a profit.

Instead of waiting, he departed to Tahiti, where he procured a full load of oranges. They were the first oranges to arrive in San Francisco. People snapped them up, bringing enormous profit to Merritt.

Dr. Merritt

Merritt himself continued practicing medicine. He was regularly spotted rowing around San Francisco Bay providing medical care to sailors, since the city had no hospital.

He would return to Bath, Maine, to visit family in 1853 and again in 1862, to settle the affairs of his brother, Capt. Isaac Merritt. Upon his trips home, he would commission new ships, including two vessels designed specifically for the coastal lumber trade.

The Camron-Stafford House, built by Samuel Merritt in 1876.

With his fortune growing, Merritt invested heavily in California real estate, including the land surrounding Lake Merritt, in the center of Oakland, Calif. He dabbled in politics, serving on the 1856 committee of vigilance, a controversial vigilante organization in San Francisco. It policed crime, politics and civil disputes and handed out harsh old-West style justice, including hangings.

Robert Louis Stevenson aboard the Casco

Merritt declined an offer to serve as mayor of San Francisco, but did serve one term as mayor of Oakland. At 6’3” tall and weighing 340 pounds, Merritt was prominent both physically and politically.

Institutional Memory

Merritt influenced dozens of California institutions, some of which remain active today. He founded Samuel Merritt Hospital and Samuel Merritt University. He was a founder of the California Insurance Company and the Oakland Bank of Savings, and he was an early supporter of the creation of the University of California.

Merritt’s chief pastime, as he got older, was sailing on his yacht Casco, both on short journeys and long. And he provided the vessel to Robert Louis Stevenson for his voyage to the South Seas in 1888.

By 1890, diabetes took its toll on Merritt. He had never married, and his sister had joined him in California. A fall from a carriage that year triggered a sharp decline in his health. He died on Aug. 17, 1890 at the age of 67, with, as Daniel Webster had promised, few if any regrets.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Lake Merritt By Aran Johnson, Attribution, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7714281. Camron-Stafford House By Californiathegreat – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50547896.

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