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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/25709911@N08/6809987125, 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/25709911@N08/6809950259, 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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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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Joshua James Avenges His Mother’s Death by Saving Hundreds of Lives

Growing up in Hull, Mass., Joshua James saw more than his share of shipwrecks. One in particular sent him on a lifelong mission of saving lives at sea.

Joshua James with his Life-Saving medals.

He began saving lives at the age of 15, when he joined the Massachusetts Humane Society, until his death while on duty at the age of 75.

Joshua James

Joshua James was born on Nov. 22, 1826 in Hull, Mass., the ninth of 12 children born to Esther Dill and William James. His father owned a fleet of schooners that hauled paving stones to Boston.

During his lifetime, the Port of Boston, just north of Hull, became one of the busiest ports in the country. One hundred ships a day would pass Hull, which jutted into Massachusetts Bay at the southern boundary of Boston Harbor. Coastal storms frequently wrecked ships on Hull’s shores.

Aerial view of Hull, Mass.

On April 3, 1837, his mother and baby sister returned from Boston on his brother’s schooner Hepzibah. Joshua, 10, stood on shore watching the vessel come into the harbor. But a half-mile out, a sudden squall rose up and knocked the Hepzibah on its side. The boy watched as the boat sank, his mother and sister aboard. He vowed to do everything he could to prevent others from the same fate.

Five years later he jumped into a surf boat manned by volunteers from the Massachusetts Humane Society. They rescued the crew of a ship battered by a storm. The Massachusetts Humane Society, formed in 1786 to rescue people shipwrecked at sea, provided the model for the U.S. Life-Saving Service established in 1848. By 1915, the U.S. Coast Guard took over operation of the Life-Saving Service.

For decades, Joshua James voluntarily saved people from shipwrecks. But he had to work to support his wife, Louisa, and three children. So he fished, coasted from Boston to Hull carrying paving stones, salvaged ships and lightering cargo from ship to shore.

He won his first life-saving medal at the age of 24 for rescuing the crew of the French brig L’Essai.

James performed his most astonishing life-saving feat, one that required seamanship and courage, at the age of 62. He had already spent decades rescuing hundreds of people when the Great Snow Hurricane of 1888 struck the New England Coast.

Finest Hours

On Nov. 25, 1888, a category 2 hurricane struck New England, bringing with it driving snow, extremely high tides and a pounding surf. As the storm worsened, Joshua James climbed Telegraph Hill and saw five schooners and a coal barge anchored off Nantasket. Fearing the storm would wreck them, he ordered his volunteers to patrol the beach.

A breeches buoy. U.S. Coast Guard photo

In the afternoon they discovered the Cox and Green wrecked on the beach. They dragged their equipment — breeches buoy, a gun to throw a line and surf boat — half a mile from the Stony Point Station. One by one, they rescued all nine men.

Sumner Kimball, who organized the U.S. Life-Saving Service, wrote a book about Joshua James. In it, he described the next, near-miraculous rescue of the Gertrude Abbott that night.

Gertrude Abbott

An eighth of a mile away, they could see through the dark another three-masted schooner, the Gertrude Abbott, wrecked on the rocks. James and his men carried their boat and gear through the storm to the schooner.

She was so far from shore they’d have to go get the crew in the lifeboat. James warned his men they’d likely perish trying to save the sailors, wrote Kimball. “Without a moment’s hesitation every man offered himself, and they ran the boat into the water and started for the wreck,” he wrote.

Spectators on the beach made a bonfire, which gave hope to the shipwrecked sailors. The lifeboat reached the Gertrude Abbott‘s bow and the crew threw a line aboard. The sailors made it fast, and when the lifeboat rose high on the crest of a wave they jumped into the lifeboat, one by one.

Joshua James and Crew (he’s in blue)

But the overloaded lifeboat had to get past the rocks and the roiling sea between to get to shore. Within 200 yards of the beach, the boat struck a boulder and filled it with water. But the men stuck to the boat even as it slammed against the rocks. The crew managed to keep it pointed toward shore until finally a humongous wave lifted it in the air and dashed it against the rocks. Though it tore into pieces, all the men got ashore, some pulled out of the water by spectators on shore.

More To Go

Even at 62, Joshua James wasn’t ready to call it a night. He and his crew patrolled the beaches until 3 a.m., when they found still another three-masted schooner, the Bertha F. Walker, wrecked and grounded about a half-mile away from the Gertrude Abbott. They couldn’t reach her with a line from the shore, so they walked to the Strawberry Hill station four miles away for another lifeboat. Then they hitched up horses and hauled the surfboat to the wreck, where they rescued seven sailors clinging to the rigging.

But even before they finished that rescue, a messenger rode up on horseback to tell them of two more wrecks on Atlantic Hill, five miles away.

Up all night with no breakfast and scanty supper, James’ crew soldiered on. They reached the H.C. Higginson, sunk between two ledges with five exhausted sailors clinging to the rigging. Two other lifesaving crews had arrived and managed to send a breeches-buoy to the vessel. But the lines had fouled and were useless. So Joshua James and his crew rowed out in the furious sea. After 45 minutes the waves washed the boat ashore with two holes in it. So they patched the holes and tried again. The lifeboat came up against the stern of the vessel, and as each sailor climbed down from the rigging the life-saving crew threw him a line, and he’d jump into the water to be fished out and into the lifeboat.

The other wreck had grounded on the beach and the sailors got off safely, so James and his life-savers headed home.

All told, they saved 29 lives during that one storm. Coast Guard historian William Thiesen called it ‘an unprecedented feat of skill, leadership, and sheer physical strength’ — especially for a 62-year-old.

Point Allerton

Joshua James and the Point Allerton crew in their gear. Courtesy U.S. Coast Guard.

In 1890, the Life-Saving Service appointed Joshua James keeper of the new Point Allerton Life-Saving Station, despite his age — 63 years old. He had saved 450 lives, and the Service waived the mandatory retirement age of 45 for him. He continued saving lives for another 13 years.

In fact, he saved another 90 — no small feat for a man in his 60s and 70s.

Ebbing Tide

He died on March 19, 1902. A northeast gale blew, and he decided to drill his crew with a new self-bailing surfboat. For an hour they managed the boat in the roiling sea. They grounded the boat and he jumped out, looked at the sea and said, “The tide is ebbing.” Then he fell on the wet sand, dead of a heart attack.

Every May 23, the Hull Life-Saving Museum and the Point Allerton Station (which houses the Hull Life-Saving Museum) honor Joshua James at his gravesite. And on Aug. 8, 2015, the Coast Guard commissioned the fifth national security cutter, Coast Guard Cutter James.

With thanks to Joshua James, life-saver by Sumner Kimball. Aerial view of Hull by By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2010_04_28_bos-rdu_018Uploaded by PDTillman, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10586927. This story was updated in 2024.

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The Boston Slave Riot of 1854

The Boston slave riot of 1854 was a contest for the soul of Boston in which slavery supporters won the battle but lost the war.

Anthony Burns, whose arrest caused the Boston slave riot.

An angry mob of abolitionists tried to free a captured slave and failed, but the struggle awakened fervent anti-slavery sentiment throughout the North. It sent Wendell Phillips on a speaking tour, transformed Ralph Waldo Emerson into an ardent abolitionist and convinced Henry David Thoreau to urge civil disobedience.

Philanthropist Amos Lawrence said, “We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”

Anthony Burns

On the night of May 24, 1854, federal marshals seized 19-year-old Anthony Burns on Court Street and wrestled him into the courthouse on a trumped-up charge of jewelry theft.

Burns was born into slavery in Virginia. When he was 15, his arm was mangled in the sawmill where he was working. He later hired out to work on the wharves of Richmond, where he befriended a sailor from Boston who helped him escape.

He found a series of odd jobs in Boston to support himself. Burns worked in a Brattle Street clothing store when his’ owner discovered where he lived in Boston. Authorities identified him by a scar on his face that looked like a brand and an inch of bone protruding from his wrist.

The arrest horrified Wendell Phillips, the wealthy, 42-year-old son of Boston’s first mayor, and the rest of the city’s abolitionists. It wasn’t so much that the Fugitive Slave Act was being enforced — it had taken effect in 1850. Burns’ arrest came on the heels of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act two days earlier. Kansas would certainly enter the Union as a slave state, and slavery opponents feared slavery could then seep north into Boston as well.

Indignation at Burns’ arrest intensified because of the presence of several abolitionist and women’s rights groups checking into Boston hotels for their annual convention.

Wendell Phillips, by Matthew Brady

The next day Wendell Phillips went to see the terrified Anthony Burns in the courthouse. He then persuaded him to accept legal help from Richard Henry Dana, Jr.

The Boston Slave Riot

A large and furious crowd gathered at Faneuil Hall to protest Burns’ capture. Phillips gave a speech, asking 500 volunteers to surround the courthouse the next day.

Unknown to him, another abolitionist, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had bought axes and planned to attack the courthouse to free Burns that night. At a pre-arranged signal, the crowd surged toward the courthouse.

The night riot at the courthouse. Burn’s cell is lit up in the upper left.

The Boston slave riot failed to free the prisoner, but killed a guard in the melee.

As many as a thousand troops poured into the city to restore order as the trial got under way.

After a four-day trial, the judge ordered Burns back to slavery as Phillips watched helplessly in the courtroom. He visited Burns in his cell. “Mr. Phillips,” Burns implored, “has everything been done for me that can be done? Must I go back?”

Phillips replied, “Burns, there isn’t humanity, there isn’t justice enough here to save you; you must go back.”

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., had pleaded in the courtroom for Burns’ freedom for 4-1/2 hours. For his efforts he was attacked by pro-slavery rioters.

Martial Law

On June 2, the governor placed Boston under martial law. Anthony Burns was to be shipped back to Virginia. As guards prepared to march him to the ship, nearly 50,000 people lined the streets, held back by Marines and police officers. Storefronts were draped in black, and people hung out upper windows spitting on the soldiers as the crowd shrieked, ‘Shame! Shame!’ Burns walked through the crowd with his head held high to the ship that would carry him back to Virginia.

Boston would long remember the sight of a solitary black man walking through a gauntlet of federal troops holding back crowds. President Franklin Pierce had hoped that stern enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law would quell opposition to it. But he miscalculated badly. The Boston slave riot intensified feelings against slavery in Massachusetts as the federal troops had seemed to place the commonwealth “under the feet of Virginia.”

Marshals taking Burns down State Street

Aftermath

Wendell Phillips sank into depression, from which he emerged with fresh resolve to take his anti-slavery message out of Boston to the Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes. He had the blessing of his invalid wife, who would spend long weeks at home without him.

Burns wrote to Phillips from a jail in Richmond, Va., asking him to ‘dow all you can for me.’ His owner refused to sell him to abolitionists, who had raised $1,200 for the purchase.

Finally, Anthony Burns was put on the auction block and sold to David McDaniel. McDaniel did agree to sell Burns to the Boston abolitionists for $1,300. He then returned to Boston.

Wendell Phillips arranged for Anthony Burns to attend Oberlin College, where an anonymous donor gave him a scholarship. Anthony Burns would graduate, become a Baptist minister, and die of tuberculosis at the age of 28.

Phillips became the country’s foremost orator against slavery. After the Civil War, he championed the rights of women, Indians and labor. In 1870 he ran for governor of Massachusetts as a labor and temperance candidate. He lost.

Wendell Phillips died on Feb. 2, 1884. In July 1915, a monument was dedicated to commemorate him in the Boston Public Garden.

This story was updated in 2022.

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