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Concord Mass.

The Wreck of the Famine Ship St. John (According to Thoreau)

On Oct. 7, 1849, the brig St. John struck Grampus Ledge off the coast of Cohasset during a sudden and furious storm.

The St. John was known as a famine ship because its passengers were mostly destitute Irish emigrants fleeing the great famine. An estimated 20 percent died of disease or starvation aboard the famine ships, but more than a hundred died in the wreck of the St. John.

Henry David Thoreau happened to visit Cape Cod as the victims were gathered and buried. His account forms the opening chapter of his book Cape Cod.

Wreck of the St. John

Thoreau, who lived in Concord, Mass., decided he wanted to get a better view than he’d had of the ocean. He and a companion, the poet William Ellery Channing, left Concord for Boston on Oct. 9, 1849. On reaching Boston they learned the steamship to Provincetown hadn’t arrived because of a violent storm. They saw in the streets a handbill that said, “Death! 145 lives lost at Cohasset.”

Henry David Thoreau

So they decided to take the train to Cohasset.

“We found many Irish in the cars, going to identify bodies and to sympathize with the survivors, and also to attend the funeral which was to take place in the afternoon,” Thoreau wrote.

When they arrived, nearly every passenger headed to the beach and many others flocked in from the nearby countryside.

“As we passed the graveyard we saw a large hole, like a cellar, freshly dug there,” he wrote. And “we met several hay riggings and farm-wagons coming away toward the meeting house, each loaded with three large, rough deal boxes. We did not need to ask what was in them.”

Thoreau learned the St. John, from Galway, had wrecked on Sunday morning. The sea on Tuesday still broke violently on the rocks. Thoreau probably did not then know that the captain, Martin Oliver, hadn’t exactly tried to save the passengers.

Martin Oliver

According to the Boston Daily Bee, before the ship smashed against the rock,

…the jolly boat was hanging by the tackle, alongside, when the stern ringbolt broke and the boat fell into the water. The Captain, second mate and two boys jumped in to get her clear, when about 25 passengers jumped in and swamped her. The twenty-five, together with the second mate and two boys, perished. The captain caught a rope hanging over the quarter, and was drawn on board by the first mate. When the long boat was got clear, a number of passengers jumped over to swim to her, but all perished. The captain, first mate (Mr. Crawford), and seven of the crew swam to and reached the boat.

Large Boxes

On the beach in Cohasset, Thoreau noted 18 or 20 of the large boxes lying on a green hillside and surrounded by a crowd. People had collected the bodies, some 27 or 28, and brought them there. “Some were rapidly nailing down the lids, others were carting the boxes away, and others were lifting the lids, which were yet loose, and peeping under the cloths, for each body, with such rags as still adhered to it, was covered loosely with a white sheet.”

He witnessed no sign of grief, he wrote, “but there was a sober dispatch of business which was affecting.”

“I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen and mangled body of a drowned girl, — who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family,–to which some rags still adhered…”

Sometimes, he wrote, he saw two or more children or a parent and child in the same box. “On the lid would perhaps be written with red chalk, “Bridget such-a-one, and sister’s child.”

The shore along the border of Scituate and Cohasset.

The Remains of the St. John

Thoreau then walked along the beach and saw in a cove bits of a ship and a great quantity of feathers. A sailor told him that was the St. John. Then Thoreau looked out at Grampus Rock and saw part of the vessel sticking up.

In a second cove the wreckage on shore piled up several feet deep, with an occasional bonnet or jacket on it.

“In the very midst of the crowd about this wreck, there were men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up,” he wrote. Sometimes they had to separate clothing fragments from the seaweed.

Thoreau then discovered a part of one side of the St. John behind some rocks. He estimated its size as 40 feet long and 14 feet wide.

“I was even more surprised at the power of the waves, exhibited on this shattered fragment, than I had been at the sight of the smaller fragments before,” he wrote. “The largest timbers and iron braces were broken superfluously, and I saw that no material could withstand the power of the waves; that iron must go to pieces in such a case, and an iron vessel would be cracked up like an egg-shell on the rocks.”

The Funeral

Then, in the afternoon, Thoreau and Channing saw the funeral procession at a distance. The captain and the other survivors of the St. John walked at the head of it.

Cohasset Central Cemetery

“On the whole, it was not so impressive a scene as I might have expected,” he wrote. “If I had found one body cast upon the beach in some lonely place, it would have affected me more. I sympathized rather with the winds and waves, as if to toss and mangle these poor human bodies was the order of the day.”

Thoreau concluded his essay on the wreck of the St. John with the observation that the victims had come to the New World as Columbus or the Pilgrims had.

“[B]ut, before they could reach it, they emigrated to a newer world than ever Columbus dreamed of, yet one of whose existence we believe that there is far more universal and convincing evidence — though it has not yet been discovered by science…”

Most of the victims today lie buried in Cohasset Central Cemetery.

Image: Cohasset shore by Chris Devers, CC by 2.0, via Flickr. Cohasset Central Cemetery Google image: 2021 MassGIS, Commonwealth of Massachusetts EOEA, Maxar Technologies, Map data 2021. This story updated in 2022.

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Helen and Sophia Thoreau, Henry David’s Amazing Sisters

Henry Thoreau wouldn’t have been Henry Thoreau without his sisters, Helen and Sophia Thoreau. Or his brother, for that matter. But John Thoreau got plenty of ink in the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Helen and Sophia, not so much.

Helen and Sophia played huge roles in shaping the writer, naturalist and author who influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Helen believed in him when others thought him a kook. He and Sophia grew so close toward the end of his life that a friend called them ‘like twins.’

Sophia Thoreau’s favorite image of her brother Henry

None of the Thoreau children married, and most of them, for most of their lives, belonged to the family household in Concord, Mass., along with aunt, uncles and servants. By all accounts, they had a happy home, marred only by early death.

During Henry’s two years, two months and two days at Walden Pond, Helen and Sophia came to visit him. And he often came home to visit them.

“Without such a stable and contented home life, Thoreau could not possibly have pursued his career in the way that he did,” wrote his biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

The Yellow House

The entire Thoreau family loved nature, and Sophia Thoreau in particular shared Henry’s passion for botany. As children they hiked together around Concord, collecting rocks, lichens and plants. Henry liked to collect arrowheads.

Henry left Walden in the fall of 1847 to babysit Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children while Emerson lectured in Europe. When Emerson returned in the summer, Thoreau went back to live with his family and help with the family business – making pencils.

The Yellow House today. Image courtesy Google Maps.

In 1850, the family had a stroke of good fortune with the development of a new and lucrative use for the plumbago used to make pencils: electrotyping. The Thoreaus began selling their ground plumbago to commercial customers. That allowed them to move to the Yellow House in one of Concord’s best neighborhoods. Henry had the attic, which stretched the length of the house, and there he kept his bed, his writing desk, driftwood book shelves, manuscripts and specimens. (The house, by the way, went on the market in 2019 for $2.6 million.)

A family friend called the Thoreau house a “haven,” a place of “undisturbed orderliness,” with a sunny sitting room filled with Sophia’s plants.

“I recall the reading aloud of fresh new books, the evening games of chess and backgammon; the bright, often distinguished people who came to the house; the tea-parties and evening visits; the lyceum lectures on cold winter nights, the walks by field and river.”

Underground Railroad

The house served as a haven of another kind: a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Helen and Sophia Thoreau, like nearly all the women in Thoreau’s life, held strong anti-slavery views considered radical at the time. His mother, aunts and sisters belonged to the Concord Ladies’ Antislavery Society, one of the first in the country.

The family proudly displayed on its mantelpiece a Staffordshire figurine of Uncle Tom and Eva, the main characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Legend has it that a fugitive from slavery gave it to them as a thank you for their help.

Staffordshire figurine of Eva and Uncle Tom.

When fugitives arrived at the Thoreau household, Henry often took them to the railroad station, bought them tickets and gave them money. Sometimes he got on the train with them, either in Concord or in Fitchburg.

During his stay at Walden, Thoreau sheltered runaway slaves during the day in his cabin and escorted them to his family home at night.

Though the Underground Railroad conductors and safe houses operated in the strictest secrecy, Henry Thoreau occasionally slipped. On Oct. 1, 1851, he wrote, “Just put a fugitive slave who has taken the name of Henry Williams into the cars for Canada.” Williams may have given them the Staffordshire.

Helen Thoreau

People suspected that Helen, of all the Thoreaus, “had more sympathy in his [Henry’s] peculiar way than perhaps any other.”

Helen Thoreau

As Henry neared graduation from Harvard, he asked his mother what he should do after college. His mother, who had a biting wit, said, “You may buckle on your knapsack, dear, and seek your fortune in the world.”

Helen, the eldest, knew the remark stung. She put her arms around him and said, “No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us.”

All four Thoreau children – including Henry – worked as schoolteachers during their lives. Helen, born in 1812, did it first. Walls described her as ‘a bookish young woman – elegant, graceful, earnest, and quiet, the family’s moral lodestar… she took the outrages of social injustice most deeply to heart, dedicating herself to ending slavery in America.’

She befriended Frederick Douglass and exchanged letters with him. William Lloyd Garrison published her obituary in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.

Helen had as independent a mind as her little brother. In 1842, the local First Parish and Trinitarian churches banned women from speaking against slavery. Helen, furious that the churches opened their doors to slaveholders but not to people who defended slaves, stopped going to services.

According to one story, it was Helen who brought Henry to the attention of their famous Concord neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helen showed Henry’s journal to Emerson’s sister-in-law, who then showed it to Emerson.

Helen died of the Thoreau family illness, tuberculosis, in 1849 at the age of 37.

Sophia Thoreau

For the last 13 years of his life, Sophia Thoreau was Henry’s only remaining sibling and probably his closest friend and confidante. When he saw something interesting or unusual, he told Sophia.

They were very much alike: musical, witty and intensely interested in botany. A family friend observed they both had “a certain gravity of thought and utterance.” Sophia also had an artistic temperament and created the famous frontispiece of Walden.

Henry was picky about who he spent time with. “I know of but one or two persons with whom I can afford to walk,” he said. “The wood-path and the boat are my studio, where I maintain a sacred solitude and cannot admit promiscuous company.” Sophia made the cut.

For her part, Sophia adored her older brother. “Henry’s whole life impresses me as a grand miracle,” she said after his death. “I always thought him the most upright man I ever knew and now it is a pleasure to praise him.”

The first night he spent away from home in his Walden cabin, Sophia worried so much she couldn’t sleep. The next day she brought him lunch, which he didn’t appreciate.

When they lived in the Yellow House, Sophia would play old Scottish melodies on the piano. Henry would come down from his attic and sing, and sometimes pick up his flute and play.

Protector of Henry’s Legacy

When Henry took to his bed with the tuberculosis that killed him at 44, Sophia not only cared for him but helped him edit his manuscripts. She also negotiated with publishers and made sure the Atlantic magazine printed several essays after his death.

She had to deal with about 60 volumes of his manuscripts and several thousand pages of notes. Thoreau’s early biographers didn’t believe Sophia was up to the task, and credited Emerson and Ellery Channing with helping her. Kathy Fedorko set the record straight.

Sophia Thoreau

“Sophia kept those manuscripts in meticulous order, selected an editor for her brother’s journal, and, on her own, edited four posthumous volumes of henry’s essays,” she wrote.

She also ran the family business after Henry died, rare for a woman in those days. A family friend remembers she had “a fine, gentle, sweet nature.” However, said the friend, “she possessed great firmness of character and was always on the side of justice.”

Every so often, Sophia visited the abandoned cottage near Walden Pond where her brother had lived. Once, she ate her dinner there, alone but for the mice.

Sophia Thoreau died in 1876 at the age of 56, the last of the Thoreau siblings.

With thanks to Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books by Annie Russell Marble and Little Known Sisters of Well-Known Men by Sarah Gertrude Pomeroy. Also, ”Henry’s brilliant sister”: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother’s Posthumous Publications by Kathy Fedorko for The New England Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 2016). Finally, Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. This story was updated in 2022.

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Discovery in the Attic: The Lost Work of Provincetown Artist Edith Lake Wilkinson

In 1924, someone packed a truck with the life work of Edith Lake Wilkinson – her woodblocks, prints, sketches and paintings. And then someone packed Edith Lake Wilkinson off to an insane asylum in Baltimore, Md.

Edith spent the remaining 30 years of her life in mental institutions. Her trunkful of artwork would sit in an attic in Wheeling, W.Va., where her nephew, her only close surviving relative, still lived.

Edith Lake Wilkinson at 20

Years after her death, her great-niece solved at least part of the riddle of what happened to Edith Lake Wilkinson. And she brought her artwork back into the public eye, even as the art world rediscovered Edith’s contemporaries, known as the Provincetown Printers.

And, as it turned out, something else may have been taken from Edith Lake Wilkinson: credit for inventing the white line woodcut.

Edith Lake Wilkinson

Edith Lake Wilkinson was born in Wheeling, W.Va., on Aug. 23, 1868 into a middle-class family. She had one sister. In 1888, at the age of 19, she left for New York City, by herself, a journey that led, perhaps inevitably, to Provincetown.

Edith enrolled in the Art Students League, studying drawing and painting with some of the top teachers in the country. She then attended Columbia’s Teachers College in 1900, where she studied with Arthur Wesley Dow. She moved to Morningside Heights with a woman named Fannie Wilkinson, 13 years older than she. They traveled to Europe together; when they returned to New York, Edith went back to the Art Students League.

At least by 1914, and possibly earlier, she summered in the gay-friendly art colony of Provincetown. World War I had sent many European artists to Provincetown, where creative people flourished in the freewheeling, cosmopolitan atmosphere.

Provincetown at the time had three art schools, surely enough for everybody to partake in creative endeavors. And yet women artists had it harder than men. They could only sell art on Sunday, and they found it much harder to get recognized as artists.

The Monongahela, white line woodcut by Blanche Lazell

Provincetown Printers

Edith fell in with a group that called themselves the Provincetown Printers. They practiced a technique known as the white line woodcut. For decades, art critics attributed the invention of the white line woodcut to a Provincetown artist named B.J.O. Nordfeldt.

Like European artists, the Provincetown printmakers embraced the Japanese woodblock prints known as ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world.” The technique involved a separate woodblock for each color, a laborious and time-consuming process. Nordfeldt supposedly simplified the technique by etching designs onto one woodblock with a v-shaped tool that gouges a line between the shapes of the design. Then the artist attaches a piece of paper to the block, and colors in each area of the design separately. The artist then lays the paper down on the block and rubs the back with a spoon until the ink transfers to the paper.

The Great Wave of Kanagawa by Hokusai, a ukiyo-e print

Kate Hanlon, who practices the white line woodcut technique in Newburyport, Mass., explained part of its appeal: Artists can make prints economically on the kitchen table. “You don’t need a press or a printing table,” she said in a zoom interview.

The white line woodcut also fit with the Provincetown Printers’ aesthetic sensibility, she said. It was flat, modernist, and it incorporated the handcraft ethos of the Arts and Crafts movement still in vogue.

“They respected the art,” Hanlon said.

Blanche Lazell, for example, one of the foremost white line woodcut artists, also hooked rugs. Other members of the Provincetown printers included Ethel Mars, Maude Squire, Mildred McMillen, Ada Gilmore, Agnes Weinrich and Juliette Nichols.

He Done Her Wrong

Provincetown changed the art of Edith Lake Wilkinson. Her work began to reflect the bright clear Cape Cod light. She moved to Boston, living at 337 Charles Street, presumably with Fannie.

Then on Feb. 15, 1922, her parents died suddenly, overcome by carbon monoxide poisoning while sitting in their West Virginia living room.

Her sister Jane had died, leaving one young son, Edward Vossler. A Wheeling attorney named George Rogers took over Edith’s financial affairs, doling out her monthly allowance. In a letter, Rogers suggested she and Fannie live in separate apartments because people needed time to themselves. He also discouraged her from moving to Provincetown.

Two years after her parents died, Edith Lake Wilkinson was committed to the Sheppard-Pratt Institute, a hospital for the mentally ill in Baltimore. Her diagnosis: paranoia.

Edith Lake Wilkinson may well have had reason to think someone was out to get her. Prosecutors charged George Rogers with embezzling from his clients.

Edith won her release from Sheppard-Pratt five months later, but soon returned. Her prints, her woodblocks, her sketches all got packed into a trunk and sent to her nephew. Fannie died in 1931, and in 1935 Edith returned to West Virginia – to the dirty, crowded Huntington State Hospital. She died on July 19, 1957.

Prints in the Attic

Edith’s nephew Eddie Vossler married a woman who had a brother. One day in the early 1960s Eddie’s brother-in-law’s family came to West Virginia for a visit. His sister-in-law, Polly Anderson, cajoled his wife, Betty, into exploring their attic. There they found the trunkful of Edith Lake Wilkinson’s artwork.

According to her daughter, Polly said, “My God, Betty, do you know what you have?” Betty let Polly take the paintings to her home in Northern California, where they formed the backdrop of her daughter Jane’s childhood.

Jane, like Edith, was gay, and, like Edith, moved to New York City as a young woman and studied art. She visited Provincetown to find out more about her great-aunt, but no one had heard about her.

Jane became a filmmaker, and in 2015 made a documentary called Packed In A Truck: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson. In the process of discovering her grea- aunt, she found a white line woodblock that Edith dated to 1913 — one year before the earliest white line woodcut by Nordfeldt

Rediscovery of Edith Lake Wilkinson

Anderson felt she owed it to her great-aunt to get her work back in the public eye. White line woodcuts had already made a comeback by the time the film premiered.

In the late 1970s, Print Review assigned a story about the Provincetown Printers to a writer named Bill Evaul. A few of the original members survived, and from them Evaul learned how to make a white line woodcut. He mastered the art himself, taught it and promoted the genre.

By the 1980s, museums and galleries revived the work of the Provincetown Printers. In 1983-84, the Smithsonian American Art Museum showed 75 Provincetown prints. And In 2004, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston held an exhibit of the art of Blanche Lazell.

Woodcut by Kate Hanlon

The work of Edith Lake Wilkinson, though, did not appear in those exhibits. Anderson’s documentary changed all that. In 2013, the Larkin Gallery in Provincetown held a one-woman show of her work. And in 2016, the Huntington Art Museum held A TALENT FORGOTTEN: The Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson.

And in 2016, Bakker Auctions held a show of eight women artists from Provincetown. In the catalogue, the auction house describes

This tragic example of the precarious standing of women in the early 20th century is also a classic story of the female artist disappearing into historic obscurity.

If you’re interested in the art of the white line woodcut, check out Kate Hanlon’s website: https://www.katehanlon.com/teaching.

Images: Monongahela By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34635675. Edith Lake Wilkinson By Unknown author – http://www.edithlakewilkinson.com/about/chronology, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70173045. With thanks to Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Story of Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner, Narragansett Bay Aviators

In 2018 the U.S. Navy commissioned the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hudner in Boston. The ship’s name pays tribute to two naval aviators’ incredible tale of gallantry, self-sacrifice and friendship in the Korean War. And the story of Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner started on Narragansett Bay in the late 1940s.

Traces of this story are still visible nearby. On board the battleship USS Massachusetts in Fall River, Mass., a small memorial just aft of the officers’ wardroom depicts a navy-blue F4U Corsair, a propeller-driven fighter built to duel the Imperial Japanese Navy from island airstrips and the wooden decks of aircraft carriers. The Corsair is the gull-winged plane flown by Pappy Boyington’s Black Sheep Squadron in the Pacific, familiar from the 1970s TV program Baa Baa Black Sheep.

Devotion.

But this is more than your average sentimental aviation painting. Rather than soaring above the clouds, the Corsair in the foreground is about to crash on a bleak mountainside. Snow swirls around it, churned up by its prop and wings. Another F4U has already fallen to earth in the background. It smolders. Other fighters swoop around overhead. Inset into the painting’s frame are the photos of two young naval aviators, one black and one white, along with a set of Wings of Gold. Officers who graduate from flight school earn their wings and wear them throughout their careers in uniform. The title of the painting is “Devotion.”

Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner

It’s an apt title. The crashed and about-to-be-crashed aviators are Ensign Jesse Brown and Lieutenant j.g. Thomas Hudner. Jesse was born into an African-American sharecropper family in Depression-era Mississippi and grew up dirt poor. He fell in love with aviation after one of the locals buzzed him in a field and resolved to become an airman himself. Them Jesse moved to Hattiesburg to attend an elite high school, studied at Ohio State for two years, joined the Navy, got married and had a baby girl. He completed flight training in 1948 and became America’s first black naval aviator.

Jesse Brown was a badass. An anecdote from his carrier flight qualifications in the F4U during the spring of 1950 makes the point. Aircraft don’t land on carriers, strictly speaking; they crash aboard in a controlled way. To land a plane on the flight deck, an aviator drops the aircraft’s tailhook to snag one of several arresting wires stretched across the deck, perpendicular to the incoming plane’s flight path. The wire reels out and brings the plane to a halt. In those days carrier crews rigged a barricade just beyond the arresting wires, in case the pilot missed all of them. Otherwise the plane would plow into aircraft parked up forward on the ship’s bow and cause havoc.

Ensign Jesse Brown in the cockpit of an F4U-4.

To qualify an airman had to complete six landings aboard the light aircraft carrier USS Wright, a flattop based at Quonset Point, on the Narragansett Bay’s western shores. Jesse had qualified on a different airframe and had a hard time adjusting to the F4U, a warplane new to him and to his squadron in the spring of 1950. The Corsair had a massive engine that blocked his view of the flight deck on final descent. He had to trust the landing signals officer on the ship to bring him in, motioning with paddles to tell him to come left or right, add or cut power, or what have you.

DNKUA

Doing it blind demanded a leap of faith Jesse found hard to make. He managed five landings but was at risk of failing to make a sixth. On his very last try he bounced his plane on deck, missed the wires . . . and then gunned his engine, jumping the Corsair over the barricade and back into the air! He managed to “trap” after that. Aviators love to grade each other. His supervisor assigned him the grade of DNKUA—Damn Near Killed Us All—but he qualified for sea duty.

LT.j.g. Tom Hudner, 1950

Tom was a native of Fall River. He was of Irish descent and enjoyed a country-club upbringing. His father operated a chain of grocery stores, Hudner’s Markets. Tom turned down admission to Harvard to attend the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, did a brief stint in the cruiser Helena in the Pacific, and applied for flight school, basically on a dare from his shipmates.

Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner became friends while serving in the Narragansett Bay. They flew together as wingmen in VF-32—Fighter Squadron 32, nicknamed Fighting 32 or the “Fighting Swordsmen,” embarked aboard the aircraft carrier USS Leyte. Jesse loved to buzz his cottage in Warwick, delighting his wife Daisy and especially their daughter Pam. Tom buzzed his old man on the golf course in Fall River.

Close Air Support

The navy reclassified Fighting 32 as a “close air support” squadron in early 1950. The F4U excelled in air-to-air combat during World War II, but faced obsolescence with the onset of jet fighters. But it could haul a load of ordnance for striking targets on the surface, including hostile forces in close contact with friendly forces. Close-air-support planes go out hunting for targets of opportunity, or they loiter overhead awaiting calls for fire support from troops beneath.

Close air support weakens hostile armies and hampers their maneuvers on the battlefield while protecting friendly troops and giving them a firepower advantage—or, in the case of the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, where this story culminates, correcting a firepower mismatch so that ten thousand U.S. and U.N. soldiers could stand against one hundred thousand or more Chinese infantrymen who came against them.

Battle of Chosin Reservoir

By November 1950 some 300,000 Chinese People’s Volunteer Army soldiers had infiltrated across the Sino-Korean frontier undetected. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had brought his force north of the 38th parallel, the dividing line between North and South Korea, and Communist China resolved to repel the invaders. The Chinese host slammed into the U.S./U.N. army in darkness on November 1. Writes Adam Makos, who chronicles these events in his book Devotion, the Chinese descended on the U.S. Army’s First Cavalry Division “like the hordes of Genghis Khan,” slaughtering a 600-man battalion in a night.

And that was just the beginning. MacArthur sounded retreat lest he lose his army. That was a real possibility. By early December the Chinese Ninth Army had encircled the First Marine Division, which was accompanied by some army troops and British commandos, at the Chosin Reservoir in northeastern North Korea. U.N. forces faced annihilation unless they could fight their way out of the trap the Chinese People’s Volunteers had sprung.

MU.S. Marines on the firing line at the Battle of Chosin Reservoir.

Back to Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner. Close air support is the great equalizer for a weaker force. Because Korea is a peninsula jutting out of continental Asia, much of it is accessible to sea power, carrier aviation in particular. Leyte had supported the initial fight against the North Koreans. But in October the flattop withdrew to Sasebo, Japan, for some R&R. The war seemed to be over. North Korea seemed beaten. Jesse had written Daisy that they might be coming home.

Iroquois Flight

Then came the Chinese intervention, and back they went to the Sea of Japan, joining Task Force 77 off the Korean east coast. On December 4, Ensign Brown and Lt. j.g. Hudner were part of Iroquois Flight, a six-plane contingent launched from 100 miles offshore on a three-hour mission. The planes cruised as low as 700 feet, hunting for Chinese formations to target.

During the sweep Jesse’s aircraft, Iroquois 13, was nicked by small-arms fire from Chinese “White Jackets,” troops so named for the white uniforms they wore for camouflage in the snow. A Chinese bullet punctured an oil line. This was a mortal wound, leaving Jesse too little fuel to get back to his ship. His engine seized up, compelling him to crash-land on a mountainside during the coldest winter on record, and 17 miles behind enemy lines.

A restored F4U Corsair

This need not have been the end. With any luck a search-and-rescue helicopter could have picked him up. Fortune deserted the airmen, though. Jesse’s Corsair broke up on impact. He survived, but twisted metal pinioned his leg within the cockpit. He couldn’t extricate himself. Worse, a fire started in the wreckage, threatening to ignite its fuel tanks. That’s when Tom deliberately crash-landed his F4U nearby while the remaining Iroquois Flight pilots patrolled the sky to fend off Chinese soldiers from the downed airmen.

Devotion

This is the scene portrayed in the painting on board USS Massachusetts. It commemorates the devotion of one aviator to another, of one American to another, and of one human being to another. This is an uplifting story, but it does not end well. Tom was unable to free Jesse from his crashed plane. Nor could Lt. Charlie Ward, another friend of Jesse’s. (He was from south Alabama, so Jesse called him “Alabama” and Charlie called Jesse “Mississippi.”)

Charlie piloted a helicopter into the mountains at great personal risk to bring rescue equipment and retrieve the airmen. But Jesse lost consciousness intermittently, and perished before they could pull him out. The rescuers had to withdraw at nightfall because helicopters couldn’t operate in darkness in those days.

Jesse Brown fell at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, known to U.S. Marines as the “frozen Chosin.” He was posthumously decorated with the Distinguished Flying Cross for gallantry, and had a frigate named after him during the 1970s.

Daisy Brown congratulating Tom Hudner after President Truman awarded him the Medal of Honor.

Aftermath

Tom made a career in the Navy, retiring as a captain in the 1970s. In 2017 he passed away in Concord, Mass., at the age of 93.

Funeral procession with the casket of Capt. Tom Hudner in Concord, Mass.

He now rests at Arlington National Cemetery. Tom received the Medal of Honor for his selfless act. After the Korean War he and Daisy went on the road together from time to time to spread Jesse’s story and promote the cause of racial integration in the United States Navy and fellow armed services.

Jesse fell along with a thousand of his brothers-in-arms and over 9,000 missing or wounded. But the First Marine Division lived, in part because of the U.S. naval aviators’ skill and bravery. The results of Chosin could have been far worse.

These were lives well lived—and it all started in the Narragansett Bay.

The author of this story about Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner, James Holmes, Ph.D., is the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I. He is the author of two books, Maritime Strategy and Red Star Over the Pacific. You can read his blog, The Naval Diplomat, here.

Image of restored Corsair By Gerry Metzler – https://www.flickr.com/photos/flyguy71/7427977930/sizes/l/in/photostream/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20571543. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Fun Facts About Paul Revere’s Ride

The poem Paul Revere’s Ride took an obscure patriot of the American Revolution and elevated him to American myth.

In 1860, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow first asked his children to listen so they shall hear the midnight ride of Paul Revere. He meant it as legend but people took it as historical fact.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

The poem created legions of Paul Revere fans, who solidified his fame after the Civil War. They installed an equestrian statue in Boston’s North End, where he had lived for 30 years. His great grandson then bought his house to save it from demolition. The Paul Revere Memorial Association raised the money to buy and restore it. Paul Revere’s house is now an important stop on Boston’s Freedom Trail.

But the backlash had already started in 1896, when a poet named Helen F. Moore wrote a parody of Paul Revere’s Ride called The Midnight Ride of William Dawes. It read, in part,

‘Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear —
My name was Dawes and his Revere.

1. Paul Revere’s Ride

Paul Revere’s Ride was really about fighting slavery, which Longfellow hated. He gave money to fugitive slaves, bought slaves their freedom and supported African-American churches, schools and newspapers. His close friend, U.S. Sen. Charles Sumner, was such an outspoken abolitionist that a southern colleague, Preston Brooks, beat him within an inch of his life on the Senate floor.

Longfellow published Paul Revere’s Ride in The Atlantic Monthly magazine, which appeared on newsstands the day South Carolina seceded. At the time, people viewed it as a call to arms for the North. More recently, historian Jill Lepore has argued the poem is an allegory about slavery itself. Paul Revere’s Ride is “a poem about waking the dead,” wrote Lepore in The American Scholar. “The dead are Northerners, roused to war. But the dead are also the enslaved, entombed in slavery…”

2. Paul Revere Made Lots of Rides

Paul Revere had made the same ride a week and a half earlier. He made lots of rides, in fact. On Dec. 13, 1774, Revere rode all the way to Portsmouth, N.H., to warn the patriots that the King’s troops were on their way to seize gunpowder from Fort William and Mary in New Castle. The redcoats arrived three days late, and they didn’t intend to take the powder in the first place. But a skirmish did result — between 400 New Hampshire volunteers and six British soldiers defending the fort. The redcoats surrendered. Then, 11 days before his midnight ride, Revere rode to Concord to warn that the redcoats would probably come to seize the large cache of military supplies stored there. The patriots moved the supplies.

3. Longfellow and Revere

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had a family connection to Paul Revere dating to the American Revolution. His grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth, commanded Revere, then a colonel, during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. Recrimination followed the worst U.S. naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. And investigation revealed Revere had made enemies because of his arrogance. He demanded a court martial, which exonerated him.

Penobscot Expedition by John Thomas Serres

4. Some Birthday Present

Rose Kennedy made all of her children memorize the poem. John F. Kennedy campaigned for U.S. Congress in 1946 at the base of Paul Revere’s statue in the North End. His brother Edward recited the entire poem during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing. When in 1975 Rose Kennedy turned 85, she asked each of her 28 grandchildren to memorize a stanza of the poem as a birthday present.

5. Mistakes Were Made

The poem got a lot of facts wrong about Paul Revere’s ride. For example, Revere – not a friend – ordered the lanterns hung in the belfry of Old North Church. He also had help, which Longfellow omits. The aforementioned William Dawes took a parallel route to the south and met in Lexington. There they encountered a third rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, while”‘returning from a lady friend’s house at the awkward hour of 1 a.m. (Revere’s words).”

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley

6. Obituary Omission

No one outside of the Boston area knew who Paul Revere was until Longfellow wrote Paul Revere’s Ride. Even during his lifetime, Bostonians knew Revere as a successful businessman who had lots of friends. That’s how his obituary read after he died on May 10, 1818. It didn’t even mention the ride.

This story was updated in 2022.

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May Alcott, The Real Amy, Always in the Real Jo’s Shadow

May Alcott, the real Amy March in Louisa May Alcott’s semi-autobiographical novel Little Women, struggled all her life to win success as an artist.

She stood on the cusp of fulfilling her dream when she died before turning 40. She had published a travel guide for American women to study art in Europe. And she had beaten out Mary Cassatt for a spot in the Paris Salon.

May Alcott

But May Alcott would always be defined by her oldest sister: first as the least likable March sister, Amy, and second as the younger sister of Jo March, Louisa May Alcott in real lilfe.

May Alcott

Abigail May Alcott was born July 26, 1840 into the eccentric – today we might say ‘progressive’ — Alcott family. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a hopelessly improvident romantic, passionate about social justice and education. Her mother, Abigail, kept the family financially afloat while advocating women’s rights.

She was Louisa May Alcott’s youngest sister. Named after her mother, her family called her Abba and then Abby. In her 20s, she asked to be called May, and her big sister gave her Little Women character an anagram — Amy.

The vain and self-absorbed Amy “was never so happy as when copying flowers, designing fairies, or illustrating stories with queer specimens of art,” wrote Louisa.

Struggles

The family struggled to survive until Louisa had her blockbuster hit with Little Women. The four Alcott daughters worked as teachers, governesses and servants to support the family, May worked as a teacher at the first Kindergarten founded by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody for a month; later she taught art at the Concord school run by her father’s friend Franklin Sanborn.

Despite her sex and her family’s poverty, she managed to piece together an artistic education. She briefly studied art from three prominent Boston artists: William Rimmer, William Morris Hunt and David Claypoole Johnston.

By 1868, she offered five or six classes in art. Daniel Chester French, who designed the Lincoln Memorial, studied under her.

That year, she illustrated Little Women. But critics panned her work as amateurish and anatomically incorrect. They were right. As a woman, May couldn’t study the human figure. She realized she’d gotten all the art training available in Boston, and dreamed of Europe, with its museums, teachers and opportunities to exhibit in prestigious venue.

May Alcott’s illustrations for Little Women did not go over well with critics.

Europe

Then May and Louisa got the opportunity to go to Europe as travel companions to a wealthy family friend. May developed the confidence to venture out in foreign cities alone, though she carried a dagger with her.

Toward the end of their trip In London, May Alcott found a watercolor teacher under whom she wanted to study. Louisa, flush with cash from Little Women, paid for her to stay on.

May Alcott returned to Concord to take care of family responsibilities – and allow Louisa to write. But soon she was back in Europe, again, thanks to Louisa’s largesse.

She returned home a second time, and established a free art center in Concord, which won her praise from her mother. “Noble girl,” wrote Abigail Alcott.

May later encouraged women of modest means like herself to travel to Europe to pursue an art career.

Third Trip

She began to come into her own on her third trip to Europe. She wrote a travel guide, released by her sister’s publisher.

Studying Art Abroad, and How to Do It Cheaply, advocated equal opportunity in art training for women.

“Art is so over-talked and over-written at the present time,” May Alcott wrote in her first chapter, “but none of these writers report the actual cost of living, instruction, or rent of studio abroad; or how one in search of such can most easily and economically obtain them, in order to realize the desire of one’s heart.”

Her art had developed beyond the student exercises she produced under her teachers and she began to enjoy some success.

In 1877, the Paris Salon selected a still life she submitted – over the work of Mary Cassatt.

La Negresse by May Alcott Nieriker

May Alcott Nieriker

The next year, at the age of 38, her life took a turn. She married Ernest Nieriker, a 22-year-old Swiss tobacco merchant, and they moved to a Paris suburb. According to Louisa, she seemed so happy her family couldn’t object to her marrying someone 16 years younger.

The next year, the prestigious Paris Salon again accepted her work, the study, La Negresse.

Watercolor of Orchard House by May Alcott

But then she got pregnant, and she died in childbirth at the age of 39 on Dec. 29, 1879. Her husband gave their daughter, Louisa or Lulu, to Aunt Louisa to raise.

Today, May Alcott is remembered as the model for Amy March, not for her art nor for her advocacy for women’s artists. Most of her art is exhibited at Orchard House, the girls’ childhood home, billed as the Little Women Museum.

This story was updated in 2023.

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