Sconyers on Boston’s Street Lamps, 18 Mar.

Old North Illuminated is living up to its name by hosting an online presentation by Jake Sconyers on the topic “They Burnt Tolerable Well: The Tea Party & Boston’s First Street Lamps” on Tuesday, 18 March.

The event description says:

In the 1770s, Boston was in a state of transformation and upheaval. While we mostly think of the American Revolution as the driver of this whirlwind of change, a technological revolution was happening at the same time. The introduction of street lamps in Boston had a profound effect on how people behaved at night.

The political revolution and the technological revolution were intertwined, with the effects of one impacting the other—including at pivotal moments like the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.

Sconyers will touch on these “burning” questions:

• How did Boston’s very first street lamps survive a shipwreck and the Boston Tea Party?
• Why did Boston decide to buy English oil lamps for the streets but fuel them with American whale oil?
• Why did Boston vote to let its new street lamps sit dark after just a few months of illumination?
• How did the Boston Port Act affect the cost of street lighting?

Not to mention how the events of April 1775 might have been different if Boston’s main streets had been lit up at night.

Jake Sconyers is the host of the HUB History podcast, formerly cohosted by Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North. The podcast has discussed these lamps, but I don’t recall it addressing all these details.

Register for this online event with a donation of any amount to Old North Illuminated through this webpage.

Dr. Henry Burchsted and the Whale

On 9 Dec 1755, Richard Pratt of Lynn wrote in his journal:

Was a Whale taken up at Sea and Brought in To Kings-Beach abought 75 feet Long

King’s Beach now straddles Lynn and Swampscott, but at this time Swampscott had not yet broken off.

The 15 December Boston Gazette reported:

We hear that a large Whale 75 Feet in length, was drove ashore dead on Lynn Beach a few Days ago.

The same day’s Boston Evening-Post added:

’Tis said she is claimed by a Cape-Cod Man, who struck her on the Banks, and 2 of his Irons were found in her. Several curious Persons from this Town have been down to view her.

Almost seventy-five years later, Alonzo Lewis shifted the whale’s gender and added a new detail as he wrote in his History of Lynn (1829):

Dr. Henry Burchsted rode into his mouth, in a chair drawn by a horse; and afterward had two of his bones set up for gate posts, at his house in Essex street, where they stood for more than fifty years.

Dr. Burchsted (1719–1807) was a third-generation physician. His grandfather had reportedly immigrated from Silesia about 1685. His father had died earlier that year. At least one of his brothers also went into medicine.

Because there’s a line of overlapping Henry Burchsteds, their genealogy isn’t entirely clear, but it looks like this physician married Anna Potter in 1742 and had a child, naturally named Henry, a short time later. At the start of the Revolutionary War, Dr. Burchsted owned one slave.

The doctor’s striking gate of whalebones “disposed in the form of a gothic arch” stood near the foot of High Rock, now a park with a tall stone observatory.

The doctor’s son Henry grew up to become a shoemaker on Boston Street, and another physician bought the house with the whalebone gate. That landmark was really helpful, local chroniclers said, for people trying to find their way to the fortune-teller Moll Pitcher, who lived in a small cottage nearby.

(The photo above shows not Dr. Burchsted’s gate, which is long gone, but a similar arch erected in front of the Captain Edward Penniman House in the Cape Cod National Seashore in 1969. This picture was taken shortly before those bones were taken down in 2018 because they were deteriorating, also after about fifty years.)

The Journey of Phillis Wheatley’s First Published Poem

As related in yesterday’s posting, a storm in September 1767 pushed a schooner packed with whale oil onto Cape Cod.

But that ship wasn’t lost, the cargo was preserved, and nobody died. Not much drama after all.

Nonetheless, the stories of two survivors—evidently Nantucketers Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin—contained enough emotion to inspire John Wheatley’s enslaved teen-aged servant Phillis to write 24 lines of poetry (plus a prose interlude).

Titled “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin,” that poem appeared in Samuel Hall’s Newport Mercury on 21 Dec 1767—the first recognized publication by Phillis Wheatley. You can read the lines here alongside Amelia Yeager’s essay about the publication for the Newport Historical Society.

David Waldstreicher starts his new study of the poet, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley, with this poem and returns to it often as a touchstone of her work, particularly for her braiding of classical and Calvinist motifs and her ocean imagery.

The poem and its publication raise some small questions beyond the identity of the two men, discussed yesterday. One is why Hussey’s name appears first in the poem’s title and in the anecdote published with it in the newspaper even though Coffin was the ship’s captain and the only person named in the reports of the grounding.

I suspect this was a matter of personality. Hussey seems to have been a sociable man, connecting the Boston and Nantucket business communities before the war; serving in Whig political gatherings; speaking for Nantucket businessmen to both the British and Patriot governments during the war (islanders wanted to stay neutral for both economic and religious reasons); and eventually taking a post with the federal Customs bureau. I suspect he just told the story better.

Another question is whether Phillis Wheatley and the family who owned her sought this publication. I think the answer to that is clear in how the poem appeared in the Boston Post-Boy when that newspaper reprinted it on 11 Jan 1768. The “Wheatley” name was eliminated:

• “belonging to one Mr. Wheatley of Boston” became “belonging to a Gentelman [sic] of Boston”
• “being at Mr. Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner” became “being at Dinner”
• The name at the bottom of the poem changed from “Phillis Wheatley” to simply “PHILLIS.”

Obviously printers John Green and Joseph Russell thought the Wheatleys didn’t want their surname linked to the poem. They may even have heard directly from the family. However supportive of their protégée and property the Wheatleys became later, at the start of 1768 they were still reticent about what we’d call publicity.

I suspect that’s why this poem didn’t appear in a Boston newspaper until after it could be credited as “From the Newport Mercury.” John Wheatley was a wealthy merchant who occasionally advertised, the sort of gentleman local newspaper printers would want to keep happy.

Still, someone must have circulated the poem privately in manuscript for it to get from Boston to Newport. That might have been the Wheatleys, sharing the news among friends and expecting it to stay private. Conversely, the poem might have been spread by Hussey and Coffin within their Quaker network. (I doubt the teen poet had developed her own out-of-town network yet.)

I tested a couple of other possible explanations for the first publication in Rhode Island:

• Did the Newport Mercury run poetry while the Boston papers weren’t yet in that habit? No, Boston printers shared a lot of poems in the 1760s.
• Was Capt. Coffin’s near-shipwreck bigger news in Rhode Island than in Boston since it involved a Nantucket ship? Not only is Nantucket closer to Newport, but both places had large Quaker communities. However, Samuel Hall didn’t pick up the Boston reports about the schooner grounding. (The Providence Gazette for 10 October did carry the second item, reporting Coffin’s ship was safe.*)

In the end, I think someone in Newport who didn’t know the Wheatleys learned about the poem and the story behind it, and asked the local printer to publish it. Hall in turn was beyond John Wheatley’s reach.

What would have prompted such a Newporter to send to poem to Hall? That person was clearly struck by how the author was “a Negro Girl,” and enslaved at that. That’s not merely a footnote to the poem; it’s in the preface, the implicit reason for printing it.

Even the name “Phillis Wheatley” at the bottom of the poem might be significant. Many other early publications credited the poet only by her first name. For example, Ezekiel Russell’s broadside of her elegy to the Rev. George Whitefield said: “By PHILLIS, a Servant Girl of 17 Years of Age, Belonging to Mr. J. WHEATLEY, of Boston.” By 1770 the Wheatley family had become comfortable having their names attached to such publications, but the prevailing style was still not to formally acknowledge enslaved people’s surnames.

Those details make me think whoever asked Hall to print the poem wanted readers of the Newport Mercury to know an enslaved girl had written it—and perhaps to see that that girl was an individual. And, though nothing about the presentation commented on the injustice of slavery, was it possible to avoid that thought?

(* In the database that I access through Genealogy Bank, the 10 October and 3 October Providence Gazettes are mushed together. Looks like something went wrong when they were photographed for microfilm.)

“Castaway on the Back of Cape-Cod”

On Thursday, 1 Oct 1767, the biggest local story in the Boston News-Letter was the weather:

The Beginning of last Week we had here very serene pleasant Weather, until Wednesday Evening, when at about 8 o’clock came on, and continued for several Hours, a most violent Storm of Wind and Rain, with some Thunder and Lighting…

Among the consequences lower down in that paragraph:

Capt. Coffin in a Schooner loaded with Oil was castaway on the Back of Cape-Cod, the Cargo and People saved, and in hopes of getting the Vessel off.

In fact, for all the worry during the storm about ships, fishing vessels, and pleasure boats, “Through the Goodness of Divine Providence no Lives were lost” at sea. (A father and son, aged 84 and 52 respectively, both died after losing their separate ways on roads north of Boston.)

Four days later, on 5 October, the Boston Post-Boy followed up on that story:

Capt. Coffin in a Schooner loaded with Oyl, was cast ashore in the Storm mentioned in our last, on the Back of Cape Cod; but the Vessel has since been got off, and arrived here Yesterday.

That incident fits the details reported in the Newport Mercury on 21 December, as quoted yesterday:

Messrs Hussey and Coffin,…belonging to Nantucket, being bound from thence to Boston, narrowly escaped being cast away on Cape-Cod, in one of the late Storms; upon their Arrival, being at Mr. [John] Wheatley’s, and, while at Dinner, told of their narrow Escape

Unfortunately, none of these newspaper items gives Coffin’s or Hussey’s full names. And lots of men from Nantucket shared those surnames, their families intermarrying just to confuse matters further.

However, for his recent Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley David Waldstreicher spotted that on 7 October the merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary that he “Din’d at home with Stephen Hussey, Abisha Folger junr Richard Coffin Isaac Paddock All four from Nantucket.” That was three days after “Capt. Coffin” and his oil had arrived safely in Boston.

What’s more, in September 1775 Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin were co-owners of a whaling brig named the Mayflower, according to British Treasury records.

So it looks like the two men from Nantucket who told their story of nearly being shipwrecked on Cape Cod in late September 1767 were most likely Stephen Hussey and Richard Coffin.

This was probably the same Stephen Hussey (1735–1805) who “was a blacksmith, shipsmith, and whaling merchant.” Having been elected to represent his town at the Massachusetts Convention of 1768 and the Provincial Congress, he became the island’s first Customs Collector under the new federal government.

TOMORROW: The Newport connection?

“Declaring that we were all Torys at Nantucket”

As I discussed yesterday, the British government exempted the island of Nantucket from its Restraining Act, which limited trade with America.

At the time, Nantucket’s chief industry was whaling, and the chief market for its products was Britain. Neither the islanders nor the home country wanted to derail that business.

Furthermore, most Nantucketers were Quakers, so they had a religious reason, or excuse, to remain neutral in the imperial government’s conflict with the thirteen colonies.

In May 1775, the Continental Congress responded to Parliament’s law by forbidding anyone in the thirteen colonies from trading with parts of the continent that still supported the Crown. That was followed on 29 May by a special resolution:

That no provisions or necessaries of any kind be exported to the island of Nantucket, except from the colony of the Massachusetts Bay, the convention of which colony is desired to take measures for effectually providing the said island, upon their application to purchase the same, with as much provision as shall be necessary for its internal use, and no more. The Congress deeming it of great importance to North America, that the British fishery should not be furnished with provisions from this continent through Nantucket, earnestly recommend a vigilant execution of this resolve to all committees.

At the time, Nantucket—or to be exact, the town of Sherburne—wasn’t participating in the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. The congress had tried to appoint a committee of correspondence for Nantucket County in April, but the men it named hadn’t taken up the call.

In July, the provincial congress wound down its work. It called on all towns, including Sherburne, to elect a new, official Massachusetts General Court. Among the congress’s final resolutions was:

whereas, the inhabitants of Nantucket have by them, large quantities of provisions in their stores, and are fitting out a large fleet of whaling vessels, whereby they intend to avail themselves of the act aforementioned [the Restraining Act], and the provisions they have by them may be unnecessarily expended, in foreign and not domestic consumption:

therefore, Resolved, that no provisions or necessaries of any kind be exported from any part of this colony to the island of Nantucket, until the inhabitants of said island shall have given full and sufficient satisfaction to this Congress, or some future house of representatives, that the provisions they have now by them, have not been, and shall not be, expended in foreign, but for domestic consumption.

Meanwhile, on 6 July a Nantucket sea captain returned to the island from a voyage to Philadelphia. He had hoped to bring back a load of flour. But, wrote Kezia Coffin, “the Congress would not suffer him to bring any declaring that we were all Torys at Nantucket.”

COMING UP: More tacking around Nantucket Island.

“The Island of Nantucket, employed in the whale fishery”

In the early spring of 1775, even before the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Parliament took steps to clamp down on New England and its allies.

Given that almost all of Massachusetts had set up a rival government in open defiance of the Massachusetts Government Act, that New Hampshire had driven away Gov. John Wentworth, and that the elected governors of Connecticut and Rhode Island were doing as little as possible to support royal policy, Parliament felt stricter measures were justified.

On 30 March it enacted the New England Restraining Act, also called the New England Trade and Fisheries Act. This law restricted trade and barred ships from the rebellious colonies from the rich fishing grounds off Newfoundland. However, that law also included a clause exempting whaling vessels from Nantucket from its new rules.

Nantucket was then the center of the North American whaling industry, which supplied a great deal of the whale oil, spermaceti candles, and other products that Britain used. In addition, many of the island’s leading families were Quakers and thus religious pacifists.

The Nantucket whaling captains could thus make the case in London both that they wanted no part in any coming war, and that their business was too important to interfere with. As a result, Nantucket got this special exemption.

When Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act in December 1775, authorizing the Royal Navy and privateers to capture ships from the rebellious colonies, that new law once again exempted ships from Nantucket:

XL. Provided also, and it is hereby further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That nothing in this act contained shall extend, or be construed to extend, to any ship or vessel, being the property of any of the inhabitants of the Island of Nantucket, employed in the whale fishery only, if it shall appear by the papers on board that such ship or vessel was fitted and cleared out from thence before the 1st day of December, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five; or if the master, or other person having the charge of any such ship or vessel as aforesaid, shall produce a certificate under the hand and seal of the Governour or Commander-in-Chief of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, setting forth that such ship or vessel (expressing her name, and the name of her master, and describing her built and burthen) is the whole and entire property of his Majesty’s subjects of the said Island of Nantucket, and was the property of one or more of them on or before the 25th day of March, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.

In the same year, the American governments were also trying to figure out what to do with Nantucket. The options shrank as war arrived, since in that situation people tend to view neutrals as helping the other side.

TOMORROW: A local headache.

The Original Molly Pitcher

As quoted yesterday, two publications from 1835—one in English and one in German—appear to be the first print appearances of the name “Molly Pitcher” in stories about a female artillerist at the Battle of Monmouth.

But that name had already appeared in print attached to a completely different person: a fortune-teller active in Lynn in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

An article about “Witchcraft” in the October 1825 issue of the Boston Monthly Magazine, edited by Samuel L. Knapp, mentioned “Moll Pitcher, of Lynn,” and stated: “she was so well known to most persons, that their recollections will be better than any description.” Pitcher was such a celebrity, at least locally, that she needed no introduction.

In 1829 Bernard Whitman published A Lecture on Popular Superstitions in Boston. He wrote:

Not many years ago, a man was suddenly missing from a certain town in this commonwealth. The church immediately sent one of her members to consult the far famed fortune telling Molly Pitcher. After making the necessary inquiries, she intimated that the absent person had been murdered by a family of negroes, and his body sunk in the deep waters behind their dwelling. Upon this evidence, the accused were forthwith imprisoned, and the pond raked in vain from shore to shore. A few days previous to the trial, the murdered man returned to his friends safe and sound; thus giving the naughty skeptics occasion to say, that the fortune teller, instead of receiving from the devil information of distant and future events, had actually played the very devil with the superstitious church.

I have no clue about the accuracy of that story, which Whitman told with a frustratingly low number of specifics that can be tracked down.

In that same year, a more complimentary description of Pitcher appeared in the first edition of Alonzo Lewis’s History of Lynn:

The celebrated Mary Pitcher, a professed fortune teller, died on the ninth of April, 1813, at the age of 75 years. Her grandfather, John Diamond, lived at Marblehead, and was for many years celebrated for the exercise of the same pretensions. She was married to Robert Pitcher of Lynn, in 1760, and had several children.

This person has been more celebrated than any individual of her class in modern times. Not only was her name known in most towns throughout the United States, but probably there is not a port in Europe, visited by American ships, that has not heard of the skill of “Moll Pitcher.” Many persons came from places far remote, to consult with her on affairs of love or loss of property, or to obtain her surmises respecting the vicissitudes of their future fortune. Every youth who was not assured of the reciprocal affection of his fair one, and every maid who was desirous of anticipating the hour of her highest felicity, repaired at evening to the humble dwelling of Molly Pitcher, which stood on what was then a lonely road, near the foot of High Rock, with a single habitation nearly opposite, at the gate of which stood two bones of the great whale, which the waves of ocean, in the liberality of their power, had cast upon the beach.

To that place also were seen repairing sailors from the neighboring commercial towns, who were desirous of ascertaining the probable success of their future voyages. Many a reputable merchant too, of whose treasures on the faithless waves, the courier of intelligence had not brought the expected information, and being fearful of betraying the nature of his business by inquiring directly for “Moll Pitcher,” has raised a smile by asking in what part of the town he should find the bones of the great whale.

Her skill was principally exercised for the discovery of things lost, either material objects which had been mislaid or purloined, or the affections of some disconsolate fair one, which had taken the advantage of some favorable opportunity to elope. Her power of evil, if she possessed any, was never exerted, unless to punish such delinquents as refused to pay her for the knowledge which she pretended to impart. Some instances have been related, in which she has evinced an unusual degree of discernment; while in others her assertions have had no relation to facts, but appear to have been the result of mere guess work and presumption.

Her only ostensible means of obtaining secret knowledge, was the simple use of tea-grounds poured into a cup; and as the grains were disposed in a peculiar manner, or assumed a particular form, so she judged of the things to which she fancied a resemblance. She also availed herself of every ordinary mode of information, particularly by causing one of her domestics to talk with her visitors, to elicit the nature of their business, while she remained in an adjoining room, pretending to be absent. These arts, added to her natural shrewdness, and readiness to seize the slightest hint which might assist her in her surmises, appear to have constituted the whole amount of her power.

Her sagacity bore no proportion to the infatuation of those who trusted to it. She seems even to have admitted this, especially in one instance, when some gentlemen offered her a large sum, if she would inform them what ticket would draw the highest prize in a certain lottery. “Do you think,” said she, “if I knew, I should not buy it myself?”

Whatever may have been the witchcraft recognised in the Hebrew law, whether an actual communication with evil spirits, or the practice of deception by the means of false pretensions, an impartial investigation of the facts respecting “Moll Pitcher,” justify the conclusion, that her skill had no other foundation, than the practice of uncommon arts, assisted by an unusual degree of shrewdness and discernment.

In the next decade other authors appropriated Mary Pitcher for literary creations. In 1832 John Greenleaf Whittier published a poem, Moll Pitcher, which described her as stereotypical old witch. (The image above comes from a copy of that book owned by the University of Texas; in it someone has drawn several pictures of Pitcher talking back to Whittier.)

Two years later Samuel G. Goodrich’s Token and Atlantic Souvenir included a fictional story called “The Modern Job” with Pitcher as a character: “Moll Pitcher, or, as she is still called in the neighborhood where she resided, Molly Pitcher, was no ordinary woman. . . . In short, poor Molly, by degrees, was made to be a fortune-teller, and a diviner, in spite of herself.”

Thus, when American authors referred to the Monmouth artillerist as “Molly Pitcher” in 1835, they were echoing a name already well known among American sailors and New Englanders in general. Was that echo some kind of inside joke or allusion lost on us? Or had Revolutionary soldiers nicknamed the artillerist after the fortune-teller from Lynn, and why?

Again, Ray Raphael already noted this curious concatenation of Molly Pitchers in his book Founding Myths and in this Journal of the American Revolution article. Because Pitcher lived in Revolutionary New England, I’m going to dig a little deeper into her curious career.

TOMORROW: Moll Pitcher in the flesh.

Hancock and the Harrison

In 1763 the London merchant Jonathan Barnard took on Gilbert Harrison (d. 1790, his monument in the church at Newton Purcell shown here) as a full partner and successor.

One of Barnard and Harrison’s major customers in Boston was Thomas Hancock, who died the following year.

John Hancock inherited his uncle’s business and business contacts, and he started a busy correspondence with Barnard and Harrison. In late 1765 the Stamp Act threatened that relationship.

Hancock warned the Londoners on 14 October: “I have come to a Serious Resolution not to send one Ship more to Sea nor to have any kind of Connection in Business under a Stamp.” If any of his own ships arrived after 1 November, he would “Haul them up” instead of sending them back out.

In that same 14 October letter, however, Hancock announced that he had launched a new brigantine, owned in thirds by himself, Barnard and Harrison, and a Nantucket partnership named Barker and Burwell. As a tribute to his London contact, Hancock had named that ship the Harrison. “She sail'd for Nantuckett 11th Inst. compleatly fitted for the sea, and as pretty a Vessell & as well Executed as I ever saw a Vessell & I think tolerable Dispatch.”

Through November Hancock continued to complain about the Stamp Act, urging his London partners to lobby for its repeal. The next month, Hancock reported that officials in Boston weren’t enforcing the Stamp Act since the local Sons of Liberty had made sure there was no stamp master to distribute stamped paper. On 21 December he wrote to Barnard and Harrison:

This I hope you will receive by the ship Boston Packet. John Marshall, commar., which is now fully loaded with oyl, & have cleared him out at the Custom house, the officers certifying that no Stamps are to be had, which is actually the case, & you may rely the people on the Continent will never consent to the Grievous imposition of the Stamp Act. Our Custom house is now open as usual & clearance taken without stamps. That I apprehend there will be no risque on your side, here. I am under no apprehensions.

Despite his confidence, Hancock was facing a risk: the royal authorities could seize his ship and its cargo of whale oil for sailing without the proper paperwork.

The Boston Packet got through, and Barnard and Harrison assured Hancock that they had joined with other London merchants doing business with North America to urge the government to repeal the law. By early 1766 it was clear that such pressure was working.

On 26 February Hancock responded to that good news by writing:

I am very glad you have interested yourselves for us & wish your application may produce the Desired Effect. I am sure it is as much for the interest of Great Britain as ourselves to Ease our trade & in the case of the Stamp Act, there seems a necessity of Repealing it for almost to a man throughout the Continent, they are determined to oppose it, but I hope very soon to hear some good acct. from you. Do give me the earliest notice that the Parliament determines. I imagine the Brig Harrison will be the first Vessel here if the Stamp Act be repealed.

In early April the Harrison, captained by Shubael Coffin, left Britain for Boston. It carried loaf sugar and women’s stays for Samuel Eliot, “English and India Goods” for Frederick William Geyer, and the February London magazines for John Mein. And it carried a copy of the London Gazette with important news.

The Harrison reached Boston on 16 May 1766 after a voyage of six weeks and two days. The merchant John Rowe wrote in his diary:

Capt. Shubael Coffin arr’d from London abo. 11 of Clock & brot. the Glorious News of the total Repeal of the Stamp Act which was signed by his Majesty King George the 3d. of Ever Glorious Memory, which God long preserve & his Illustrious House.

The 19 May Boston Gazette noted:

It is worthy Remark that the Vessel which bro’t us the glorious News of the total Repeal of the Stamp Act is owned by that worthy Patriot, JOHN HANCOCK, Esq; who first ventured his Ship with a very rich Cargo for London, with a Clearance without the Stamp.

TOMORROW: Much rejoicing.

Down to the Sea in Deerfield with the Dublin Seminar, 24-26 June

On the weekend of 24-26 June, Historic Deerfield will host the annual Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, this year’s topic being “New England at Sea: Maritime Memory and Material Culture”:

Focusing on how the region remembered its maritime past, the weekend begins with a keynote address by the historian W. Jeffrey Bolster on the pivotal role that Gloucester, Massachusetts, played in the memory of its fishing industry.

It continues with individual topics such as chart making, the keeping of ship logs, and ship-design technologies. Later sessions address subjects such as whaling, slaving, privateering, and maritime family life; the rise of marine societies and efforts to preserve old ships; and the growth of maritime antiques businesses. The conference concludes with minorities’ experience of seafaring and maritime laboring and the material culture of sailors’ (and diplomatic) dress.

An optional workshop presented on Friday afternoon will examine the history of celestial navigation including a detailed exploration of the sextant, and Mystic Seaport’s digital resources used in genealogical and maritime-related research.

The main program of nineteen lectures (with discussion periods after each grouping) will begin in the Deerfield Community Center at 7:00 P.M. on Friday evening and will continue until around noon on Sunday. The conference registration fee includes lunch and dinner on Saturday, June 25, plus coffee and (really good locally made) doughnuts each morning.

The Dublin Seminar casts a wide net for researchers and for attendees, including university scholars, other educators, curators, collectors, librarians, preservationists, students, and the general public. Selected papers from this event will be published in a couple of years as the 2016 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife.

For more information and to register, visit this webpage.

New Myths of the Boston Massacre

The Boston Massacre occurred 244 years ago today. From the start that was a controversial event with different participants seeing it quite differently. It’s been mythologized in many ways, and myths and misconceptions continue to crop up. Here are some that I’ve seen repeated recently.

Did Crispus Attucks work at Gray’s ropewalk?

Boston’s official report on the shooting, titled A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre…, gave a lot of attention to a brawl between soldiers and workers at John Gray’s rope-manufacturing facility on 2 March. That fight involved two soldiers, Mathew Kilroy and William Warren, and one ropemaker, Samuel Gray, who faced off on King Street three days later. Another soldier, John Carroll, was part of a follow-up brawl on 3 March. Thus, the town suggested, those soldiers had not shot in self-defense but out of anger at townspeople, and perhaps at Samuel Gray in particular.

In all that attention to the ropewalk fight, however, no witness identified Crispus Attucks as being involved. Testimony does put a big man of African descent in the brawl: Drummer Thomas Walker of the 29th Regiment. But justice of the peace John Hill recalled shouting at Walker, “you black rascal, what have you to do with white people’s quarrels?” That suggests that no man of color like Attucks had been prominent in the fights before. Newspapers described Gray as a ropemaker but Attucks simply as a sailor.

In 2008 I noted a Boston Globe essay that said, “According to lore, Attucks reappeared [in Boston] just before the massacre, likely finding dock work as a rope maker.” But there’s no evidence for that guess and some to suggest it was mistaken. I suspect people trying to find a tight link between the ropewalk fight and the shooting on King Street assumed Attucks was involved in both, but historical events aren’t always so neat.

Did Attucks work on a whaling ship?

In Traits of the Tea-Party, published in 1835, Benjamin Bussey Thatcher cited an old barber named William Pierce as his source that Attucks “was a Nantucket Indian, belonging on board a whale-ship of Mr. Folger’s, then in the harbor…” But Pierce also told Thatcher that he’d never seen Attucks before the night of the Massacre, so he didn’t have inside information.

Boston’s 1770 newspapers directly contradict Pierce. They said Attucks was from Framingham, not Nantucket. They reported Attucks was “lately belonging to New-Providence [in the Bahamas], and was here in order to go for North-Carolina”—meaning he worked on trading voyages to the south rather than hunting whales.

I suspect that Pierce’s memory of Attucks from sixty-five years before had gotten mixed with his memory of the Prince Boston legal case, which did involve a man of African and Native descent, whalers from Nantucket, and a captain named Folger.

TOMORROW: The myth of the tombs.

Kempton Called Back to Service

Walter Spooner (1723-1803) was a representative to the Massachusetts General Court from the town of Dartmouth, which contained what’s become New Bedford. On 24 Jan 1776 Spooner wrote from Watertown, where the legislature was meeting, to Capt. Thomas Kempton of Dartmouth:

Sir—

It is with pleasure that I have it in my power to informe you that you are appointed a Lieut Colo. of a Regiment of Men to be raised as temporary reenforcement of men to continue for the Space of two months or until the first day of April next (if needed so long.) Jacob French is appointed Chief Colo. 50 men are to be raised in the County of Bristol, the other part are raised in the County of Cumberland, the Majr of F’[s] Regiment is appointed in the County & the Adjitent also, the other officers time would fail me to give you a perticuler account off.

Esqr. Baylies is appointed by the Court to come into the Town of Dartmouth in order to raise men. He will furnish you with more particular accompts. I also expect to be at home this weak and shall be glad to see you before I return again. Tho this appointment may be unexpected, yet I hope it will not be disagreeable. I wish your conduct may anser the expectations of your friends, for in your appointment I have taken no small part.

I with truth subscribe my Selfe

Your Friend,
W. Spooner.

Kempton had just finished eight months of service as a captain at the siege of Boston. He hadn’t reenlisted in the Continental Army at the end of 1775. But Gen. George Washington had asked the New England colonies to raise some militia regiments for a short period—two months in this case—to augment his depleted Continental forces. So the General Court gave Kempton a promotion from captain to lieutenant colonel and told him to report again.

Yesterday I quoted how Kempton’s grandson understood the way his Revolutionary War service started, as opposed to the slightly different story that documents from the time suggest. When Daniel Ricketson wrote his 1858 History of New Bedford, Kempton’s son told him that his father had “left service at the evacuation of Boston by the British troops” because of “a failure of health.” In fact, Lt. Col. Kempton’s term was up in April 1776.

It’s possible that health concerns played a role in Thomas Kempton’s decision not to reenlist in the Continental Army at the end of 1775 and later, though he was only in his mid-thirties and lived another thirty years. It’s also possible that Kempton had other reasons: a feeling that he’d done his part, pressure to be home with his family, better opportuntities in privateering (he had been a whaling captain years before) or civil government. But he did serve again in early 1776. When he died in New Bedford in 1806, the Columbian Centinel newspaper called him “Col. THOMAS KEMPTON, an aged and respectable inhabitant of that town.”

Today at 12:30 I’ll speak at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., about one of Thomas Kempton’s souvenirs of his military service in 1775: an engraved powderhorn now owned by that museum.

“The Happy Peace Taking Place So Suddenly”

According to an reminiscence by Dr. Ephraim Eliot, the Boston merchant Daniel Bell (1752-1791) and his brother-in-law, Dr. Amos Windship (1745-1813), conceived of a novel business venture early in 1783. Nantucket had oil from whaling. Britain had a good market for that oil. So why not send a shipload to England?

Because, technically, Britain and America were still at war. Windship had even served in the medical departments of both the Continental Army and the Continental Navy, so he was well aware of that situation. But that didn’t deter him from signing onto this voyage as supercargo (a job that sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is).

Windship first went to New York, still held tight by the British military, and “obtained a private licence” for the trip. Somehow the partners arranged a deal with an American merchant in Amsterdam to extend credit for the venture, and with merchants in London to buy the oil.

But not “buy” in the usual way. According to Eliot’s account:

The ship with the Doctor on board, was to hover on the coast of England; to be taken by a british privateer & then claimed by the London partners. The Admirals protection [obtained in New York] was to screen him from all other captures.

Unfortunately for the adventurers peace took place while he was on the ocean.

The Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in September 1783. British privateers returned to port, their licenses to take enemy shipping no longer valid. Which left Dr. Windship on his ship off the English coast, waiting for a capture that never came.

Windship decided that the best way to make a profit was “going immediately into the Thames & selling the oil,” perhaps for even more than originally planned. He didn’t consider that once Great Britain recognized the U.S. of A. as an independent country, American goods were subject to the same stiff Customs duties as other cargoes arriving in London from elsewhere outside the British Empire. And of course the local merchants who had made the previous, surreptitious deal weren’t going to expose that to the authorities.

The tariffs on the Nantucket oil “amounted to more than it was worth,” so the cargo and ship were seized and sold. But Bell still had to pay off that Dutch loan. He eventually applied for legal protection from creditors, pleading the unfortunate fact of “the happy Peace taking place so suddenly and unexpectedly.”

And this brings to an end “No Relation” Week at Boston 1775. So far I know, I’m not related to printer Robert Bell, deputy sheriff John Shubael Bell, any Sgt. Maj. Bell, bricklayer William Bell, or merchant Daniel Bell. And in some cases, that might be a very good thing.