Mystery of the Spanish Sailors Graves
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Historian authorized by stewards to take grave rubbing of Sam Haley's grave on Smuttynose Island/ SeacaostNH.com/ Rpbinson photo
ISLES OF SHOALS

Is anyone buried in the thin Smuttynose soil or is it just a tale told by poets? Shoals history records an incident in a snowstorm on January 14, 1813. Whatever happened to the 14 Spanish sailors, they live today in two poems by local writers. Following is another mystery from Smuttynose Island.

 

 

 

SEE ALSO: Misty Legends of Sam Haley 

Here’s what the records say on the according to the late Shoals historian Bob Tuttle – "In the Gosport Town Records it is noted that the ship was wrecked on the night of January 14, 1813, during a snowstorm. The body of one sailor was found the next morning, six more bodies on January 17th, and five more on the 21st. On the 27th a body was grappled up from the Hog Island passage I presume this meant Malaga Gut On August 8th, another body was found in the same area; altogether, 14 bodies. They were reported buried on Smuttynose. But where are they?

READ ALSO: two poems about Spanish Sailors

Drowned at sea / SeacoastNH.comIt's time to peel the onion on the legend of the shipwrecked Spanish sailors at the Isles of Shoals. Two 19th century poems tell the story. But what about the facts? Were 14 frozen bodies buried on Smuttynose Island in 1813? Here are the few pieces of the puzzle we have.

Poet Celia Laighton Thaxter lived briefly on Smuttynose as a child. Her father Thomas Laighton bought the little rocky island from Captain Sam Haley who likely passed on the story of the Spanish shipwreck. The Laightons lived briefly in Captain Haley’s 1770s-era house, now one of just two buildings still standing on Smuttynose.

Most people confuse the Haley House with the Hontvet House, the site of the grisly March 1873 ax murder. But that house burned over a century ago. This is the story of the "other" great island mystery. Just behind the Haley House and up a small grassy rise is the Haley family cemetery. A few dozen yards further down the path is a sign marking the burial of the shipwrecked Spanish sailors.

At least that's what Celia tells us in her poem "The Spaniard's Graves" (1865). Celia addicts know this one by heart. In it, the poet stands weeping at the abandoned mass grave and whispers comfort to the dead sailors. Focusing the accumulated sadness into herself, the poet broadcasts the location of the dead sailors through space and time like a geo-positioning satellite. Celia channels the emotions of all the distant widows, mothers and sisters who never saw their loved ones again and never learned their fate. Here they are, the poet cries into the wind. She writes:

  Spanish women, over the far seas,
  Could I but show you where your dead repose!
  Could I send tidings on this northern breeze
  That strong and steady blows!

It's a good poem, very good. Celia once told a friend in a letter that she thought of the poem "among the pots and kettles" while doing housework. Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps she also read a recently rediscovered work about the Spanish sailors by Portsmouth poet James Kennard Jr.. His "Wreck of the Seguntum" first appeared in 1847. Poet Kennard gives a stirring eye-witness-style account of the sudden winter snowstorm, the cleaving green sea and the tragic wreck. The captain cries, the ship tacks, the foaming breakers roar.

It seems more than coincidental that the final stanza of Kennard's action-packed tragedy dovetails neatly with the opening lines of Celia's emotional response. Kennard ends his dramatic shipwreck poem noting that the Spanish sailors remain lost in a foreign land with no one to mourn them. It’s the kind of connection PhD candidates in English Literature thrive on. Two decades before Celia’s work, Kennard wrote:

  No mourners stood around their graves,
  No friends above them wept ;
  A hasty prayer was uttered there, --
  Unknown, unknelled, they slept.

Continue with SPANISH GRAVES



Update from SMUTTYNOSE ISLAND SHIPWRECK

It was important to Celia that her readers know the facts of the wreck. She devotes six pages to the background story in "Among the Isles of Shoals," the little history book that she reluctantly wrote for all the demanding 19th century tourists. It was a runaway bestseller, drawing visitors to her family's grand hotel on the Shoals by the ferry-full. It's still in print today and the tourists are still coming.

Another body discovered on the Isles of Shoals in 1813 / SeacoastNH.com

The Spanish ship Sagunto, she explains crashed at Smuttynose in a storm on January 14, 1813. All hands on board died. Fourteen were found over the next few days, some having crawled toward the candle light in the window of Sam Haley's cottage. Haley kept a candle burning for 50 years before White Island lighthouse was built nearby.

It's a powerfully gruesome image, a band of hoary figures like Titanic victims, frozen solid, one just inches from the Haley home, his arm raised stiffly toward the cottage door.

Okay, that's probably not how it happened, if it happened at all, but poets take license with facts to hold their reader’s attention. Celia recounts the official Gosport town records of the "ship Sagunto Stranded on Smotinose Isle," but disputes the dates and body count. Sam Haley, she insists, buried the bodies, but his tombstone nearby in the Haley Cemetery proves he died two years earlier in 1811 at age 80. The record accounts for 12 bodies. Celia says 14. Old records can be as faulty as old spelling.

So we're forced to consult the usual cluster of Isles experts for clues. Historian John Scribner Jenness (1875) appears mute on the Spaniards' graves. Celia’s granddaughter Rosamund Thaxter says there were 15 sailors and simply reprints the poem in her Celia biography "Sandpiper" (1962). Celia's brother Oscar also reprints the poem in his biography "Ninety Years on the Isles of Shoals" (1929). He sticks to his sister's version, but counts 16 Spaniards, three of whom survived a short while in the night, he says.

But beloved historian Lyman Ruttledge waxes eloquent in "The Isles of Shoals in Legend and Lore" (1965). Celia is confused, he writes, because there were two Sam Haleys. It was the son, Captain Haley, who discovered the bodies.

Then Ruttledge lobs a curve ball. Cap't Haley, he says, told a Massachusetts court that the ship was not the Sagunto, but the "Concepcion from Cadiz". A Spanish ship named Sagunto did arrive in Newport from Cadiz two days earlier, Ruttledge says. Haley recounted finding bodies strewn around the island and in the water, 14 in all.

Continue with SPANISH GRAVES



Update from SMUTTYNOSE ISLAND SHIPWRECK

In his "Visual History" (1989) of the Shoals, the late John Bardwell reverted to the Sagunto story. Two men struggled toward the cottage and got as close as the stone wall, he says. They were found like a dozen others, coated in fresh snow. Another was found in the bushes six months later. Ferryboat Captain Robert Whittaker has told the story hundreds, maybe thousands of times to passengers on the ship Thomas Laighton. Like lost poet James Kennard, Whittaker's version in "Land of Lost Content" (1994) reads like a Howard Cosell blow-by-blow account. The snow dances, the surf roars, the mast cracks as each man embraces his Mistress Death. But this is again drama, not fact.

Smuttynose steward J Dennis Robinson points out the marker at the supposed burial site of the 14 Spanish sailors on Smuttynose Island / Photo by Rodman Philbrick. SeacoastNH.comThere's more. Kicking around in the archives on Star Island, the late Shoals historian Bob Tuttle found an annotated copy of the Jenness history. Now this gets complicated, so hold tight. The book was annotated by a doctor named Joseph Warren. Warren had copied a paper written by a Shoaler named E.L. Ham. Ham had been given the copy by Celia's brother Oscar, who said it came from the Haley family bible. Still with us?

Assuming it is authentic, the paper tells of various shipwrecks on the Shoals. On the list we find -- "the Spanish ship from Cades (Cadiz) Bound to New York was Castaway on this island of Smuttinose." The dates match the Sagunto report and the Haley report goes on to say that no one survived and there was not much worth salvaging. The next passage reads:

"my sons & what other men I Hired picked up 14 of the Dead men & buried them in my Buring [sic] field; but I Did not get my pay from any man."

So maybe, Tuttle concludes, just maybe there was a shipwreck with Spanish sailors. But think about it. The topsoil on rocky Smuttynose is about a foot deep. It was January. The graves were marked by a line of rocks, we're told.

Enter Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, another doctor who spent 10 days on the Shoals in 1858. Not far from the Haley family cemetery at Smuttynose he saw what could have been the identifying stones. Bowditch was speculating when he noted in his journal that "they were buried close together, evidently in one trench, with their feet to the East & their heads to the Setting Sun."

Bowditch saw 28 stones lined up, stones he identifies as the 14 headstones and 14 footstones. Twelve, he wrote, were clustered practically on top of each other, while two sets are paired a couple of feet away. Were these the officers of the ship, he wonders, segregated in death as in life from the "rude seaman"?

Bowditch guessed. Archeologist Faith Harrington tested. In 1991 while an assistant professor at a Maine university, her crew dug discreet systematic test pits across the burial area where the soil is about a foot deep. They found no graves, no evidence of any human remains, no trenches -- just rocks. There was no proof that the ground had ever been disrupted.

"All the archeology is inconclusive," Harrington says today. Although historian Ruttledge suggested it would be sacrilegious to excavate the remains, he had not imagined ground-penetrating radar. The sceintific search found no proof of the burials. Harrington chooses her words respectfully.

"We did not find evidence for the graves in the research that we did," she says. Pushed, the existence of 14 Spanish sailors buried in a foot of soil on Smuttynose Island "seems unlikely," Harrington admits. But there may be more clues in a study of maritime history; an equally scientific survey of ships from that era may turn up something.

Maybe, maybe not. So for now we're left with a sinking ship of facts, a conflicting sea of words, some piles of rocks, a storm of misplaced emotions. Although the written record suggests that Captain Haley found nothing valuable to salvage, just seven years later Haley built a costly stone breakwater connecting Smuttynose with nearby Malaga Island. Legend says he paid for the work in 1820 with bars of silver. Haley died in 1839 at age 76 when Celia was just five years old.

The mystery remains. And so does the light from Haley’s cottage. Smuttynose Island has never had the luxury of electricity. On summer nights, when visitors are in the cottage, the glow of a flicker oil lamp is still visible for miles at sea.

Copyright © 2006 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved. Robinson owns and edits the regional web site SeacoastNH.com with fresh content posted every day since 1997.