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.

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