Seaborne

Seaborne--The Baby that washed Ashore at Hendricks Head--is the tale of a baby rescued by a lighthouse keeper one stormy night after a shipwreck near the Cuckolds. There has been much debate about its validity. But one thing is for certain, the news of this story has become a legend that has stuck with this lighthouse since. It has been featured in television documentaries and newspaper and magazine articles. It has been featured in the fictional novel Waterbaby: A Novel, by Cris Mazza, (You can read an excerpt from the novel HERE.), and the book, Gift of the Winds: A Tale of Hendricks Head Lighthouse, by Tecla Emerson. And it has also inspired the children's book, The Sea Chest, by Toni Buzzer.

Below is the story, as featured on Ben Russell's Hendricks Head Light website, reprinted from the Boothbay Region Historical Society's, Out of Our Past, by Barbara Rumsey.

Out of Our Past

Boothbay Region Historical Society

The Baby That Washed Ashore at Hendricks Head

by Barbara Rumsey

One of the more disheartening aspects of spending time on local history is how real history is often ignored in favor of tales of "mystery, romance, intrigue, and adventure," always with the obligatory dash of death. Ordinarily, daily life is rather mundane and repetitive, and I actually like it that way; it's restful. But many people think that's too pallid and that around the corner is something really fantastic. In the same vein, people like to imagine that grand dramatic things took place long ago. This urge to embroider, to aggrandize, eventually results in created stories that become regarded as history by some.

In my years of manning the museum, reporters have dropped in from out-of-town papers, and the pattern is almost always the same. They're after history as entertainment - such as ghost stories and pirate treasure. I tell them that I think real history is more interesting than phony history, and urge them to write the real Boothbay story. I actually think it's an insult for them to come to town, ignore the true history, and spin a yarn from Cloud Cuckoo Land. They needn't come to Boothbay to write imaginary tales! I guess you'd call me a spoilsport.

Shipwreck, 1870's

A good example of this kind of story is, "the baby that washed ashore an Hendricks Head." Both we and the Southport Historical Society have gotten repeated requests for information about this "incident." The trouble seems to have started in 1945 when Edward Rowe Snow included the story as fact in Famous Lighthouses of New England.

According to Snow, in the 1870's the lightkeeper at Hendricks Head saw a vessel going to pieces on the rocks nearby; it had earlier struck a ledge near Cuckolds, at the tip of Southport. The keeper saw a bundle put overboard, lit a bonfire to let the people aboard (most clinging to the rigging) know they were aware of them and to guide them, but soon saw the vessel go under. Not long after, two mattresses came ashore tied together. When the lighthouse keeper untied them, he found a box with a live baby girl inside. Having just lost a baby, the lightkeeper and his wife took it as their own.

Shipwreck!-death!-a saved baby!-drama on the high seas!-irresistible story elements.

This "incident," supposedly happening not more than 120 years ago, is recent enough to be checked, and I think it's a worthwhile exercise. I hope to show that once something is in print, no matter how outlandish, it's extremely difficult to debunk it.

First of all, were it true, the Boothbay Register, founded in 1876, certainly would have devoted some space to it. If the event predated the paper's existence by a year or two, still the girl and the family would have been newsworthy and would have been interviewed at times over the years.

The Marr Lightkeepers

The lightkeepers at Hendricks Head were local and there to stay. From 1866 to 1895, Jeruel Marr ran the light, so he would have been the shipwrecked baby girl's adoptive father. Jeruel had five children between 1852 and 1871, two of them daughters, Verona and Clarinda, born in 1853 and 1855. All three of Jeruel's sons were lightkeepers. From 1895 to 1930, Jeruel's son, Wolcott Marr, was lightkeeper at Hendricks Head. Ethelyn Pinkham Giles, born 1904, spent many an afternoon as a youngster at the lighthouse, as did other neighborhood children, since Wolcott had eleven children, with Clara and Arthur Marr near Ethelyn's age. Additionally the Pinkham and Marr families were closely related. When I spoke with Ethelyn in April, she had never even heard of the story. If the story were true, the shipwrecked baby would have been a sister to Wolcott and an aunt to all the children Ethelyn played with.

The Marrs ran heavily to lightkeeping. Besides Jeruel and his son Wolcott, Jeruel's son Clarence and Preston were lightkeepers at Pemaquid and Cuckolds. Clarence, Preston, and Wolcott Marr had a brother-in-law, Sidney Pinkham (great-uncle of Ethelyn Giles), who was lightkeeper at Seguin; Sidney's father Ephraim Pinkham had briefly been lightkeeper at Hendricks Head in the mid-1850's. It should also be remembered that Southport was a very marine-oriented town. If the men weren't running lighthouses, they were fishing or coasting. Things of the water were of paramount importance, and Southport had a reputation as the home of the highest-earning fishermen in Maine in the late 1800's. There wouldn't have been much that they missed.

Cecil Pierce and Albert Orne

Cecil Pierce, born 1906 and associated in people's minds with Southport history, never heard the story, though his family had been involved in lightkeeping. Cecil's grandfather, Albert Orne (1850-1938), was often employed at lighthouses, and Orne's grandfather had run the Hendricks Head Light earlier in the nineteenth century. Many years ago I took down some remarks Cecil made about his grandfather. "His livelihood for thirty years was as a maintenance man for lighthouses. He traveled up and down the coast of Maine doing carpenter and slip work the four months of the year that the weather allowed. The winter storms would stave things all to pieces, such as the head houses where the winches were. Just the transportation was a job in itself made more awkward by his wooden toolbox which took two men to lift it. [It was later lost in the 1940's Goudy & Stevens fire when Clayton Orne worked there.] In order to get to Sequin, for instance, he would have to hire a man and horse to get his toolbox to the steamboat landing, steam to Bath, take another steamer to Popham, and hire an idle dory to row him to the island. When he retired, he was the first man to draw a pension in town, outside of Civil War veterans. Although he probably made no more than thirty-five cents an hour top pay, he had a sizable sum accumulated at the time of his death, even though he'd fallen into the hands of traveling stock market brokers."

Royal Luther

In 1875 Royal Luther was named Superintendent of Lighthouses in the First and Second District, which included Maine and Massachusetts. He ran the lighthouse service for 53 years, arriving in Southport in 1875 to take charge of rebuilding Hendricks Head Light. Soon after his arrival, he married Annie Marr, daughter of Nahum Marr and niece of Jeruel Marr. The Luthers lived principally in Malden, Massachusetts, but summered in Southport, with Royal joining them weekends by steamer. Surely he, the head of the district, a summer resident, and related by marriage to five local lightkeepers, would have known of this incident. One of Royal Luther's daughters was Evelyn Luther Pratt, born 1890. Her daughter, Evelyn Sherman, once said to me, "my mother would have known that girl and she would have told me about her." The shipwrecked girl would have been Evelyn Pratt's first cousin.

With all those people-lightkeepers, maintenance worker, head of the district, seamen-intimately knowledgeable about sea life, local lighthouses, and wrecks, it is simply unbelievable that such an event could have happened without their knowledge and comment. It is not the kind of thing you keep to yourself.

Southport Historical Society Founders

A remarkable number of Marr descendants founded the Southport Historical Society. Of the founders, eight came down from the Marrs (if you include Stuart Thompson's and Maurice Sherman's marriages to Marr descendants Jean Luther and Evelyn Pratt.) Cecil Pierce, another founder of the Society, was distantly related to the Marrs by two Pierce sisters marrying lightkeeper Jeruel Marr's brothers, Thomas and Nahum Marr. (Cecil would have been a fourth cousin to Charles Pinkham and Evelyn Luther Pratt, while Charles and Evelyn were second cousins.) With all these Marr descendants so committed to local history, is it plausible that they would have been ignorant of the story that so intimately involved their family if it were true?

Ronnie Orchard told me that about 40 or 50 years ago, Bob Colby of Southport, while playing cards with Arthur and Wolcott Marr, Jr. (grandsons of Hendricks Head lightkeeper Jeruel and sons of keeper Wolcott), asked them about the story. They looked puzzled, and Bob explained some more of the details. Finally, their faces cleared, and Wolcott said, "Oh, yes, I remember; that's the time the bowsprit came through the bedroom window, and I sanded it, and (looking at Arthur) you varnished it." That's how seriously they took the story about their purported aunt.

I speculated the story came into being as that kind of a tall tale, told simply for the fun of putting somebody on, and that it reached the ears of Edward R. Snow who printed it as fact in 1945. I remember talking to my old teacher, Hope Hodgdon Updegraff, one day about the East Boothbay mills on the mill pond and the marsh. After going over it for some time, I got up to leave and Hope, with a twinkle in her eye, said, "I told the last person who came here to talk about the mill that it was on that little frog pond by the Murray house." I laughed and asked her why, and she said, "I didn't like him; he needed to come down a peg or two." Don't get people's backs up if you want the straight story! Or, think back to one of the Sam Woodward stories printed a month ago - the drowned couple in Adams Pond - created just to see how much of a commotion he could cause by spreading a totally untrue rumor.

Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast

Though my speculating was plausible, the real answer is much simpler, Ronnie Orchard knew I was working on this article, mentioned it to various people, and Kathy Bugbee jumped on it. She borrowed a book from Sally Wood for me to read, entitled Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast. Written in 1900 by Charles Clark Munn, it broadly told the shipwreck/baby story as a typical period romance adventure. Munn, born in Southington, Connecticut in 1848, worked as a commercial traveler and died in Springfield, Massachusetts on July 8, 1917. Being a commercial traveler, might he have been the traveling stockbroker who fleeced lighthouse worker Albert Orne, mentioned earlier in this article? The titles of Munn's other books give the same promise of light, somewhat athletic, romance adventure: Pocket Island, Rockhaven, The Hermit, The Castle Builders, and Camp Castaway.

In Munn's novel, the lighthouse was placed on the mainland tip of Southport, about five miles south of Hendricks Head. Incidentally, Cuckolds light, just off the tip, was not erected until 1907. Uncle Terry, originally from Connecticut, was lightkeeper (for 30 years altogether, like the real Hendricks Head keeper, Jeruel Marr), in residence with his wife and no children. The vessel first struck on White Hoss Ledge (probably The Motions) off Damariscove, then struck again on ledges at the tip of Southport, where it went under just after the baby was sent ashore in the mattresses. Enough material came with the baby or floated ashore to determine her name was Etelka Peterson from Stockholm, Sweden. The wreck took place eighteen years before the story was narrated - that gave the baby time to grow up so the author could work in the love interest.

The Perennial Plot - Death, Love, and Money

Baby Etelka (Telly) grew up on the pastoral island of Southport, devoted to her adoptive parents and following her hobby of painting. The harbor at Southport was ice-bound in winter, and the island was inhabited by families named Leach, Oaks, and Bascom, and minor eccentric characters. Though the author probably visited here, he didn't use local names, and he changed conditions at will - icing up the harbor and moving the lighthouse. The plot follows the usual course. Terry finds a legal notice in a Boston newspaper, placed for a Stockholm man searching for his Peterson grandchild, known to have been shipwrecked in Maine. Terry follows it up and gets tangled with a villainous Boston Lawyer who cheats him. A young lawyer, yachting on the coast, is befriended by the family, falls in love with Telly, shares his love of painting with her, and promises to handle the Peterson situation when the villainous lawyer shoots himself after a market crash. Girl gets fortune from Sweden, boy gets girl; old couple tearfully wave goodbye.

So that's where the story came from - a 1900 novel. I wish all local legends were so easily analyzed and placed where they belong as either fact or fiction. Serious historians often ignore such stories since to even mention them in order to dispel them can appear to give them credence. It's a good policy, which I've subverted, but I couldn't pass up the chance to show how these legends can start. So when you hear, "They say a baby washed ashore at Hendricks Head after a shipwreck," laugh and encourage them to while away some time with Uncle Terry. Who can resist the opening lines?

"It's goin' to be a nasty night," said Uncle Terry, coming

in from the shed and dumping an armful of wood in the box

behind the kitchen stove, "an the combers is just a-humpin'

over White Hoss Ledge, an' the spray's flyin' half way up the

lighthouse."

"The Lord-a-massy help any poor soul that goes ashore

tonight," responded a portly, white-haired woman beside the

stove, as a monster wave made the little dwelling tremble.

Source: Ben Russell's Hendricks Head Light website

Edited and enhanced by C.A. Chicoine

The story mentioned in the above article, as it was presented in The Lighthouses of New England, by Edward Rowe Snow, 1945, updated by Jeremy D'Entremont in 2002, is available to view HERE.

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