Margaret Fuller (60 page)

The six on board the
Elizabeth
had packed their trunks for arrival; Margaret had chosen Nino’s outfit to wear ashore. But they huddled together now in their nightclothes, Margaret’s white gown faintly visible in the darkness of the cabin, after the dreadful shock of impact woke them all and an ominous scraping sound from below confirmed their worst fears. Waves breached the sides of the ship and beat against the walls of the cabin, which rocked to and fro with each surging swell. The wind howled at near hurricane force. Nino cried until Margaret swaddled him in blankets in her arms as she sat bracing herself with her back to the leeward wall, her legs pointing up the slanting cabin floor toward the foremast. Celeste screamed and wailed until Giovanni persuaded her to kneel in prayer. “Cut away!” they heard, and sails, rigging, and two of the three masts crashed to the deck of the
Elizabeth,
whose hold, with its cargo of “marble and rags,” now flooded with seawater.
She lay at the mercy of the maddened ocean.

“We must die,” Horace Sumner told Catherine Hasty. “Let us die calmly, then,” the young widow replied.
But shore was only three hundred yards off. At dawn, the first mate, Charles Davis, appeared to guide the passengers up to the forecastle where the crew had gathered, just as the flimsier walls of the passengers’ cabin began to break apart. The ship’s hull was stuck fast in the sands below, the vessel itself leaned to one side; waves poured over the main deck, littered with ropes and shards of the two downed masts. Nino made the trip in a canvas bag slung around a sailor’s neck. Catherine Hasty was nearly swept overboard, but Davis grabbed her long hair and held fast until she was free of the wave. All six passengers reached the relative shelter of the forecastle, where they could see figures moving about on shore. Davis returned to the passengers’ cabin to retrieve Margaret’s purse—seventy dollars in gold coins—and her travel desk, which held “what is most valuable to me if I live,” the manuscript.
Margaret tied the doubloons into a kerchief and secured it at her waist. The tide was near its lowest point; surely someone would come to their rescue.

An hour passed, yet none of the figures on shore entered the water; their attention was fixed elsewhere, on trunks, hats, anything that washed up on land. The sailors—there were seventeen in all—began to leap overboard. Swimming to shore at low tide, for those who knew how, seemed the only possible means of salvation. As one man fought his way to safety on the beach, after nearly an hour wrestling with the waves, Horace Sumner plunged in to follow, but he never resurfaced, dragged under by currents or knocked unconscious by floating debris.

Here was death by drowning: silent, senseless. A life lost, not sacrificed, yielded up not in a battle for freedom, but in a desperate bid for survival. And Margaret could not swim. She had waded into the shallows of the East River at Turtle Bay to bathe on warm summer nights, imagining James Nathan’s embrace; but she had never taken a stroke in the open ocean, and would not now in a storm that was smashing seaside cottages and boats at harbor as it battered the Atlantic coast all the way from North Carolina, where it made landfall, to Coney Island.

The tide turned. The waters began to rise again and the waves to swell ever higher, lifting the roof of the forecastle as they crested, drenching those who remained on board in spray. Soon the ship would be broken up entirely. Charles Davis proposed tying rope handles to wooden spars and towing passengers to shore. Catherine Hasty volunteered. Margaret watched as the younger woman held grimly to her plank, rolled over and over by the waves, her long hair streaming in the billows, her soaking nightdress dragging her downward, until she finally reached the shore, pulled out of the undertow by Davis at the last. She lived.
Now came Margaret’s turn.

But no single spar could support Margaret, Giovanni, Nino, and Celeste, the passengers still gathered about the foremast. With them were the
Elizabeth
’s cook, carpenter, steward, second mate, and Captain Bangs. Bangs insisted Margaret take hold of a plank; he would drag her next to shore. She refused. Bangs offered to take Nino first. She would not let him go. Margaret would not leave her family; they would not leave her. Surely first mate Davis would return with the lifeboat now visible on shore.

Another hour passed, after which the terrified, exasperated Bangs released his remaining crew members from duty; they could save themselves any way they wished. “I am a married man[.] I do not feel it right to throw away my life & can do nothing more on board,” he yelled into the wind, and dove from the deck to fight his way to shore. No one followed. Later, on the beach, an enraged Davis dragged Bangs out of the surf, berating him for “breaking his pledge,” leaving passengers behind on the sinking ship he’d dared to captain. Davis had had no greater success in persuading anyone on shore to help launch the lifeboat in the rough surf; the heavy craft could not be managed alone.
But the passengers and crew still waiting aboard the wreck could not know this.

In midafternoon, more than ten hours since the
Elizabeth
ran aground, the storm raged more fiercely than ever. The cook, Joseph McGill, cried out as the ship’s stern gave way. There could be no hope of rescue now. All must make “
one
desperate effort,” dive in and swim if they could, grab whatever might float and jump if they couldn’t, before the wreck itself dragged them under.
The steward had just taken Nino in his arms, Margaret saw to it, when an enormous wave crashed over the forecastle, bringing down the ship’s final mast, pulling up a stretch of deck, and sending Nino and the steward overboard. Celeste and Giovanni clung to the mast until the next wave swept them away. Margaret steadied herself for a moment, and then she too was gone.
When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders.

It was over.
Margaret would no longer suffer, or exult in, what Waldo had called life’s “sweet fever.” Did she share his belief in, his hope for, a compensating “sweet health” in death?

Margaret had believed that she and Giovanni “could have a good deal of happiness together in what remains of life,” once they reached America.
And Nino—would his small voice have spoken new words, deepened, and mingled with those of the other growing children of Concord? Through the years ahead there would be his cousins, Ellen and Ellery’s Greta and Caroline; and Waldo and Lidian’s Ellen, Edward, and Edith; Nathaniel and Sophia’s Una, Julian, and Rose; Bronson and Abba’s Anna, Louisa, Beth, and May. Theirs would be the voices of “children splashing and shouting in the river,” once so pleasing to Margaret as she lay on a favorite boulder in the hot sun of a summer day years ago, a day such as this one should have been—“lustrous warm, delicious happy, tender.” Farmers were “making hay in a near field” and the “fiddle of the village dancing master” could be heard “with its merry shriek and scrape in the distance, but all this noise”—all this
life
—was “harmonized by the golden fulness of light on the river on the trees, on the fields: it cared not where it lay: it loved and laughed on all.”

Epilogue: “After so dear a storm”

T
WO NIGHTS BEFORE
ELIZABETH
STRUCK GROUND OFF
Fire Island, the skies over the northeastern United States had been so clear that the daguerreotypist John Adams Whipple, experimenting with Harvard’s powerful Great Refractor telescope, succeeded in capturing the first photographic image of a star, Vega. But the same winds that scoured the heavens on the night of July 16–17, enabling a technological marvel, had carried with them a lethal storm and a merchant ship, a remnant of the fading age of sail, that proved no match for nature’s force.

When news of the wreck of the
Elizabeth
and Margaret’s disappearance reached the
New-York Tribune
offices, Horace Greeley assigned the story to his finest young writer, the poet-journalist Bayard Taylor, who set out at nightfall, making a seven-hour journey over still-stormy waters to reach the scene just before daybreak on Saturday, July 20. Newly returned from California, where he’d been posting letters to the
Tribune
on the 1849 gold rush, the twenty-five-year-old Taylor traversed the shoreline, finding ruptured casks of almonds, sacks of juniper berries, and oil flasks, “their contents mixed with the sand.” The ship’s shattered timbers were strewn along the narrow beach for a stretch of three or four miles. Taylor marveled at the force of a storm that had “so chopped and broken” the once sturdy vessel that “scarcely a stick of ten feet in length can be found.”
A portion of the
Elizabeth
’s foremast, studded with broken spars and snagged in loose rigging, rose and fell on the swells about fifty yards off shore, held fast by the ship’s sundered hull, a skeletal apparition beckoning in the dawn light.

Taylor had given up his post in mining country for the sake of a tubercular sweetheart back east; he was determined to marry, although his bride would survive only a few more months. At Fire Island, the waste of healthy lives, the “bruised and mangled” bodies of the dead that had washed to shore, seemed an abomination. Catherine Hasty had insisted on transporting Nino’s small body, still warm when it reached the beach, to the nearest house, a mile off, where the surviving sailors paid tearful farewells and fashioned a makeshift coffin out of one of their own sea chests. They locked and nailed down the lid before burying the boy “in a little nook between two of the sand-hills some distance from the sea.”
The midsummer heat made a swift interment necessary. Nino’s nurse, Celeste Paolini, was “enclosed in a rough box” and committed to the sand alongside two Swedish sailors and the ship steward who had held Nino in his arms at the last. In all, eight lives were lost. The bodies of Margaret, Giovanni, and Horace Sumner had not yet been found.

In his account of the wreck for the
Tribune,
Taylor placed blame squarely on the “inexperience” of Captain Bangs and made no secret of his disgust at the crowd of indifferent scavengers, whose number swelled to a thousand by Sunday morning as the greedy streamed in from as far off as Rockaway and Montauk to pilfer what they could of the
Elizabeth
’s cargo, valued at $200,000, roughly the equivalent of $4.5 million today. Taylor reported that a trunk filled with oil paintings destined for the Aspinwall family—kin to William Aspinwall Tappan, Cary Sturgis’s husband—had floated to shore. The paintings might have been preserved had they not been immediately cut away and pocketed by looters, who left the frames in shambles on the beach. Only a few “shreds of canvas, evidently more than a century old, half buried in the sand” remained. Likewise, the “silk, Leghorn braid, hats, wool, oil, almonds, and other articles contained in the vessel, were carried off as soon as they came to land.”

Taylor held out hope that the bodies of Margaret and Giovanni would be found “buried under the ruins of the vessel” or cast up on shore farther along the coast, dragged westward by the current that had set in since the storm. On Sunday afternoon, one of Margaret’s trunks bobbed free of the wreck, claimed at once by Catherine Hasty “before the pirates had an opportunity of purloining it.” She was said to be drying manuscripts by the fire in the same house where Nino had lain in state the day before. Taylor himself looked through “a pile of soaked papers,” finding copies of French and Italian newspapers as well as “several of Mazzini’s pamphlets,” Margaret’s reference materials. “I have therefore a strong hope that the work on Italy will be entirely recovered,” he wrote in the
Tribune.

Word of the tragedy took longer to reach New England, where Margaret’s family had gathered at Arthur’s house in Manchester, New Hampshire, anticipating a reunion with Margaret and first encounters with her husband and son. Instead, a telegram reprinted in the local paper brought the grim news, and Ellen, Arthur, Eugene, and Margarett Crane set out immediately for New York, where the Springs opened their Brooklyn home to the stricken family. As a child, Margaret had suffered from nightmare visions of her mother’s death. Had Margarett Crane ever permitted herself to imagine her daughter’s? Mrs. Fuller “sat like a stone in our house,” Rebecca Spring remembered afterward, unable to eat or sleep or even cry.
Ellen was as agitated as her mother was benumbed; she could not think of life without her older sister.

Arthur, Eugene, Marcus Spring, and Horace Greeley left together for Fire Island on the twenty-fourth, where they met Charles Sumner searching in vain for the body of his younger brother. William Channing was there too, along with his cousin, Ellen’s husband Ellery Channing, and Henry Thoreau, who had traveled with Ellery from Concord. Waldo Emerson had handed Thoreau seventy dollars to cover expenses and charged him “to go, on all our parts, & obtain on the wrecking ground all the intelligence &, if possible, any fragments of manuscript or other property.”
Waldo had considered making the trip himself but changed his mind, instead staying home to begin filling the journal that would ultimately generate his portion of a memorial biography he already envisioned as marking out “an essential line of American history” devoted to this “brave, eloquent, subtle, accomplished, devoted, constant soul!”

At Fire Island, Thoreau made a full survey of the shoreline and interviewed as many survivors and witnesses as he could find, drawing up an inventory of the Ossolis’ belongings: five trunks of varying sizes, a case of books, a tin box, and Margaret’s jewelry, four rings, a brooch, and “one eye glass with heavy gold handles & chain.”
Aside from the large trunk recovered by Catherine Hasty, another had been found, but its contents had vanished, “whether emptied by the sea, or by thieves, is not known.”

Late in the day he enlisted three fishermen to ferry him in an oyster boat to Patchogue on the mainland, where he’d heard many of the scavengers lived, but the trip proved fruitless and nearly cost Thoreau his life. The fishermen had delayed for several hours, drinking at a tavern as darkness fell, waiting for the tide to rise, they said. Two of the men spent the voyage stretched out in the bottom of the boat, sleeping off their bender in a swill of bilge and vomit; the third, taking the helm, narrowly missed running the boat aground when he mistook the light from a nearby cottage for the beam of a distant lighthouse. Thoreau got no answers in Patchogue other than what he gleaned from observing several youths at play with dominoes, dressed up in hats scavenged from the wreck; their mothers had stitched decorative tassels and buttons to the hats, filched, Thoreau guessed, from Margaret’s wardrobe trunk.