Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

~~ THEODOSIA BURR ~~

“No, no,” he said to a friend who revived the fable of the pirates, “she is indeed dead. Were she alive all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father.”

But the mystery persisted and so the rumors and stories would not down. For a number of years after 1813 the newspapers contained, from time to time, reports from various parts of the world, generally to the effect that a beautiful and cultured woman had been seen aboard a ship supposed to be manned by pirates, that such a woman had been found in a colony of sea refugees in some vaguely described West Indian or South American retreat, or that a woman of English or American characteristics was being detained in an island prison, whither she had been consigned along with a captured piratical crew. The woman was always, by inference at least, Theodosia Burr.

Nor were the persevering Burr calumniators idle, a circumstance which seems to testify to the fear his enemies must have had of this strange and greatly mistaken man. Theodosia Burr had been seen in Europe in company with a British naval officer who was paying her marked attentions; she had been located on an island off Panama, where she was living in contentment as the wife of a buccaneer; she was known to be in Mexico with a new husband who had first been her captor, then her lover and now was in the southern Republic trying to revive Burr’s dream of empire.

The death of Governor Alston in 1816 caused a fresh crop of the old stories to blossom forth and the long deferred demise of Aaron Burr in 1836 released a still more formidable crop of rumors, fables and speculations. It was not until Burr had passed into the grave that there appeared on the American scene a type of romantic who made the next fifty years delightful. He was the old reformed pirate who desecrated his exit into eternity with a Theodosia Burr yarn. The great celebrity of the woman in her lifetime, the tragic fame of her father and the circumstances of her death naturally conspired to promote this kind of aberrant activity in many idle or unsettled minds. The result was that “pirates” who had been present at the capture of the Patriot in the first days of 1813 began to appear in many parts of the country and even in England, where they told, usually on their deathbeds, the most engaging and conflicting tales. It took, as I have remarked, half a century for all of them to die off.

The accounts given by these various confessors differed in details only. All agreed that the Patriot had been captured by sea rovers off the Carolina coast and that the entire crew had been forced to walk the plank or been cut down by the pirates. Thus the fabulists accounted for the fact that nothing had ever been heard from any of Mrs. Alston’s shipmates. Nearly all accounts agreed that Theodosia had been carried captive to an unnamed island where she had first been a rebellious prisoner but later the docile and devoted mate of the pirate chief. A few of the relators gave their narratives the spice of novelty by insisting that she, too, had been made to walk the plank into the heaving sea, after she had witnessed all her shipmates consigned to the same fate. The names of the pirate ships and pirate captains supposed to have caught the Patriot and disposed of Theodosia Burr Alston ranged through all the lists of shipping. No two dying corsairs ever agreed on this point.

Forty years after the disappearance of Mrs. Alston this typical yarn appeared in the Pennsylvania Enquirer:

“An item of news just now going the rounds relates that a sailor, who died in Texas, confessed on his death bed that he was one of the crew of mutineers who, some forty years ago, took possession of a brig on its passage from Charleston to New York and caused all the officers and passengers to walk the gang plank. For forty years the wretched man had carried about the dreadful secret and died at last in an agony of despair.

“What gives the story additional interest is the fact that the vessel referred to is the one in which Mrs. Theodosia Alston, the beloved daughter of Aaron Burr, took passage for New York, for the purpose of meeting her parent in the darkest days of his existence, and which, never having been heard of, was supposed to have been foundered at sea.