THE PIRATE SHIP OF THE SAN BERNARD
A LEGEND OF THEODOSIA BURR ALLSTON
By J. W. Morris
Rumor of a pirate ship wrecked at the mouth of the San Bernard River, Brazoria County, has persisted for more than a century. Colonel Hunnington, who is seventy-eight years old, and [[192]]who has lived near the mouth of the San Bernard for sixty years, heard of the wrecked privateer from the McNeill family, which established itself on the Bernard in 1822. Colonel Hunnington says that the ship was wrecked about 1816. It had put into the river to escape a great hurricane. The crew buried their golden pillage, some say ten million dollars, before the water rose to their destruction. When the storm passed, only one pirate remained alive. Colonel Hunnington says that the buried money has never been found, and he believes that it still lies where pirate hands placed it more than a hundred years ago. Captain William Sterling, who died a few years ago at the age of eighty, gave me corroborative evidence concerning the pirate ship. He said that during his boyhood he knew a solitary fisherman on Matagorda Peninsula who claimed to be the sole survivor of the wrecked privateer. He often showed the boy gold coins, which he called Spanish doubloons.
A wild and fascinating legend of the storm-wrecked ship was told me many years ago by Doctor Sid Williams, who was then a practicing physician near the mouth of Old Caney in Matagorda County. Mr. Jacob Smith told the same story. It is ascribed to a chief of the Carancaguas Indians, who spoke broken English and often visited the white settlers. He said that his tribe had always lived along the coast—a fact substantiated by history. A small band, of which he was chief, lived in the timber a few miles from the San Bernard River, along which clear to its mouth grew live oak trees and tough salt cedars. One day a great storm came out of the Gulf; the wind blew with fury that increased as the darkness came, and the waters rose upon the land. The chief and his people climbed into the salt cedars, which bent with the wind but did not break. After two days the storm passed and the tidal waters fell back. Many of the huge live oaks were destroyed utterly, and the remainder were so twisted and broken that they soon died. Since that time there has been no forest along the lowest reaches of the San Bernard.
As soon as the storm abated, the chief went from his camp to the bank of the river, where a pale-face lived alone. He found the hermit’s body tied with a rope to the splintered stump of a tree. There the waves had overwhelmed him. The chief also saw, partly in the water and partly on the land, the wreckage of a great ship. As he looked, he heard a faint voice. He followed the sound to what had been a cabin, and saw the ghost-like form of a white woman chained to the side. She stood with [[193]]difficulty, and presently fainted, perhaps from weariness, perhaps from fright at seeing an Indian savage, for the chief made a habit of wearing deer antlers on his head. He broke the chain from the wall and carried her to the shore and laid her on the sand. He bathed her face in cold water, and she revived. She told him that her father had been a great chief away back somewhere, but that he had been misunderstood and had had to leave his country. Her husband was governor, she said, of a great state. She had been in a ship on the ocean when pirates destroyed the ship and killed all aboard it except herself. She was put on the pirate ship, which, returning to its Gulf headquarters, had been encountered by the storm and driven inland. There was, she said, a chest of gold on the wrecked ship, but the Indian could not find it. He did find the captain and some of the crew lashed to parts of the wreckage, dead. The chief made every effort to revive the woman, but she grew steadily weaker. She took from her neck a chain and locket and gave them to him. She began to sing, very faintly and beautifully. The Great Spirit spread a white wigwam around her so that the Indian could not see her. The voice sang on into the night, more and more faintly. When the morning star rose, the voice was still. At daylight the white wigwam was gone, and the woman lay dead. The Indian dug a grave with broken pieces of the wrecked ship, laid her there, and covered the grave with a broken door from the wreck. No man knows where that grave lies.
The Indian took the locket and chain to some white men, who read on the locket the word Theodosia and found within pictures of a fine-looking man and a little boy. Long afterward coast dwellers told this story in explanation of the mysterious fate of Theodosia Burr Allston.[1] [[195]]
[1] Theodosia Burr Allston, daughter of Aaron Burr and wife of Joseph Allston, Governor of South Carolina, 1812–1814, set sail from Charleston in December of 1813 on the Patriot bound for New York. The vessel was never heard of again, and it is supposed to have been wrecked off the coast of Hatteras. “Some forty years afterward, however,” according to Lamb’s Biographical Dictionary of the United States, Vol. I, pp. 76–77, “a romantic story found credence and went the rounds of the press, to the effect that a dying sailor in Detroit had confessed that he had been one of a crew of mutineers who, in January, 1813, took possession of the ‘Patriot’ … and compelled the crew and passengers to walk the plank.” The New International Encyclopedia says that “a tradition of uncertain origin” has the Patriot to have been taken by pirates.—Editor. [↑]