The Palatine Wreck by Jill Farinelli

Author:Jill Farinelli [Farinelli, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Maritime History & Piracy
ISBN: 9781512601176
Google: rdIwDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: University Press of New England
Published: 2017-09-05T22:17:50+00:00

The monument that marks the location of the Palatine graves on Block Island. Photograph: Jill Farinelli

In the March 19, 1739, issue of the Boston Post-Boy, the following item appeared in the (Newport) Rhode Island Customs House news: “Last Wednesday arrived here between Fifty and Sixty Palatines from Block Island, viz. Men, Women and Children, who sail for Philadelphia with the first fair Wind.”31

CHAPTER TEN

On to Pennsylvania

Most of the survivors left Block Island on the evening of March 14, just hours before “a very great Storm of Wind and Rain” swept across southern New England. This latest gale—the fifth that winter—produced heavy seas and caused extensive damage to the wharves in Boston.1 During the two-and-a-half months the castaways had spent recovering from their ordeal, two more vessels had wrecked on the island. The second occurred just a week earlier in March, when a sloop from the West Indies, laden with rum and molasses, was cast away in a snowstorm and lost most of her cargo.2

Conrath Gehr and Elisabetha Gebert were among the sixty or so Palatines who were ferried across Block Island Sound to Newport, where arrangements had been made for two sloops to transport them to Philadelphia. Ships were passing freely on the Delaware again after a winter so brutally cold that the river had been frozen on and off for seven weeks, shutting down traffic throughout most of December and January.3 Coastal trade between Newport and Philadelphia had since resumed, with one- and two-masted cargo vessels shuttling freight, mail, and passengers between the two cities.

The Palatines spent about a week in Newport, a community of around 6,000 people, located at the entrance to Narragansett Bay. On the evening of March 20, thirty of the survivors left for Philadelphia. Around thirty more left on a cold and rainy evening two days later. Boston newspapers reported their departure, but not the names of the ships they traveled on.4 In its March 29 issue, however, the Pennsylvania Gazette announced the arrival that week of two sloops from Rhode Island: the King’s Fisher, under the command of Joseph Worth, and the Martha, under Captain Edward Barker. These may have been the vessels that finally delivered the Palatines to their original destination.

It would have taken the sloops several days to reach Cape James (now Henlopen) and Cape May, the two capes that mark the entrance to Delaware Bay. Fifty miles inland, the bay narrows to less than three miles wide, a point that mariners consider to be the mouth of the Delaware River. The sloops had to travel another fifty miles upstream to reach the port of Philadelphia.

For the large Palatine ships that arrived each fall, this last part of the journey could be hazardous. The bay is strewn with dozens of sandbanks, some more than ten miles long, and river travel is impeded by shoals, shallows, and islands. There was no accurate chart of the waterway until the mid-1700s, so the heavily laden immigrant ships had to rely on a local pilot to navigate the hazards.

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