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The Palatine Wreck

The Legend of the New England Ghost Ship

Jill Farinelli

Two days after Christmas in 1738, a British merchant ship traveling from Rotterdam to Philadelphia grounded in a blizzard on the northern tip of Block Island, twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast. The ship carried emigrants from the Palatinate and its neighboring territories in what is now southwest Germany. The 105 passengers and crew on board—sick, frozen, and starving—were all that remained of the 340 men, women, and children who had left their homeland the previous spring. They now found themselves castaways, on the verge of death, and at the mercy of a community of strangers whose language they did not speak. Shortly after the wreck, rumors began to circulate that the passengers had been mistreated by the ship’s crew and by some of the islanders. The stories persisted, transforming over time as stories do and, in less than a hundred years, two terrifying versions of the event had emerged. In one account, the crew murdered the captain, extorted money from the passengers by prolonging the voyage and withholding food, then abandoned ship. In the other, the islanders lured the ship ashore with a false signal light, then murdered and robbed all on board. Some claimed the ship was set ablaze to hide evidence of these crimes, their stories fueled by reports of a fiery ghost ship first seen drifting in Block Island Sound on the one-year anniversary of the wreck. These tales became known as the legend of the Palatine, the name given to the ship in later years, when its original name had been long forgotten. The flaming apparition was nicknamed the Palatine Light. The eerie phenomenon has been witnessed by hundreds of people over the centuries, and numerous scientific theories have been offered as to its origin. Its continued reappearances, along with the attention of some of nineteenth-century America’s most notable writers—among them Richard Henry Dana Sr., John Greenleaf Whittier, Edward Everett Hale, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson—has helped keep the legend alive. This despite evidence that the vessel, whose actual name was the Princess Augusta, was never abandoned, lured ashore, or destroyed by fire. So how did the rumors begin? What really happened to the Princess Augusta and the passengers she carried on her final, fatal voyage? Through years of painstaking research, Jill Farinelli reconstructs the origins of one of New England’s most chilling maritime mysteries.

Paper: $19.95 | E-book: $14.99
ISBN-13: 9781611687057
Pages: 232 | Size: 6 in. x 9 in.
Date Published: September 5, 2017

Reviews

  • The Palatine Wreck is an invaluable addition to any collection dealing with maritime history and the immigrant experience. Part of the Seafaring America series, it delves deeper into the true story of the fateful journey, while clearly separating fact from fiction.

    Pirates and Privateers: The History of Maritime Piracy
  • Farinelli’s research on the works of 19th-century New England writers, interviews with local Block Island historians, and years of researching Palatine emigration allows The Palatine Wreck to work as a case study for how history can transform itself into legend.

    The Beehive
    Official Blog of the Massachusetts Historical Society
  • A great sea story told by a gifted historian. . . . Richly detailed and splendidly written, it offers unique insight into the dreadful suffering immigrants to America endured in the eighteenth century to find a better life.

    George C. Daughan
    author of Revolution on the Hudson
  • Wide-ranging and intriguing. . . . Jill Farinelli unveils the actual sojourn of the German immigrants cast ashore by the ill-fated Princess Augusta; . . . their suffering became a myth that besmirched a community’s reputation for generations.

    Glenn S. Gordinier
    Mystic Seaport

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