Pirates!

I have gotten back into some family history work lately, after a long break.  I have been studying Mayflower ancestors and their first two generations of descendants in the New World... and I've come across not one, but two encounters with pirates!

In 1651, Elizabeth Howland (daughter of Elizabeth Tilley and John Howland, both Mayflower passengers) married Captain John Dickinson (sometimes spelled Dickenson, Dickarson, or other variations).  They - and several of Elizabeth's other married siblings, including my direct ancestors Desire Howland and Captain John Gorham - lived in Barnstable, MA.  By 1653, Dickinson was master of the 120-ton sloop Desire - the third vessel built in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  It was owned by Samuel Mayo, William Paddy, and John Barnes.

The ship was hired by Rev. William Leverich and the brothers Peter, Anthony, and Nicholas Wright, to take them, their families, and all of their possessions to Oyster Bay, Long Island, where they had purchased land from the Native Americans and intended to start a new town.  On arriving in Hempstead Bay, the ship was seized by pirate Thomas Baxter, an Englishman who had a letter of marque from the Rhode Island government to prey on Dutch shipping (the English and Dutch were at war at the time).  He allowed the passengers to disembark, then took the sloop and its cargo to Fairfield Harbor, Connecticut.  It is possible that John Dickinson had run past Baxter's blockade on previous occasions, doing trade between New England and New Amsterdam, and that this qualified the ship in Baxter's mind as a valid target.

Capt. Mayo brought suit against Capt. Baxter, who was arrested, tried, forced to return his booty and pay a fine for "disturbing the peace", and banished from New Haven Colony.  A further civil suit by Capt. Mayo won further damages, financially ruining Thomas Baxter, who is said to have gone to Nevis where he died.  John Dickinson and his family moved to Oyster Bay themselves around 1658.

A generation later, around May 1695, Desire Howland and John Gorham's youngest son, Shubael Gorham, was traveling with his friends and family to Nantucket for his marriage to Puella Hussey when "the members of the wedding party were taken prisoner by a French shallop from Port Royal and were stripped of all their valuables."  I have found a mention that Shubael's brother John was among that party, but nothing further to indicate which other family members might have been.  They had eight other siblings alive at the time, all married with children.  Their parents had passed.

While my brief research has not turned up more documentation and details of these events, they each must have been the talk of the family!

Aldrich Court in World War I

I am often amused and amazed by the connections that crop up during my research.

In the book I'm currently reading about World War I - The Last of the Doughboys - I have just come across a reference to 45 Broadway in New York City.  That same address featured heavily in my post just last week as the location of the offices of Union Iron Works and Youngs & Cable.

Apparently, that same building was a center for German espionage and sabotage efforts during the war.  How did that come about?  In 1905, it was purchased by Germany's Hamburg-American steamship line and was renamed from Aldrich Court to the Hamburg-American Building.  It housed some German government offices, including those of Heinrich Albert who was suspected of organizing sabotage efforts on American soil.  The best known of those was the destruction of a munitions depot on Black Tom Island in New York Harbor in July 1916 (a fascinating tale on its own).  The building was seized by the U.S. government in November 1917, seven months after the U.S. entered the war.


Sources:
Richard Rubin, The Last of the Doughboys, Mariner Books 2014.
The New York Times, 29 Oct 1905 and 9 Nov 1917.

The End of an Old Theater

I have been enjoying going through the photo archive at oldnyc.org.  This photo jumped out at me:

It shows the Civic Repertory Theater (also known as the Theatre Francais, the Lyceum and the 14th Street Theatre) as it was being demolished in 1939.  The photo is by Alexander Alland.

For more information about the theater, see Daytonian in Manhattan: The Lost 1866 Theatre Francais. 


Source:
Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. Manhattan: 14th Street (West) - 6th Avenue Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dc-f8d7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

"Life is not a firework to be let off at the end of a party."

This quote jumped out at me recently - partly on its own merits but partly because of the context in which it was said.  I encountered it in The Battle For Spain by Antony Beevor, a good history of the Spanish Civil War which I am still reading and enjoying.  These words were spoken by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the lawyer, nobleman and politician who founded the Falange party.  In March of 1936, during the tensions before the war broke out, the Falange was outlawed by the Republican government.  José Antonio was immediately arrested on charges of illegal arms possession.  After the uprising that started the war, he was still in enemy custody.  He was put on trial in November along with his brother Miguel and sister-in-law Margarita Larios.  Conducting his own defense, he did not stoop to plead for his own life, but did make a successful appeal for leniency on behalf of his brother and sister-and-law.  It was in this context that he stated, "life is not a firework..."