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.
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