The Ghost Ship Palatine

This is the part of the story that the legend softens.

The legend is about wreckers. Shore-based opportunists who lured ships onto rocks with false lights, then took whatever washed ashore. The legend is also about a ghost. Both of those things are in the story.

But before the wreck, there was the crossing.

The accounts collected from survivors, and there were survivors who told their stories in New England after the wreck, describe a crew that began systematically robbing the passengers while still at sea.

Not just taking things. Selling them. The crew, or elements of it, was charging passengers for food and water. Charging them for access to what they already paid for. Passengers who could not pay, or who had exhausted their money, went without.

Some of them died of thirst on a ship crossing an ocean. This is the kind of sentence that takes a moment.

By the time the Princess Augusta was off the coast of Block Island in late December, the passengers were in poor condition. Some of them were already dead. The ship was damaged from storms. The crew was, by the account of the people who survived, no longer primarily interested in delivering anyone to Philadelphia.

Block Island is a small island about thirteen miles south of the Rhode Island coast. It is rocky. It has shoals. In December, with a damaged ship and compromised crew, it is extremely easy to wreck on.

The question of whether the wreck was an accident is the question the ghost ship is still answering, every December, offshore.

December 27, 1738.

The Princess Augusta went onto the rocks near Block Island.

The islanders came. Block Island in 1738 had a small community of farmers and fishermen who knew the sea and knew what a wreck meant: survival for the passengers if it could be managed, and salvage, which was a real and legal part of coastal economy and has to be named for what it was without making everyone involved a villain.

Some passengers made it ashore. Local accounts say the islanders helped people off the ship. The surviving accounts from passengers also say this.

But the ship caught fire.

This is where the story fractures into two versions that do not fully reconcile.

Version one: the ship caught fire in the chaos of the wreck. Stoves, lanterns, the kind of accident that happens when a wooden ship is being beaten apart against rocks in winter.

Version two: the ship was set on fire. Deliberately. With some passengers still aboard.

Who set it on fire and why are the questions. The crew, trying to destroy evidence of what they had done during the crossing. Wreckers, trying to clear the ship so the salvage could begin without complications. Someone else entirely.

The passenger accounts mention a woman. One woman who refused to leave the ship, or could not leave, or was prevented. A woman seen on deck as the fire caught. A woman whose voice was heard, afterward, by people who came to the shore.

The ship burned and went down with whatever it went down with.

And then, the following December, people on Block Island saw a burning ship offshore.

The ship comes back.

Not in pieces. Not in drift wood or rusted iron or the scattered remnants of a wreck, though those things also exist. The ship comes back whole. Burning. Moving under sail. Visible from shore.

It appears in December, because that is when it wrecked. December sightings are the most common. But it has been seen at other times.

The witnesses over two hundred years include fishermen, farmers, sailors, and visitors who came specifically to see it and either saw it or did not. The ones who saw it describe the same thing: a ship under sail, offshore, engulfed in flame, moving without sinking. Bright enough to see from shore. Bright enough to cast light on the water.

And then it disappears.

Not burns down to the waterline and sinks. Disappears. Like a candle going out.

Some accounts include sounds. A voice. A woman's voice, from the direction of the ship.

Those accounts are the ones that attached the story to the woman who was seen on deck as the fire caught in December 1738. The ghost ship and the ghost are understood, in the tradition, as the same thing. She is still on the ship. The ship is still burning. It will keep burning.

Block Islanders in the 18th and 19th centuries did not find this comforting. They found it explanatory. An injustice was done. Something was left unresolved. The ship is still here because the ship never fully left.

That is as close to a theory as anyone has managed.

The sightings continued.

Through the 1700s, through the 1800s, into the 1900s. Different people, same description. A burning ship offshore. December usually, but not always. Gone when you looked away.

Block Island is not a large place. It is about eleven square miles. There is not a lot to do on Block Island in December, which means the sightings were observed by people who were paying attention and had reason to remember what they saw.

Some sightings were shared. Multiple people, same night, same ship. This is the category of sighting that is hardest to dismiss.

The tradition was strong enough that when writers came looking for American ghost stories in the 19th century, they went to Block Island. They interviewed islanders. They collected accounts. The story was consistent across decades of informants in a way that suggested it was being maintained by observation, not just retelling.

John Greenleaf Whittier published a poem called 'The Palatine' in 1867, which named the ghost ship after the passengers rather than the actual vessel. The poem is the reason the ship is now almost universally called the Palatine rather than the Princess Augusta. Whittier changed some details and romanticized others. The poem was very popular.

After the poem, the story spread further. The legend became national instead of local. And the sightings from Block Island kept coming.

The most recent documented sightings are from the 20th century. The gap between the last reported sighting and the present is not as long as you might expect.

Whittier's poem is worth reading. It is a good poem. It is also not entirely accurate, which is the nature of poems about real events.

Whittier describes the Block Islanders as wreckers who lured the ship onto the rocks with false lights and then plundered the wreck. He describes the last survivor, the woman, as being driven back onto the burning ship by the islanders themselves. He made them the villains.

This did not go over well on Block Island.

The islanders objected. Their descendants objected. The historical record, such as it was, suggested a more complicated picture: yes, there was salvage, yes, there were questions about the fire, but the islanders also rescued survivors and there was no clear evidence they caused the wreck.

Whittier later acknowledged he had taken liberties.

But the poem stuck, and the name stuck, and the story as most people know it is Whittier's version rather than the documented version.

This is how a lot of legends work. The dramatic version becomes the standard version. The actual history becomes a footnote to the story someone told about the actual history.

The Princess Augusta is still the Palatine to most people. The woman on the burning deck is still out there offshore, in Whittier's version and in the accounts of people who say they have seen the ship.

Block Island is still there. The water is still cold in December. And some Decembers, offshore, something lights the water that the locals have gotten used to not explaining too precisely.

It is easier that way.