What became of Peter? Although he had sent home to Peggy a sum of money “from the first fruits of his labors,” out of which she purchased her “first white gown,” Peter never prospered as he had dreamed, and he never returned home. In the end, he “could not bear to come back thus, old, sad, and poor to lift the latch again of the door from which he had stolen by night in presumptuous youth.”
Uncle Peter was not really so old when he died, barely fifty. But his was one of those “long sad tales of ineffectual lives” that, Margaret told Anna, “move me deeply.” Margaret was in her early thirties, an ambitious woman still uncertain of her capacity for achievement, when she learned the news of her uncle Peter’s lonely death and wrote out the story for Anna. Margaret had not yet published her first book, and she had been turned aside painfully, both in love and in friendship. “It is sad when a man lays down the burden of life frustrated in every purpose,” Margaret wrote to Anna. “Happy the prodigal son who returns!”
Three years later, Margaret left America as one of its most accomplished citizens, a cultural emissary to Europe. She was the author of a book on the woman question that had revived the cause and advanced it well beyond Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman; she was a widely read columnist for a national newspaper with a rare commission as foreign correspondent. But Margaret, “the much that calls for more,” had still been searching. Now, after several “rich, if troubled years,” although worried that “to go into the market, and hire myself out” would be “hard as it never was before,” Margaret had fulfilled many of her longest-held desires. She had taken a lover who became her devoted husband; she had borne a child. Stored for travel inside her portable desk was the manuscript of a new book, her “great history” of the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. Margaret, who had played the role of eldest son to her father in girlhood and to her family since Timothy’s death, whose heart was moved by Uncle Peter’s story rather than Peggy’s, could now play the prodigal who returns. Uncertain of her welcome in the United States, Margaret was sure of what she possessed, what she was bringing home—“my treasures, my husband and child,” and her book, “what is most valuable to me . . . of any thing.”
Another long-ago night in Boston with Anna Ward: Sam was away, and Margaret and Anna shared a bed, “together in confiding sleep,” as they had done so often when Margaret visited Anna before her marriage to Sam. But this night, with her head on Sam’s pillow, after listening to Anna’s “graceful talk,” Margaret fell into a restless sleep and dreamed “a frightful dream of being imprisoned in a ship at sea, the waves all dashing round.” Dreaming, she suffered through “horrible suspense,” knowing the crew had orders to throw their prisoner overboard. Into the nightmare scene entered “many persons I knew,” who were “delighted to see me,” yet when Margaret begged their help, “with cold courtliness” they “glided away.” “Oh it was horrible these averted faces and well dressed figures turning from me . . . with the cold wave rushing up into which I was to be thrown.”
The seventeenth of May, the day of sailing, came. Margaret and Giovanni spent their last night in Florence with the Brownings, Margaret almost giddy with anticipation. During the last days of packing her nerves jangled at the thought of America, of the “sense of fresh life unknown here,” and of the “rush and bang” of Americans—more than twenty million of them now—“with their rail-roads, electric telegraphs, mass movements and ridiculous dilettant phobias.” How many would “care for the thoughts of my head or the feelings of my heart”?
Margaret brought a Bible for the Brownings’ little boy as a parting gift from Nino, inscribed “In memory of Angelo Eugene Ossoli.” In the Brownings’ handsomely furnished parlor, the couple joked nervously about a prophecy in the Ossoli family that the sea “would be fatal” to Giovanni, that he should “avoid traveling” by water. Then Margaret turned to Elizabeth Browning, “with that peculiar smile which lighted up her plain, thought-worn face,” the poet would recall, and told her hostess, “I accept as a good omen that our ship should be called the ELIZABETH.”
But despite—or because of—her fascination with the mystical and the magnetic, properties she regarded as certain to be proven empirically one day, Margaret had long ago put aside the notion of luck, whether good or ill. She preferred to practice perseverance in the face of adversity. When Timothy Fuller had announced the move from the Dana mansion in Cambridge to the farm in Groton and her brother Eugene had complained that “our family star has taken an unfavorable turn” and “we shall never be lucky any more,” Margaret had made her own peace with the family’s change of fortune. “We are never wholly sunk by storms,” she chose to believe, even if “no favorable wind ever helps our voyages.” Better to live by the words she had copied out from the Aeneid as a girl and explicated in an essay for her father, the determined oarsmen’s credo: “Possunt quia posse videntur.” They can conquer who believe they can.
And yet, to those who reject the notions of luck and fate, the world still insists on offering up chance, accident. As Margaret, the prodigal who would return, boarded the Elizabeth at Livorno with her “treasures,” having posted by separate vessel a last affectionate letter to her mother in the event she did not survive the voyage—“and I say it merely because there seems somewhat more of danger on sea than on land”—she accepted the laws of chance. Margaret knew, as she’d once taken the trouble to calculate and record in her journal, that “more than five hundred British vessels alone are wrecked and sink to the bottom annually.”
A steady wind drove the ship westward across the Mediterranean toward Gibraltar and the broad Atlantic. Margaret’s seasickness subsided by her fortieth birthday, May 23. Little Nino, almost two years old, made friends with the crew, with the goat that provided his milk, with Captain Hasty’s young wife, Catherine, with twenty-two-year-old Celeste Paolini, a nurse Margaret had hired after all, enabling the young woman’s return to a job she’d formerly held in New York. Horace Sumner was already a friend. All six passengers had comfortable rooms toward the stern of the ship, in a covered exterior cabin with its own parlor and exercise deck. The breeze tossed Giovanni’s dark hair, which grew long as the days passed, curling into ringlets in the salty air.
But Captain Hasty was unwell. Fever and aches turned to smallpox, and after a seven-day sail and a night at anchor off Gibraltar, he was dead. There had been no chance for a doctor’s attention. Margaret recorded the funeral at sea, when all the ships in the blue harbor raised their banners in the late-afternoon sun—“Yes! it was beautiful but how dear a price we pay for the poems of the world.” She did her best to console Catherine Hasty. The Elizabeth was doused in sulfur and quarantined; no one could board or leave the ship during the required week in the harbor, spent waiting to see if anyone else on board contracted the illness.
Under the command of first mate Henry Bangs, the Elizabeth sailed onward, now over open ocean. Two days out, Nino, who had visited Captain Hasty in his sickroom before smallpox was confirmed, became ill, his body and face covered with pustules, his eyes swollen shut. The vaccine administered by the careless doctor in Rieti had been ineffective. Suffering high fevers, the child wandered once again “between the two worlds.” But he was stronger now than he’d been the previous summer. When Margaret and Catherine Hasty sang to him, Nino waved his puffy hands in time to the music. On the ninth day, Nino “could see” again. The boy’s swift recovery, the disappearance of the pockmarks from his face, brought comfort to the grieving Catherine Hasty. She had never known “two people happier or more devoted to each other & their child” than Margaret and Giovanni. Although she’d seen them quarrel once over Nino’s care, she had also watched Giovanni draw Margaret into an embrace and calm his anxious wife, telling her “I wish we could always think the same thing—& I never could differ from you, if it were not that baby’s life depends on it.”
No one else on board succumbed to the illness, and the Elizabeth drifted lazily westward in a midsummer stillnes
s at midocean. Casting her thoughts ahead to arrival in the old New World, Margaret might have recalled the last summer she’d stayed in Concord, inhabiting her sister’s house all on her own, a welcome visitor to the Emersons and Hawthornes: “I feel cradled,—with me the rarest happiest of feelings,” she’d written to Cary Sturgis. “I am borne along on the stream of life.”
Neither chance nor accident, but only time, the duration of a transatlantic crossing, prevented Margaret from receiving the letter Waldo Emerson had finally posted to her in April, just before she left Florence. But this was fortunate. Margaret did not have to read the advice of yet another dear friend who’d fallen under the influence of what she’d come to think of as “the social inquisition of the U.S.” Waldo had joined the chorus recommending that she “stay in Italy, for now.” He offered to do the work of selling Margaret’s book for her in America, as he had for Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, and he marshaled his eloquence to press the “advantages of your absenteeism” and a continued residence abroad: “not only as adding solidity to your testimony, but new rays of reputation & wonder to you as a star.” No letter at all would be better than reading Waldo’s oblique, subtly reproachful reference to her changed state: “but surprise is the woof you love to weave into all your web.”
Margaret could remember instead Waldo’s several letters written from London and Paris, urging her to return with him to America, expressing at last the outright affection she had longed to hear from him: “Shall we not yet—you, you, also,—as we used to talk, build up a reasonable society . . . and effectually serve one another?” She could remember that Waldo’s vision of a future life, an afterlife, had included her: “When we die, my dear friend, will they not make us up better, with some more proportion between our tendencies & our skills; that life shall not be such a sweet fever, but a sweet health, sweet and beneficent, and solid as Andes?”
Waldo’s words, if she remembered them, might have brought some comfort as the wind picked up, blowing the Elizabeth rapidly past Bermuda on July 14, then close to port at New York on the evening of July 18—and then as night fell, the novice Captain Bangs all unwitting, beyond. Nino and Giovanni had to be Margaret’s first thoughts when, at four in the morning on July 19, the Elizabeth ran aground off Fire Island, well north of their intended destination. Here, along the narrow southern rim of Long Island, there was no safe harbor, only shallow waters and treacherous shoals; no rescue party, only a lifeboat beached near a distant lighthouse and practiced scavengers on shore who would rather pillage under cover of darkness the flotsam of merchant vessels blown off course by storms and wrecked on Long Island’s sandbars than aid in the dangerous rescue of passengers.
The six on board the Elizabeth had packed their trunks for arrival; Margaret had chosen Nino’s outfit to wear ashore. But they huddled together now in their nightclothes, Margaret’s white gown faintly visible in the darkness of the cabin, after the dreadful shock of impact woke them all and an ominous scraping sound from below confirmed their worst fears. Waves breached the sides of the ship and beat against the walls of the cabin, which rocked to and fro with each surging swell. The wind howled at near hurricane force. Nino cried until Margaret swaddled him in blankets in her arms as she sat bracing herself with her back to the leeward wall, her legs pointing up the slanting cabin floor toward the foremast. Celeste screamed and wailed until Giovanni persuaded her to kneel in prayer. “Cut away!” they heard, and sails, rigging, and two of the three masts crashed to the deck of the Elizabeth, whose hold, with its cargo of “marble and rags,” now flooded with seawater. She lay at the mercy of the maddened ocean.
“We must die,” Horace Sumner told Catherine Hasty. “Let us die calmly, then,” the young widow replied. But shore was only three hundred yards off. At dawn, the first mate, Charles Davis, appeared to guide the passengers up to the forecastle where the crew had gathered, just as the flimsier walls of the passengers’ cabin began to break apart. The ship’s hull was stuck fast in the sands below, the vessel itself leaned to one side; waves poured over the main deck, littered with ropes and shards of the two downed masts. Nino made the trip in a canvas bag slung around a sailor’s neck. Catherine Hasty was nearly swept overboard, but Davis grabbed her long hair and held fast until she was free of the wave. All six passengers reached the relative shelter of the forecastle, where they could see figures moving about on shore. Davis returned to the passengers’ cabin to retrieve Margaret’s purse—seventy dollars in gold coins—and her travel desk, which held “what is most valuable to me if I live,” the manuscript. Margaret tied the doubloons into a kerchief and secured it at her waist. The tide was near its lowest point; surely someone would come to their rescue.
An hour passed, yet none of the figures on shore entered the water; their attention was fixed elsewhere, on trunks, hats, anything that washed up on land. The sailors—there were seventeen in all—began to leap overboard. Swimming to shore at low tide, for those who knew how, seemed the only possible means of salvation. As one man fought his way to safety on the beach, after nearly an hour wrestling with the waves, Horace Sumner plunged in to follow, but he never resurfaced, dragged under by currents or knocked unconscious by floating debris.
Here was death by drowning: silent, senseless. A life lost, not sacrificed, yielded up not in a battle for freedom, but in a desperate bid for survival. And Margaret could not swim. She had waded into the shallows of the East River at Turtle Bay to bathe on warm summer nights, imagining James Nathan’s embrace; but she had never taken a stroke in the open ocean, and would not now in a storm that was smashing seaside cottages and boats at harbor as it battered the Atlantic coast all the way from North Carolina, where it made landfall, to Coney Island.
The tide turned. The waters began to rise again and the waves to swell ever higher, lifting the roof of the forecastle as they crested, drenching those who remained on board in spray. Soon the ship would be broken up entirely. Charles Davis proposed tying rope handles to wooden spars and towing passengers to shore. Catherine Hasty volunteered. Margaret watched as the younger woman held grimly to her plank, rolled over and over by the waves, her long hair streaming in the billows, her soaking nightdress dragging her downward, until she finally reached the shore, pulled out of the undertow by Davis at the last. She lived. Now came Margaret’s turn.
But no single spar could support Margaret, Giovanni, Nino, and Celeste, the passengers still gathered about the foremast. With them were the Elizabeth’s cook, carpenter, steward, second mate, and Captain Bangs. Bangs insisted Margaret take hold of a plank; he would drag her next to shore. She refused. Bangs offered to take Nino first. She would not let him go. Margaret would not leave her family; they would not leave her. Surely first mate Davis would return with the lifeboat now visible on shore.
Another hour passed, after which the terrified, exasperated Bangs released his remaining crew members from duty; they could save themselves any way they wished. “I am a married man[.] I do not feel it right to throw away my life & can do nothing more on board,” he yelled into the wind, and dove from the deck to fight his way to shore. No one followed. Later, on the beach, an enraged Davis dragged Bangs out of the surf, berating him for “breaking his pledge,” leaving passengers behind on the sinking ship he’d dared to captain. Davis had had no greater success in persuading anyone on shore to help launch the lifeboat in the rough surf; the heavy craft could not be managed alone. But the passengers and crew still waiting aboard the wreck could not know this.
In midafternoon, more than ten hours since the Elizabeth ran aground, the storm raged more fiercely than ever. The cook, Joseph McGill, cried out as the ship’s stern gave way. There could be no hope of rescue now. All must make “one desperate effort,” dive in and swim if they could, grab whatever might float and jump if they couldn’t, before the wreck itself dragged them under. The steward had just taken Nino in his arms, Margaret saw to it, when an enormous wave crashed over the forecastle, bringing down the ship’s final mast, pulli
ng up a stretch of deck, and sending Nino and the steward overboard. Celeste and Giovanni clung to the mast until the next wave swept them away. Margaret steadied herself for a moment, and then she too was gone. When last seen, she had been seated at the foot of the foremast, still clad in her white night-dress, with her hair fallen loose upon her shoulders.
It was over. Margaret would no longer suffer, or exult in, what Waldo had called life’s “sweet fever.” Did she share his belief in, his hope for, a compensating “sweet health” in death?
Margaret had believed that she and Giovanni “could have a good deal of happiness together in what remains of life,” once they reached America. And Nino—would his small voice have spoken new words, deepened, and mingled with those of the other growing children of Concord? Through the years ahead there would be his cousins, Ellen and Ellery’s Greta and Caroline; and Waldo and Lidian’s Ellen, Edward, and Edith; Nathaniel and Sophia’s Una, Julian, and Rose; Bronson and Abba’s Anna, Louisa, Beth, and May. Theirs would be the voices of “children splashing and shouting in the river,” once so pleasing to Margaret as she lay on a favorite boulder in the hot sun of a summer day years ago, a day such as this one should have been—“lustrous warm, delicious happy, tender.” Farmers were “making hay in a near field” and the “fiddle of the village dancing master” could be heard “with its merry shriek and scrape in the distance, but all this noise”—all this life—was “harmonized by the golden fulness of light on the river on the trees, on the fields: it cared not where it lay: it loved and laughed on all.”
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