Epilogue: “After so dear a storm”
TWO NIGHTS BEFORE ELIZABETH STRUCK GROUND OFF Fire Island, the skies over the northeastern United States had been so clear that the daguerreotypist John Adams Whipple, experimenting with Harvard’s powerful Great Refractor telescope, succeeded in capturing the first photographic image of a star, Vega. But the same winds that scoured the heavens on the night of July 16–17, enabling a technological marvel, had carried with them a lethal storm and a merchant ship, a remnant of the fading age of sail, that proved no match for nature’s force.
When news of the wreck of the Elizabeth and Margaret’s disappearance reached the New-York Tribune offices, Horace Greeley assigned the story to his finest young writer, the poet-journalist Bayard Taylor, who set out at nightfall, making a seven-hour journey over still-stormy waters to reach the scene just before daybreak on Saturday, July 20. Newly returned from California, where he’d been posting letters to the Tribune on the 1849 gold rush, the twenty-five-year-old Taylor traversed the shoreline, finding ruptured casks of almonds, sacks of juniper berries, and oil flasks, “their contents mixed with the sand.” The ship’s shattered timbers were strewn along the narrow beach for a stretch of three or four miles. Taylor marveled at the force of a storm that had “so chopped and broken” the once sturdy vessel that “scarcely a stick of ten feet in length can be found.” A portion of the Elizabeth’s foremast, studded with broken spars and snagged in loose rigging, rose and fell on the swells about fifty yards off shore, held fast by the ship’s sundered hull, a skeletal apparition beckoning in the dawn light.
Taylor had given up his post in mining country for the sake of a tubercular sweetheart back east; he was determined to marry, although his bride would survive only a few more months. At Fire Island, the waste of healthy lives, the “bruised and mangled” bodies of the dead that had washed to shore, seemed an abomination. Catherine Hasty had insisted on transporting Nino’s small body, still warm when it reached the beach, to the nearest house, a mile off, where the surviving sailors paid tearful farewells and fashioned a makeshift coffin out of one of their own sea chests. They locked and nailed down the lid before burying the boy “in a little nook between two of the sand-hills some distance from the sea.” The midsummer heat made a swift interment necessary. Nino’s nurse, Celeste Paolini, was “enclosed in a rough box” and committed to the sand alongside two Swedish sailors and the ship steward who had held Nino in his arms at the last. In all, eight lives were lost. The bodies of Margaret, Giovanni, and Horace Sumner had not yet been found.
In his account of the wreck for the Tribune, Taylor placed blame squarely on the “inexperience” of Captain Bangs and made no secret of his disgust at the crowd of indifferent scavengers, whose number swelled to a thousand by Sunday morning as the greedy streamed in from as far off as Rockaway and Montauk to pilfer what they could of the Elizabeth’s cargo, valued at $200,000, roughly the equivalent of $4.5 million today. Taylor reported that a trunk filled with oil paintings destined for the Aspinwall family—kin to William Aspinwall Tappan, Cary Sturgis’s husband—had floated to shore. The paintings might have been preserved had they not been immediately cut away and pocketed by looters, who left the frames in shambles on the beach. Only a few “shreds of canvas, evidently more than a century old, half buried in the sand” remained. Likewise, the “silk, Leghorn braid, hats, wool, oil, almonds, and other articles contained in the vessel, were carried off as soon as they came to land.”
Taylor held out hope that the bodies of Margaret and Giovanni would be found “buried under the ruins of the vessel” or cast up on shore farther along the coast, dragged westward by the current that had set in since the storm. On Sunday afternoon, one of Margaret’s trunks bobbed free of the wreck, claimed at once by Catherine Hasty “before the pirates had an opportunity of purloining it.” She was said to be drying manuscripts by the fire in the same house where Nino had lain in state the day before. Taylor himself looked through “a pile of soaked papers,” finding copies of French and Italian newspapers as well as “several of Mazzini’s pamphlets,” Margaret’s reference materials. “I have therefore a strong hope that the work on Italy will be entirely recovered,” he wrote in the Tribune.
Word of the tragedy took longer to reach New England, where Margaret’s family had gathered at Arthur’s house in Manchester, New Hampshire, anticipating a reunion with Margaret and first encounters with her husband and son. Instead, a telegram reprinted in the local paper brought the grim news, and Ellen, Arthur, Eugene, and Margarett Crane set out immediately for New York, where the Springs opened their Brooklyn home to the stricken family. As a child, Margaret had suffered from nightmare visions of her mother’s death. Had Margarett Crane ever permitted herself to imagine her daughter’s? Mrs. Fuller “sat like a stone in our house,” Rebecca Spring remembered afterward, unable to eat or sleep or even cry. Ellen was as agitated as her mother was benumbed; she could not think of life without her older sister.
Arthur, Eugene, Marcus Spring, and Horace Greeley left together for Fire Island on the twenty-fourth, where they met Charles Sumner searching in vain for the body of his younger brother. William Channing was there too, along with his cousin, Ellen’s husband Ellery Channing, and Henry Thoreau, who had traveled with Ellery from Concord. Waldo Emerson had handed Thoreau seventy dollars to cover expenses and charged him “to go, on all our parts, & obtain on the wrecking ground all the intelligence &, if possible, any fragments of manuscript or other property.” Waldo had considered making the trip himself but changed his mind, instead staying home to begin filling the journal that would ultimately generate his portion of a memorial biography he already envisioned as marking out “an essential line of American history” devoted to this “brave, eloquent, subtle, accomplished, devoted, constant soul!”
At Fire Island, Thoreau made a full survey of the shoreline and interviewed as many survivors and witnesses as he could find, drawing up an inventory of the Ossolis’ belongings: five trunks of varying sizes, a case of books, a tin box, and Margaret’s jewelry, four rings, a brooch, and “one eye glass with heavy gold handles & chain.” Aside from the large trunk recovered by Catherine Hasty, another had been found, but its contents had vanished, “whether emptied by the sea, or by thieves, is not known.”
Late in the day he enlisted three fishermen to ferry him in an oyster boat to Patchogue on the mainland, where he’d heard many of the scavengers lived, but the trip proved fruitless and nearly cost Thoreau his life. The fishermen had delayed for several hours, drinking at a tavern as darkness fell, waiting for the tide to rise, they said. Two of the men spent the voyage stretched out in the bottom of the boat, sleeping off their bender in a swill of bilge and vomit; the third, taking the helm, narrowly missed running the boat aground when he mistook the light from a nearby cottage for the beam of a distant lighthouse. Thoreau got no answers in Patchogue other than what he gleaned from observing several youths at play with dominoes, dressed up in hats scavenged from the wreck; their mothers had stitched decorative tassels and buttons to the hats, filched, Thoreau guessed, from Margaret’s wardrobe trunk.
Thoreau returned to Fire Island to learn that a few garments had been recovered: a shift embroidered with Margaret’s initials, a child’s underclothes, a man’s shirt. But there were no more papers to be found anywhere, and Margaret’s manuscript was not among those in the trunk, nor was it in the small portable desk that first mate Davis had retrieved from the passengers’ cabin on Margaret’s instructions. Ellery Channing had stayed behind to help Catherine Hasty dry the contents. Precious letters from Mazzini and Mickiewicz survived, along with Margaret’s correspondence with Giovanni and a slim journal she’d kept in Rome during the early months of 1849, ending just as the siege began. Nothing more. Nothing, until Thoreau stumbled across Giovanni’s guardsman’s coat. He ripped off one button and pocketed it for his return to Concord, its solidity mocking his quest after vanished lives. “Held up,” he would write of the button in his diar
y, “it intercepts the light and casts a shadow,—an actual button so called,—and yet all the life it is connected with is less substantial to me than my faintest dreams.”
A week after the Elizabeth foundered off shore, “a portion of a human skeleton,” mutilated beyond recognition by sharks, was reported on the beach, a mile or more from the lighthouse. Thoreau followed this lead as well, tracing once more on foot the now deserted shoreline until he spied the “relics of a human body,” he later wrote, which had been draped with a cloth, their location marked with “a stick stuck up” in the air. “Close at hand,” he wrote, “they were simply some bones with a little flesh adhering to them,” with “nothing at all remarkable about them.” He could not make out “enough of anatomy to decide confidently” whether the body was “that of a male or a female”—whether Margaret, Giovanni, Horace Sumner, or anyone else.
After so many days of futile searching, Thoreau felt acutely the insignificance of his place in the drama, and “as I stood there [the bones] grew more and more imposing. They were alone with the beach and the sea, whose hollow roar seemed addressed to them.” It seemed to the thirty-three-year-old writer, whose early scribblings had passed beneath Margaret’s stern editorial eye, “as if there was an understanding between them and the ocean which necessarily left me out, with my snivelling sympathies. That dead body had taken possession of the shore, and reigned over it as no living one could, in the name of a certain majesty which belonged to it.”
Margaret’s essay for the United States Magazine and Democratic Review recollecting her torchlight tour of the Vatican galleries had just appeared in print, in the July issue. Her concluding lines, describing her recent efforts in Florence to gain entrance to the Church of San Lorenzo for a nocturnal viewing of Michelangelo’s interiors—“I doubt they cannot look grander by one light than another; but I hope to try” —stood in sharp contrast to the Tribune’s account of her last words, as reported by the Elizabeth’s cook: “I see nothing but death before me,—I shall never reach the shore.” But there was no disputing it: Margaret was gone.
“To the last her country proves inhospitable to her,” Waldo Emerson summed up in his journal, perhaps wishing to forget that he had been among the several friends who, unsettled by the surprising course Margaret’s life had taken in Italy, discouraged her return to America. Now he could simply mourn: “I have lost in her my audience.” Margaret had been his equal in intellect and, since leaving Concord, had bested him in experience. “We are taught by her plenty how lifeless & outward we were,” he had once observed. “Her heart, which few knew,” he wrote now, adapting an oft-quoted assessment of Margaret’s idol Goethe, “was as great as her mind, which all knew.” Fatherless since childhood, Waldo Emerson had grown up into a life of recurring loss, each death unleashing an inner fury that took the form of months-long depression. The loss of Margaret, his friend, collaborator, and intellectual sparring partner, affected him differently, if still personally, as a shock that warned of his own mortality: “I hurry now to my work admonished that I have few days left.”
Privately, in his journal, Horace Greeley lamented the loss of Margaret’s book—“pages so rich with experience and life,” he conjectured. Greeley wrote her Tribune obituary himself, calling for new editions of her already published work and concluding, “America has produced no woman who in mental endowments and acquirements has surpassed Margaret Fuller.” And he opened up the Tribune’s pages to memorial poetry. Christopher Cranch, who had known Margaret in Boston as a member of the Transcendentalist circle and later in Rome, contributed one of the first elegies on a subject that would beguile American poets far into the twentieth century, Robert Lowell and Amy Clampitt among them. Like the other lyrics written in direct response to her drowning and printed in the Tribune, Cranch’s “On the Death of Margaret Fuller Ossoli” expressed unambiguous grief:
O still sweet summer days! O moonlit nights,
After so dear a storm how can ye shine! . . .
For she is gone from us—gone, lost for ever,
In the wild billows, swallowed up and lost—
Gone full of love, life, hope and high endeavor,
Just when we would have welcomed her the most.
But how warmly would Margaret have been welcomed? Her tragic death seemed only to invite further speculation on a topic that had preoccupied Margaret’s friends ever since the news of her secret marriage and child had reached New England. Pondering the question became a form of mourning, a means of reconciling the loss. By August 1, Cary Sturgis Tappan had received a packet of papers sent from Concord containing the accounts that Ellery Channing and Henry Thoreau had written up for Waldo. It was like the old days of sharing letters and journals through the mail, but immeasurably sadder. “How characteristic,” Cary decided, had been Margaret’s actions in the crisis: offering her own life preserver to a sailor once she’d resolved not to make a bid for shore, “refusing to part with her child when she could not have saved him.” And even Margaret’s “securing the money about her” was a heart-rending sign of “how much she had felt the need of it.” Someone “who had always been taken care of,” Cary observed, someone like herself, “would not have done so when lives were in danger.”
Then Cary’s thoughts wandered to the now impossible future: “The waves do not seem so difficult to brave as the prejudices she would have encountered if she had arrived here safely.” Margaret, as Cary remembered her, “was always so sensitive to coldness & unkindness, even from strangers.” There was something fitting, even, about the way her life had ended: “Her return seemed like tearing a bird’s nest from a sheltering tree and tossing it out on the waves.” And Cary could not resist a last gibe at her former teacher, a woman she had resented as well as loved. Cary had suffered an early loss—her beloved older brother, knocked overboard by a wayward boom at sea, when she was a girl. Her mother had gone mad with grief. “Why should we all be afraid to lose everything?” Cary asked now, questioning Margaret’s decision to remain on the sinking Elizabeth with her husband and son. “It is not sorrow but tedious days that we fear.” Margaret had deserted Cary too.
Cary had never known Margaret as a married woman, as a mother. Did Cary believe her old friend could have saved herself from death at sea, like some Shakespearean heroine—Viola of Twelfth Night or Miranda of The Tempest, whose name Margaret had borrowed for her pseudonymous autobiographical sketch in Woman in the Nineteenth Century? Would this Margaret-Miranda have abandoned husband and child and fought her way to shore, crying out in the voice of the writer, “I must depend on myself as the only constant friend,” proud that she had “taken a course of her own, and no man stood in her way”? Writing to Cary from London four years earlier, Margaret had reproached the younger woman similarly for giving up her “noble” independence to marry, for failing to “embark on the wide stream of the world” by continuing her work as an artist. And Margaret had been right: Cary was already unhappy in her marriage, already fearing tedious days ahead, a kind of death in life.
Cary had been the one to deliver the terrible news to Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who’d taken up residence with their two young children in a small farmhouse on the grounds of Highwood, the estate the Tappans leased from Sam Ward in Lenox, the property to which Nathaniel would one day give the name Tanglewood in his children’s tales. Nathaniel’s first novel, The Scarlet Letter, had been published in early spring, selling out its first edition within ten days and making its author an instant celebrity. But money was still in short supply, and Cary’s offer of the “Red House,” as Nathaniel dubbed the simple cottage—“as red as the Scarlet Letter,” he’d noted with pleasure —for minimal rent, had been a welcome one, especially as Nathaniel’s book, with its preface satirizing the denizens of Salem’s Custom House, his colleagues until the political spoils system cost him his job the year before, had earned him enemies at home.
After reading the newspaper accounts of the shipwreck that Cary had brought her, Sophia co
uld think of nothing “so unspeakably agonizing as the image of Margaret upon that wreck, alone, sitting with her hands upon her knees—& tempestuous waves breaking over her!” Sophia wished “at least Angelino could have been saved,” she wrote to her mother in Boston, but of Margaret and Giovanni: “If they were truly bound together as they seemed to be, I am glad they died together.” Years before, Sophia had dismissed Margaret’s critique of marriage in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, arguing that unless “she were married truly”—like Sophia—Margaret had no right to pronounce on the institution. Now, however, Sophia felt that “with her new & deeper experience of life in all its relations—her rich harvest of observation . . . Margaret is such a loss.”
But gossip about the Ossoli marriage traveled nearly as fast as reports of the drownings. George Ripley and Waldo Emerson puzzled over the precise meaning of Giovanni’s title, figuring it “is about equivalent to Selectman here.” Sophia Hawthorne’s older sister Mary had heard from Maria Child that Giovanni “was wholly unfit to be [Margaret’s] husband in this country . . . He would have been nothing here—he could do nothing, be nothing, come to nothing, and he would have dragged her down.” Margaret was rumored to have been pregnant with a second child even as her young family’s “only prospect of maintenance was by her pen.” Maria Child guessed that Margaret would have “fully realized” the “unsuitableness of the match” once she’d arrived in America. “When we think of what a laborious and precarious living she would have had to earn,” Mary had concluded, “I think that we may well be thankful that they all went to Heaven together, agonizing and melancholy as the departure was.”
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