The Betsey

The Betsey was built on the Sheepscot River in Wiscasset Massachusetts in 1803 – now midcoastal Maine. The Betsey was a hermaphrodite brig, or brigantine. A standard brig has a square rig on both the foremast and mainmast. A hermaphrodite brig has a fore-and-aft gaff-rig or schooner mainsail The Betsey’s lot in life was to sail from Wiscasset to the West Indies with lumber and return with molasses, sugar, and coffee. Ships that sailed this route were known as West Indiamen, even though ships were referred to as “she.” Scarcely three weeks into her voyage of 1824, on the night of December 19, and less than a day’s sail from its Matanzas, Cuba destination, the vessel succumbed to the wrath of a sudden northerly gale. Against insurmountable odds, the surviving mariners clambered into the Betsey’s longboat and, amid driving rain and mountainous seas, reached a nameless isle—later charted as Cruz del Padre. Their relief, however, proved tragically fleeting: the fishermen whose aid had been eagerly solicited, betrayed the shipwrecked party into the hands of marauding pirates. In the ensuing carnage, only two survived, one being first mate, Daniel Collins of Wiscasset. Collins’s return to his native Maine was shadowed by the horrors he had witnessed; henceforth, he vowed never again to set foot upon a vessel. He spent the final eight decades of his life on land, sustained by the memories of loss and survival, until his death on November 15, 1885, at the age of eighty-four. A passage from Daniel Collins’s book dictated to newspaper editor John Dorr, the year of his return: “On the 18th of December we passed the Berry Islands, and early next morning came to anchor within a league of Orange Key, on the Bahama Banks. It was the morning of the Sabbath, so calm and clear that even the lengthened billows of the Gulf Stream seemed sleeping around us, and the most untutored son of Neptune could not but remember that it was a holy day, consecrated to devotion and rest. Here we continued until noon, when a fresh breeze from the North invited us to weigh anchor and unfurl our sails, which, swelling with a fair wind, were as buoyant as our own spirits, at the increasing prospect of reaching our port of destination.” Full text available at Project Gutenberg under the title: NARRATIVE OF THE SHIPWRECK OF THE BRIG BETSEY, OF WISCASSET, (MAINE,)AND MURDER OF FIVE OF HER CREW, BY PIRATES, ON THE COAST OF CUBA, DEC. 1824.