Ghoulies and Ghosts: Theo and the Pirates (Column)

by Doris Lane
August 22, 2000

source: http://www.themestream.com/articles/149771.html

As a ten-year-old girl, Theodosia Burr could read Latin and Greek. Her doting father, Aaron Burr, thought she could walk on water. And that's just what she's been doing off the Outer Banks of North Carolina since early January 1813.

Born in the final year of the American Revolution, it is more or less accepted that she died in a coastal storm during the War of 1812 onboard a privateer, the Patriot. She certainly vanished. There was indeed a gale force storm off Cape Hatteras. A British ship did attempt to detain the Patriot. Three retired pirates separately in the course of the 19th century claimed to have plundered the schooner.

But what really became of Theodosia Burr Alston after her husband saw her off in Charleston on a trip to visit her father in New York?

To this day, as Theo's ghost dressed in white is seen walking the tips of the waves off the beach of Huntington Beach State Park at Nags Head in North Carolina, nobody knows what became of her. But there are legends enough to explain her death or her later life, depending on whom you believe. The stories come from land and sea and one time they actually converge.

It is difficult to accept one legend that tells us Theo simply took on another identity. It is easier to agree with Aaron Burr that his daughter would never have lived in a world without him. But there is one such story that tells us Theo washed ashore in a small boat at Nags Head after being set adrift by pirates who had plundered the Patriot and killed everyone else aboard.

A fisherman and his wife rescued her on the beach and cared for her in their small house until she was elderly. In 1869, Theo was gravely ill and a physician was called to the house. The woman caring for Theo had no money and offered to trade the doctor anything in the house he wanted in exchange for his services. He chose an oil portrait hanging on the wall of a woman dressed in white. At this, Theo jumped from her sickbed and objected strenuously, claiming the portrait was for her father whom she was on her way to visit in New York. In this story, the doctor ended up with the portrait and it later found its way to the Burr family.

A variation on this story is one that has a different woman sick and paying for her own medical care with the portrait. The woman's family long worked as "wreckers" who stripped ships that wrecked along the coast. This story has the Patriot wrecked with sails set at Nags Head during the War of 1812. The local belief is that Theo was kidnapped by pirates and taken as prisoner. It is thought she lived on as the common law wife of one of the pirates and possibly had children by him. Here the portrait was taken from the wreck, but again ended up with the doctor and ultimately with the Burr family.

A different story has a ship of the pirate Jean Lafitte's fleet, the Vengeance, commanded by Captain Octave Chauvet. Disappointed in his search for British ships to plunder off Cuba, Chauvet took on the Patriot simply because their paths crossed, after Chauvet turned north from Cuba along the Atlantic coast. Attacking the American privateer was an act of outright piracy and against Lafitte's wartime orders, but Chauvet did it anyway.

After a struggle, the pirates boarded the Patriot, slaughtered the crew, and cast the bodies overboard. In this scenario, Captain Chauvet kidnapped Theo, and raped and murdered her in her cabin onboard the Vengeance. In this story there was no portrait, but a gold locket holding a tintype of Theo's son and engraved, "To my wife, Theodosia." The tale was told in 1874 by an old man named Jean Baptiste Callistre of Lake Charles, Louisiana, and reported in the Galveston Daily News. Callistre, as a young man, had been a pirate on the Vengeance under Captain Chauvet and took part in the raid on the Patriot.

It was the third story told independently by ex-pirates who had been there, onboard the Patriot that stormy day in 1813. An Alabama newspaper had already reported a similar story told by a resident of Alabama in 1833. And in 1848, another pirate story tied the portrait of Theo in with the pirate ship and its prey, the Patriot.

Frank Burdick was dying when he told his part of the story. He claimed in his deathbed confession to have held the plank steady for Theodosia Burr Alston to walk off the Patriot. He said she was calm, dressed in white, and wanting him to tell her father and husband of her fate. He said he saw the oil portrait of Theo in her cabin before the crew of the Vengeance abandoned the Patriot under full sail off Nags Head.

Her beginnings were nearly as interesting as her mysterious end, but not quite.

In the early years of the American Revolution, Aaron Burr fell in love with a married woman with five children in Paramus, New Jersey. Theodosia Bartow Prevost was the daughter of Theodosius Bartow, a lawyer in Shrewsbury, who died a few weeks before she was born in 1746. Her mother, Ann Stillwell Bartow De Visme, was widowed a second time in 1762. The widow was living with Theodosia and her children in a house called the Hermitage, when Aaron Burr came to call in 1777.

Theodosia's husband, who had been the commander of the British forces in New Jersey when they married in 1763, was now stationed in the West Indies. Theodosia was considered no beauty, but she had a fine intellect and what Aaron found, "the most winning and graceful manners of any woman I ever met." He was 21 and she was 31 when they met.

After Col. Prevost was transferred from Jamaica to Georgia, where he led a defeat of the Americans, he was named Lt. Governor of the new royal government there. Her husband's new prominence on the mainland placed Theodosia and their New Jersey property in jeopardy in 1779, when offenders against the patriot cause were subject to forfeiture. James Monroe, who referred to Theodosia as "my dear little friend," and other patriots, such as Aaron's friend Robert Troup, wrote to officials in her support. Aaron took Theodosia and her children temporarily to a house near his sister's in Sharon, Connecticut to escape the Bergen County commissioners.

Prevost died in Jamaica in October 1781, and in the summer of 1782, Theodosia and Aaron were married at the Hermitage. Aaron knew Theodosia was ill when he married her and her health declined steadily throughout their marriage. But he loved her and she loved him, calling him "My Aaron." In their fifth year of marriage he wrote her, "I am wholly yours."

Theodosia would not permit him to resign the Senate even as she grew sicker and sicker. She died on May 28, 1794, when he was at Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States. Years after, he wrote to one of her sons that she was, "the woman whose life brought me more happiness than all my success, and whose death has dealt me more pain than all sorrows combined."

Their daughter, Theodosia, called Theo, was born in Albany where Aaron was practicing law in 1783, but the family soon moved to Manhattan. Theo was ten years old when they moved into Richmond Hill, a grand home on the shores of the Hudson River south of Greenwich Village. That year, Theo was reading Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Terence and Horace in Latin. She was learning to ice skate and was studying ballet. Her education was entirely directed by her father whose political career often kept him away from home. He instructed her to write in a journal 20 minutes a day and send it to him every Monday morning.

Her mother died when she was 12, and Theo became the lady of the house. Her relationship with her father, which had always been close, became ever closer. She was hostess at his political and social functions, interacting easily with George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James and Dolley Madison, and the other leaders of the day.

When she was 17, Theo married Joseph Alston of South Carolina. The Charleston Times reported, "Married, at Albany (New York) Joseph Alston, Esq. of this city, to Miss Theodosia Burr, only child of Mr. Burr, candidate for President of the U.S."

Perhaps if the Alstons had lived in New York, their marriage might have been happier. As it was, between being separated from her father and the unhealthy climate of the swampy Waccamaw Neck where they lived, Theo's emotional and physical health suffered greatly after her marriage. In 1802, following a difficult labor, Theo gave birth to a son named Aaron Burr Alston. She never fully recovered her strength after the childbirth. When her husband was elected Governor of South Carolina, Theo barely partook in the duties of First Lady of the state.

But her devotion to her father and his to her were absolute.

The night before his duel in 1804 with Alexander Hamilton, Aaron wrote his daughter, "I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped or even wished. With a little more perseverance, determination, and industry, you will obtain all that my ambition or vanity had fondly imagined. Let your son have occasion to be proud that he had a mother. Adieu. Adieu."

She said, after his disgrace, that she'd rather not have lived than not to have had such a man for a father. Theo's husband was not unkind to her and he probably loved her, but it would have been difficult for any man to come up to her idealized vision of her father. Joseph's family disliked her, as she did them, and they urged him to leave her. There is also a story that Theo walked in on Joseph in bed with his slave woman.

Her combined troubles, her father dishonored, her marital problems, illness and despair, left Theo a broken woman. Aaron was in exile in London in 1808 and Theo only 25 years old, when she wrote, "Oh, my guardian angel, why were you obliged to abandon me just when my enfeebled nature doubly required your care? Alas, alas! How often have I deplored the want of your counsel and tenderness! How often, when my tongue and hands trembled with disease, have I besought Heaven either to reunite us, or let me die at once."

There is reason to think she had determined to leave the marriage by 1812. She wrote to her father on May 16, "For personal reasons, I am very desirous of having some unrestrained conversation with you." The Alstons, like their neighbors, generally left the district in summer when fever risk was highest and went to stay at the coast. Their son, Aaron Burr Alston, did not escape and he died in June of tropical fever. Theo could not be consoled after losing her son. On December 30, she boarded the privateer schooner Patriot bound for New York and her beloved father. She carried with her a recent portrait of herself dressed in white.

The country was at war with England and the Patriot was commissioned to raid British ships. There were often storms and shipwrecks along the way through what is known as the Bermuda Triangle. Pirates infested the shoreline. It was a dangerous voyage, anything could happen, and something did.

Theodosia Bartow Burr Alston, along with the Patriot vanished.

Aaron Burr believed his daughter was dead, writing a friend, "She is indeed dead. Were she still alive, all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father."

Perhaps he was right and she is still trying to reach him.

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