A Texas end for Burr’s Theodosia?
Dear Theodosia, what to say to you? You have my eyes You have your mother’s name… —Lyrics from “Dear Theodosia” from the musical “Hamilton”
RIVER’S END, BRAZORIA COUNTY — For Texans, maybe the story begins where it might have ended. In mystery.
The year was 1813 and, as the story goes, a Karankawa brave discovered a foundered ship, her keel splintered, at the mouth of the Rio San Bernardo, today’s San Bernard River. Clambering aboard, he discovered debris and bodies. Hearing a faint voice calling for help, in English, he followed the sound to a small white woman chained by one ankle to a bulkhead. He freed the woman and carried her ashore.
As the Dallas Morning News told the story more than a century later, the woman was able to tell her rescuer what happened. (The brave is supposed to have learned English from a hermit who arrived in southeast Texas in the early 1800s and lived among the Karankawa.) She had
been a passenger on a ship, the woman recounted, and had been captured by pirates off Cape Hatteras, N.C. Weeks later, her captors’ ship was hit by a storm while en route to Galveston and drifted into Matagorda Bay. She was the lone survivor.
The woman gave her rescuer a locket she wore around her neck and begged him to take it to those who spoke her language. Then she died and was laid to rest near the mouth of the San Bernard. Sometime later, white men who knew the Karankawa noticed the locket he wore. Inside was a painting of a young man holding an infant son. Engraved on the back was the name “Theodosia.”
Those who heard the story and believed it had no doubt about the identity of the unfortunate young woman. She had to be the missing Theodosia Burr Alston. If Amelia Earhart is the 20th century’s most tantalizing missing-person mystery, Theodosia Burr Alston is the 19thcentury equivalent.
The beautiful and brilliant Theodosia was the daughter of Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States who lost the presidency to Thomas Jefferson in an election so close it was decided by the House of Representatives. Burr is best known, of course, as the man who killed Alexander Hamilton in an 1804 duel. His wife Theodosia died when daughter Theodosia (known as Theo) was 11. Burr was almost preternaturally devoted to Theo and made sure she had all the advantages and education that a male child would have. Theo, in turn, idolized her father and at 14 became mistress of the Burr estate on lower Manhattan Island. The New York Times noted that the teenager, “black-eyed and dignified,” entertained Talleyrand, Louis Philippe, Jerome Bonaparte, Hamilton, Jefferson and other notables of her day. At 18, she married Joseph Alston, a scion of South Carolina
plantation owners and later governor of the state. In 1802, she bore him a son, Aaron Burr Alston.
Burr, acquitted of murder charges after killing Hamilton, concocted a hazy scheme to build a southwestern empire, including Spanish America and perhaps U.S. territory west of the Alleghenies, a plan that got him charged with treason in 1807. Again acquitted, he decided that voluntary exile in Europe might be best. He was gone for five years. Returning to New York in early 1812, he longed to see his daughter and grandson, but in June of that year the youngster died of tropical fever. Burr and the child’s parents were devastated.
On Dec. 31, 1812, Theodosia at last set sail for New York from Georgetown, S.C., aboard a schooner called the Patriot. Neither she nor the ship was ever heard from again. As with Earhart more than a century later, the fate of Theodosia gave rise to rumors, tales and conjecture. (I came across several of the stories in “Texas Obscurities: Stories of the Peculiar, Exceptional & Nefarious,” by Texas writer E.R. Bills.)
In 1874, the Galveston Daily News published a letter from a retired pirate living in Calcasieu, La., who claimed the Patriot had been attacked by the brig Vengeance, of which he was a crew member. Tossing the Patriot crew overboard, the pirates discovered a woman in the main cabin, Theodosia Burr. Transferring her to the Vengeance, they set sail for Galveston, but Theodosia did not survive the voyage. The old pirate told the newspaper she was interred on Galveston Island.
Four years later, the Washington Post reported on the deathbed confession years earlier of another old pirate, this one living in the Cass County Poor-house in Cassopolis, Mich. Encountering the Patriot on Jan. 3, he and his fellow buccaneers took everything of value,
he said, and then forced captain, crew and passengers to walk the plank. One of the passengers identified herself as Mrs. Theodosia Alston.
“When her turn came to walk the fatal plank,” the Post reported, “she asked for a few moments’ time, which was readily granted her. She then returned to her berth and changed her apparel, appearing on deck in a few moments clad in pure white garments, and, with a Bible in her hand, she announced that she was ready. She appeared as calm and composed as if she were at home, and not a tremor crept over her frame, or a pallor over her features as she walked toward her fate. As she was taking the fatal steps, she folded her hand over her bosom and raised her eyes to heaven. She fell and sank without a murmur or a sigh.”
In 1886, the Galveston paper ran a similar deathbed confession from an old pirate in Mobile, Ala., and in 1913, in a New York Times 100thanniversary article about Theodosia’s disappearance, a former pirate named Benjamin Franklin Burdick also claimed to have been aboard the pirate ship that captured the Patriot. Burdick told the Times that when “Theodosia was discovered, his captain gave her a choice: Be my mistress or die. Theodosia bravely walked the plank.”
Someday, perhaps, we’ll know how Amelia Earhart died; Theodosia Burr, probably not. Her father believed until the end of his days that she perished in a shipwreck, not at the hands of pirates. Tales from the mouths of old buccaneers are interesting, but I’m guessing — not ever having known one — they could be as fickle as the San Bernard itself. Maybe Theodosia Burr’s remains lie near the river’s mouth, but we’ll never know that either. The mouth of the San Bernard, like the stories, has shifted numerous times since an English-speaking Karankawa purportedly rescued a mysterious locket-wearing lady more than two centuries ago.