Mysterious Theodosia
The story of Theodosia is perhaps one of the strangest tales to come from the annals of the Old West. She was the beautiful daughter of Aaron Burr, one of the most colorful and controversial characters in American history. As his only legitimate child, she was lavished with all the pampered privilege his great wealth and position could provide. On Christmas Day 1813, Theodosia left her home at the Governor’s mansion in Charleston, South Carolina, and sailed into oblivion. No one really knows what happened to her, but enough circumstantial evidence exists to suggest that she was shipwrecked in Texas, dying in the arms of an English-speaking, cannibalistic Karankawa Indian warrior chief.
Theodosia was Aaron Burr’s only legitimate daughter. Like any protective father, he envisioned for her a life of luxury among the titled heads of Europe. Her mother had died in 1794, leaving him to raise his child with the help of a governess. She grew into a beautiful, petite woman with auburn hair to match her fiery temperament, and Burr made sure she was well-educated and refined. By the time she was sixteen, she easily spoke six languages and could converse on such "manly" topics as economics and politics. When Joseph Alston of The Oaks Plantation in South Carolina decided to visit relatives in New York, he fell under her spell. Young Alston, however, was not what Burr had in mind. As their flirtations blossomed into romance, Burr became alarmed. He felt a marriage to Alston would be a grave mistake.
Aaron Burr had a great deal of influence on those around him, including his daughter, and Joseph Alston was concerned. When he returned to South Carolina, he feared Burr would seize the opportunity to turn Theodosia against him. In an effort to impress, he wrote letter after letter, continually assuring Theodosia of his wealth and position in life. Although he had inherited The Oaks from his grandfather, he reminded her that he was also a lawyer in his own right, having attended Princeton and practiced before the bar when he was twenty. With his wealth and resources, he promised he was free of the drudgery of running the plantation. He asked her to marry him. Although Aaron Burr wasn’t totally convinced that Alston was the right suitor for his daughter, he grudgingly gave his consent. In February 1801, the lavish ceremony was held in Albany, New York.
By the late 1700s, Aaron Burr was one of the most powerful men in the Nation’s capital. He was descended from a family of famous clergymen, but instead of following a religious tradition, he opted for the more lucrative business of law and politics. His restless and ambitious nature led him straight to the fledgling band of American colonists who preached independence from England. During the American Revolution, he served in George Washington’s army with great distinction. But even as a soldier, he wanted more. After the Revolution, he became a successful lawyer and statesman, becoming so powerful that soon after Joseph Alston took Theodosia south, he ran for President of the United States. As was the practice at that time, the man with the most votes would be President and the runner-up, the Vice-President.
The vote was close in the House of Representatives, and Burr lost to Thomas Jefferson. Instead of the coveted Leader-of-the-Nation position he had expected to win, he had to settle for the second-in-command, the Vice-President of the United States. He blamed his loss of the presidency on Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton, although he didn’t like Thomas Jefferson, hated and distrusted Aaron Burr even more. This mutual dislike started a war between the two men. The political quarrel between Burr and Hamilton culminated in a duel on 11 July 1804. Hamilton was wounded and taken to New York, where he died a few days later. Burr had to flee, for although dueling was an accepted practice and often condoned, it was still against the law. When Hamilton died, warrants were issued for Burr’s arrest, and he went into hiding. But Hamilton was a powerful figure, and his friends swore revenge upon his death. They succeeded in having Burr charged with treason. Aaron Burr fled to Europe.
By this time, Theodosia’s health was declining. A year earlier, she had given birth to a son, Aaron Burr Alston, only the extreme heat and humidity of coastal South Carolina was not suited to her upbringing, and she became increasingly frail. Also at this time, her husband, taking Aaron Burr’s advice, was busy making a name for himself in South Carolina politics. As Speaker of the House, he held the most influential office in the state, an office which kept him away from home a lot.
When word reached Theodosia that her father had been accused of contriving a plan to head an expedition against Mexico, believing there would be a war between the United States and that country, she vehemently rose to the occasion to aid her father in proving his innocence. Joseph also wrote a report stating that the conspiracy was founded in innuendo. Eventually, the charges were dropped, and Burr returned to America. But the worst was yet ahead.
Theodosia, still sickly and frail from the humidity and life on the plantation, decided to move with her son to a summer cottage on the beach a few miles distant. She was not forsaking the plantation, but the slaves had medicinal powers rooted in African voodoo, and she felt that she was easily imposed upon when her husband was away working politics. In fact, some of the healers had used poisonous plants and invoked "conjur bags" (cotton cloth holding ashes and salt, dirt from a grave, and a few hairs yanked from the head of the ailing person, among other things), in an effort to make her well. She had also endured mashed onions around her throat and nutmeg and garlic draped around the walls beside her bed. Packing and moving to the beach would not be easy, but Theodosia felt she had nothing to lose and a lot to gain by doing it.
At first, life at the beach was pleasant, and Theodosia showed signs of improvement. Her pleasure, however, was interrupted when her son took a head cold. Joseph sent for not one, but several physicians, who were on the scene as quickly as possible for those days. Their diagnoses revealed that the boy had the dreaded malarial fever. Within hours he was dead, and Theodosia’s world crashed around her. She wrote her father, "My dear father...there is no more joy for me, the world is a blank. I have lost my boy. My child is gone forever. He expired on the 30th of June."
Theodosia went into seclusion. and her father was in a frenzy over her poor health. He wrote and insisted that she come to New York for a visit with him. Theodosia had reached her lowest state of dejection, and as her health worsened, she finally agreed. Alston, now Governor of South Carolina, made the preparation for her journey to New York.
Joseph Alston accompanied his young wife from The Oaks Plantation to Georgetown (Charleston). The coasting-barque Patriot was not yet ready to sail, and Theodosia and her husband and servants waited in a brick building. They heard talk of pirates, of the war with the British, and of a violent storm at sea. Finally, on 25 December 1813, Theodosia, wearing a silk dress trimmed in lace and carrying her sewing basket, along with her nurse, boarded the Patriot...and sailed into oblivion.
When the Patriot failed to make her scheduled arrival in New York, an intensive search and rescue investigation was undertaken to determine her fate. The entire eastern seaboard as far south as Nassau was combed for the missing ship. She was last seen sailing across the bar at Charleston harbor and into the Atlantic, and although she was to follow a well-traveled sea lane, no other merchant ships encountered her while at sea. No trace was ever found of the ship, her passengers, cargo or crew. It was generally surmised that the ship had foundered during a storm off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, but no debris ever washed ashore that could be traced back to her. And even though the United States had declared war on Great Britain, and it was a well-known fact that British warships prowled American waters, the London government emphatically denied any involvement in the Patriot affair. In fact, the first officer of the doomed ship had in his possession a letter written by Governor Alston to the British Admiral off the Capes, advising that his wife was on board and requesting permission for a safe passage through the fleet. But the Patriot had vanished as completely as if she had never existed.
Newspapers carried accounts of the disappearance of South Carolina’s First Lady, and there were hundreds of rumors. One story said that pirates had overtaken the ship and had forced "the white lady" to walk the plank. Another story said that the vessel had been smashed to splinters in a hurricane. Aaron Burr in New York and Joseph Alston in South Carolina endeavored to accept their loss.
A few weeks after the Patriot’s disappearance, residents of Nags Head, North Carolina, awoke to a startling sight. On the beach gently bobbing in the foaming surf was a full-rigged schooner which had apparently washed ashore during the night. Hailing the vessel produced no answering response, and when investigators finally boarded her, the only living creature they found was a half-starved black kitten cowering in the pantry.
The deserted ship made absolutely no sense. It must have been abandoned offshore, yet no lifeboats were missing. And except for minor damage to her keel, she was in excellent sailing condition. One witness reported, "all the sails were still set on the vessel, the rudder was lashed, and the craft seemed to be in good order, but entirely deserted." In one of the cabins, searchers found fancy silk dresses and a vase filled with beautiful flowers strewn all over the floor. There was nothing on board to explain the identity of the vessel, the whereabouts of her passengers or what happened to her crew. It was as if everyone on board the ship had simply disappeared. Even more intriguing, she fitted the description of the missing Patriot.
Details were quickly dispatched to officials in New York, and as incredible as it now seems, no one associated with the missing Patriot acted upon the discovery. America was at war with Britain, and no one was interested. Since North Carolinians had other things on their minds besides trying to determine the identity of the shipwreck, the mysterious schooner on the beach was soon forgotten.
Joseph Alston died in 1816, at the age of thirty-seven, still mourning his missing wife. His estate passed by his Will to his brothers, John Ashe Alston and William Algernon Alston. Joseph’s remains were laid to rest alongside his son’s in the Alston Family Cemetery at The Oaks Plantation.
Several years later, a doctor treating a sick woman on North Carolina’s Outer Banks was given a portrait in payment for his services by the woman who claimed she had no funds. The woman said the picture was of the missing Theodosia Burr Alston. She went on to explain that some years earlier a schooner had washed ashore after a hurricane, and that a family named Tillet had found the craft and examined it. In one of the cabins, scattered about on the floor, were dresses made of silk and trimmed in lace. Lying among the debris were a sewing basket and a portrait of a lovely young woman dressed in white, which had fallen from the wall. The Tillet family had taken the sewing basket, but the portrait had come into the possession of the patient, and she offered it as payment of the doctor’s services.
The doctor, realizing that other portraits of Theodosia Burr Alston had been painted, accepted the offer and set about searching for a likeness to compare to the one he now owned. Finally, he found such a portrait. When the two were compared, the painting held by the physician appeared to be of the very same woman. Was it the first clue to Theodosia’s disappearance?
Twenty years later, in 1833, an article in an Alabama paper, the Mobil Press-Register, reported an unidentified man "who resided in one of the interior counties of this state" and who claimed to have been with several other companions who captured the Patriot on her last voyage in January of 1814. According to his "deathbed" confession, they murdered "all of those on board," and scuttled the ship "for the sake of her plates and effects."
A few years after this astonishing revelation, another supposed deathbed confession from another pirate claimed a similar story---only he added a juicy detail. A woman, whom he called "Odessa Burr Alston," chose death over sharing a cabin with the pirate captain. Were any of these pirates’ deathbed admissions believable? Some thought not, until yet another deathbed confession surfaced several years later. This time, a rum-soaked, consumptive old derelict dying in a sailor’s home in Detroit gave a slightly different version of the ship’s last voyage. He revealed that there had been a forecastle plot to mutiny and capture the ship. As soon as the ship dropped land astern, the mutineers acted. He described in graphic detail how they gleefully made the officers and passengers walk the plank, including the beautiful Theodosia. They then absconded with the ship to pirate up and down the American coast.
There are many reasons to disbelieve all these accounts, the main one being that the "confessors" all needed money and were paid for their stories. But the rummy’s story generated an interesting twist to the way people then thought. The Patriot just might have been boarded by pirates after all. And in the nature of pirates everywhere, the ship would have been stripped of everything of value, and all people either killed or sold into slavery. The ship itself would have been destroyed or left to the mercy of Nature.
It was generally known that women captives were often kept as slaves on pirate ships, and their lot was not a romantic one. They were repeatedly raped, beaten, fed scraps, and forced to sleep on rags. Often they were kept naked and chained by their ankles to the bulkhead. If the ship foundered and sank, the women were left to drown. They were also infected with every venereal disease known to man...and some probably not identifiable to this day.
It is known that many pirate vessels plying the Atlantic trades sought shelter in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Among the favorite targets off the Texas coast was Galveston Island, and there in Brazoria County just west of Galveston Bay lies a river that was once known as El Rio de San Bernardo. The river once emptied into the bay before the topography of the area was rearranged by numerous Gulf storms. It now empties into a small lake, and its name has been changed to simply the "San Bernard."
At the time of the pirate raids, the river’s mouth was surrounded by huge, spreading live oak trees. It was a virtual forest of coolness, and many pirate captains would drop anchor offshore and bask in the cooling shade. The Indians who hunted and lived in the area, indeed the entire Texas coast, were the most fierce of all, the dreaded Karankawa. Most other Indian tribes were afraid of them because the Karankawa used cannibalism in their ceremonial rituals.
For some unknown reason around 1810, an English-speaking white man came to the mouth of the San Bernard to live as a hermit. He did not know he was in dangerous territory, or if he did, he chose to ignore it, for the Karankawa had no use for white men. They hated anyone not of their own tribe. As one writer so colorfully phrased it, the Karankawa got "off to a bad start with pirates years earlier when the pirates snatched some Karankawa women for the usual reasons and the Karankawa snatched some pirates for dinner....They finally settled on a good working relationship---whoever got to a weapon first, lived."
The hermit was crafty, and he managed to convince the Karankawa that he was crazy, which definitely worked to his advantage because they left him alone. All American Indian tribes share the same philosophy about crazy people. They believe that harming or killing anyone possessed would bring evil spirits on the one doing the harming or killing. It was not taboo to be friendly with one, however, and this is just what a young Karankawa did when the hermit moved into the area.
The hermit taught the young chief to speak English. It was not the pigeon English depicted in western movies accompanied by sign language, but complete sentences with a fair semblance of proper word usage and structure. When Stephen F. Austin’s colonists settled in the Karankawa area ten years later, this Karankawa, who was now a respected chief, served the colonists as an interpreter. He was considered highly intelligent and a valued commodity, no doubt because he could talk to the settlers in their own language.
The Karankawa chief, like his kindred, was around six feet tall, splendidly muscled, and totally awesome to behold. The nipples of his breast were pierced with stiff cane, as was his lower lip and the cartilage of his nose, and his body was covered in tattoos. He always wore a peculiar headdress made of deer antlers, and if he was like the other Karankawa warriors, only a buckskin breechcloth for clothing. His feet were huge, flat, and wide---other Indians called the Karankawa "Big Feet," when they were not calling them other unflattering names. He carried with him a bow every bit as tall as he was and arrows to match. They were custom-tailored to his great size, and there was no way another could have used them. Lashed to his side was a huge knife sharpened on both edges. He also stunk to high heaven, since he wore a home-made mosquito repellent consisting of dirt, bear grease, and among other things, "pennyroyal and rancid crocodiles’ liver oil." But his most distinguishing feature he wore around his neck---a large gold locket. Inside the locket was a miniature painting of a handsome young man and a small boy. Engraved across the back of the locket was a single word: "Theodosia."
When he was later asked where he got the locket, he said it was given to him by his "white wife." When he was asked where he got a white wife, he said she was given to him by the Great Storm, and the gods quickly took her away.
The Gulf of Mexico has suffered lots of great storms over the centuries, and the Texas coast has seen her share. Long before hurricanes wore names, they were rated by the amount of damage they did in the areas they struck. Most storms were rated great only after complete devastation to a city or town. But great storms hit the uninhabited areas, too, and one was the storm of "about 1816."
The 1816 storm was remembered as one of the worst to ever hit the Texas coast. Survivors estimated that the surge tide brought at least fifteen feet of ocean, and possibly more, rushing over parts of Galveston Island. It was reported that Jean Lafitte, at the height of the storm, sailed his Red House, with a draft of twelve feet, completely across the island---and snagged nothing. Newcomers to the area reported that as late as the 1830’s, high water marks and flood debris were found in places twenty feet high and as far inland as ten miles. Old Spanish records prior to 1816 report there was a huge forest of ancient live oak trees at the mouth of the San Bernard, yet Austin’s colonists in the early 1820’s described that stretch of coast as low, desolate, and almost treeless.
The Karankawa warrior told the colonists that his people survived the storm the way they always did by climbing to the tops of the flexible salt cedars, which grew in abundance everywhere along the coast, and tying themselves to the branches. The tough cedars, being deep-rooted, would bend with the wind, but remain rooted and upright.
When the storm was over and the water receded, which could have been anywhere from several days to several weeks, the young Karankawa warrior wandered down to the mouth of the river to check out the damage to his homeland. He also wanted to see how his white man friend had fared. When he reached the hermit’s location, he found the white man dead, still strapped to an uprooted giant oak tree. It was obvious what had happened. The hermit had thought he would be safe if he climbed to the top of one of the massive, ancient live oaks and tied himself to one of the giant limbs, but it was the worst thing he could have done. For all its huge size, old age, and spreading crown, the live oak is extremely vulnerable to high wind---especially if accompanied by torrential rain.
Live oaks, sometimes called water oaks further east, are common throughout the South, and their peculiar vulnerability to wind and rain has been well-known since the 1600’s. It implies that the hermit was not a Southerner by birth. The trunk splintered, and the tree fell. If the hermit wasn’t killed in the fall, he drowned in the rising water.
Looking past the dead hermit, the Karankawa found something extremely interesting. At the mouth of the San Bernard, lying half-in and half-out of the riverbed with her keel snapped, was a large, seagoing sailing ship. Since the Karankawa Indians had been taking advantage of the bounty brought by storms since the 16th Century and probably before that, the chief climbed aboard and began to explore.
His description of the vessel said that it had a noticeable raised structure on one end which contained living quarters. He found lots of useful ropes on the decks and several bodies of men lashed to the wreckage in various stages of decomposition. He gathered the ropes, ignored the bodies, and made for the living area. When he entered the sterncastle, he was surprised to hear a weak, high-pitched, woman-like voice pleading for help in English.
Following the voice, he entered a cabin where he found a small, ghost-like form of a mature white woman. She was completely naked, except for a locket around her neck, and chained by her ankle to the bulkhead. According to his story, she stood with difficulty to face him, when she heard him enter, but then fainted dead away when she saw him.
He pulled her free from the bulkhead, picked her up, and carried her off the ship to the bank of the river. Gently laying her on the sand, he bathed her face in the cooling water until she revived. He gave her water in a shell to drink. Because he spoke English, she asked to be taken to where there were other white men, but as far as he knew at the time, no one else spoke that language. His hermit friend was dead.
When the woman learned this, she appeared to lose hope. She then told the Karankawa an amazing story. She said she was the daughter of a great chief of the white men, but that the great chief was badly misunderstood by his people and had to leave his country. She was also the wife of a governor of a large state. Some time before, perhaps three winters---maybe more---she got on a great boat similar to the one that lay wrecked a few yards away to go visit her father. The first boat was attacked by the one that was now wrecked. Her boat was burned and all on board, except herself, were murdered. She had been kept, naked and chained, as a slave to the crew of the wrecked boat ever since. Then she gave the warrior her gold locket and told him that if he ever met white men who spoke English, he was to show it to them and tell them the story.
The Karankawa said she then began to sing softly to herself until she fell asleep. She died a short while later. When the woman died, the warrior buried her in the sand along the river’s bank, digging her grave with broken pieces of the wrecked ship. He then covered the grave with a broken door from the wreck. Today, no man knows where that grave lies, although there have been attempts to find it. Also before she died, the Indian said the woman mentioned that there was a huge treasure on the wrecked vessel, but when the chief went to look for it, he could not find it.
The Karankawa was real. He is mentioned in the memoirs of the McNeill family, which established itself on the San Bernard in 1822, and by others of Austin’s Colony. The locket and the story behind it have been a part of the history of Austin’s Colony since its founding. The "about 1816" storm was real. Coastal Indians, for as long as they remained, dated things not by the coming of Austin’s colonists, but from the Great Storm. Considering the number of storms they must have survived along the Texas coast over countless generations, for them to consider one particular storm "The Great Storm" must mean it was, indeed, a great storm.
The ship was real, too. Noah Smithwick, in his Evolution of a State, specifically mentions going down to the mouth of the San Bernard to scavenge iron from the old wreck to use in his blacksmith business. And Colonel Hunnington, who was seventy-eight years old in 1924, says that ‘the ship was wrecked about 1816,’ as far as he could remember being told. Archaeological records have confirmed the existence of several shipwrecks at the mouth of the San Bernard, and at least two or three of them are of the right vintage to have brought the Karankawa his "white wife."
Although the Texas Almanac does not list a great storm for the year 1816, it does list one for 1818. No one really knows for sure when the Great Storm of the Karankawa occurred. It is a recorded fact that most of the live oak trees along the mouth of the San Bernard were destroyed or left dying from a great hurricane that occurred sometime during that time frame.
And what about the treasure the woman told to the Karankawa? Records indicate that it could have been found. In the 1840’s, after Texas became a Republic, an old, gray-bearded man dressed in rags and skins showed up in the Austin Colony area. He carried a bag of gold coins, and they were all dated before 1816. He said he had been a prisoner aboard a pirate ship that had been wrecked at the mouth of the San Bernard in a great storm. Her keel was broken, and all aboard died. After the flood waters receded, he had fled into the swamp, and over the years, had systematically looted her of all her treasure and anything else he could use. Shortly after he arrived at the Colony, he died, and speculation has it that he was killed by ruffians when he refused to reveal where he had hidden the treasure. At any rate, archaeologists did not find any huge golden horde on any of the various ships they excavated at the mouth of the San Bernard.
Colonel Hunnington, before he died, claimed the treasure had never been found and that it still "lies where the pirates placed it more than a hundred years ago." It is a sentiment echoed by Captain William Sterling, a famed Texas Ranger, who died at the turn of the century. He claimed that as a child he knew a solitary fisherman on Matagorda Peninsula who "claimed to be the sole survivor of the wrecked privateer, showing me gold coins which he called Spanish doubloons."
The Karankawa Indians disappeared from the Texas coast around 1838, and no descendants are known to exist. None were ever moved to reservations. Rejecting assimilation into the world of their conquerors, they simply vanished, and nobody knows for sure where. When the Karankawa tribe left the area, the locket went with the Indian brave who wore it.
Aaron Burr was definitely a "great chief." He was also badly misunderstood by his people. Joseph Alston was a lesser chief than his father-in-law, as Governor of South Carolina from 1812-1814. Theodosia Burr Alston did board a ship to go visit her father, and according to The New International Encyclopedia of 1924, "a tradition of uncertain origin" has the Patriot to have been taken by pirates. The attack described by the woman to her rescuer was about three or more years before the Great Storm, which corresponds to the date of the Patriot’s last voyage in 1813-1814. For this woman to have survived these years at the mercy of cutthroats under such deplorable conditions indicates she was a woman of rare courage and fortitude. And if she inherited her father’s character, this description fits Theodosia Burr Alston very well.
Without the missing locket, however, it is impossible to prove that the "white wife" of the Karankawa Indian warrior was Theodosia Burr Alston, only daughter of Aaron Burr, Vice-President of the United States. "But if untrue, just who was the mystery woman of the San Bernard?"
