Marauding under an alledged foreign flag

Mainers have heard stories about pirates Dixie Bull, Captain Kidd and Samuel Bellamy cruising the coast in the 17th and early 18th centuries, but little has been written about the pirates caught trying to smuggle stolen Spanish cargo into Portland, Maine in September 1817.

During the War of 1812, patriotic privateering was a lucrative business for American mariners. The United States Congress issued Letters of Marque and Reprisal authorizing designated ships to attack and pillage enemy vessels. The law required that prize ships be condemned and that booty proceeds be divided between the privateer owners and crew. Goods seized were often delivered to reputable merchants at a lower than usual cost in exchange for financial backing for the privateer. No matter how temptingly profitable it may have been, it was never legal to plunder vessels from countries the United States was not at war with.

When U.S. peace was restored in 1815 some of the privateers and their U.S. merchant partners could not bring themselves to give up the huge profits of privateering. They set up dummy registrations and residencies in South America to subvert U.S. piracy laws.

Buenos Aires was fighting for independence from Spain after the War of 1812 and it proved a convenient location for Baltimore, Maryland pirate, Joseph Almeida, to set up a second home. Whenever necessary to avoid conviction for looting Spanish ships, Almeida would claim citizenship in Buenos Aires even though his family still lived handsomely in Maryland and his 10-gun Privateer El Congresso, was built and armed by Baltimore merchants.

Five American sailors, who had all arrived in Portsmouth, N.H. on the sloop Aurora, out of Portland, aroused suspicion on Sept. 7, 1817 when they each tried to exchange $1,000 in Spanish gold and silver coins at a Portsmouth bank. The purchasing power of $1,000 in 1817 would equate to about $170,000 today; an unusual sum for low-level seamen to receive in payment for a voyage.

The Portsmouth Customs collector was alerted to the suspicious circumstances and he immediately seized the Aurora under the command of a Capt. White from Portland. All her passengers and crew were rounded up for interrogation. As a result of the investigation, three of the crewmembers, John Palmer, Thomas Wilson and Barney Colloghan, all of Massachusetts, were indicted for piracy. The following details of the case were revealed in newspaper reports and court transcripts.

The three accused pirates had sailed the previous May from Baltimore, in the ship El Congresso, under the command of Capt. Joseph Almeida. During the cruise, the Congresso captured several Spanish vessels and after having taken valuables out of them, sank, burned or destroyed them.

On July 4, 1817, the Congresso captured a most valuable Spanish ship, the Industria Raffaelli, as she sailed from Havana to Cardiz. Her cargo included 500 boxes of sugar valued at $20,000; 60 pipes of rum worth $6,000; honey, coffee and hides that together were valued at $6,000; and $60,000 in gold and silver specie.

The Industria’s Spanish crew was replaced by a prize crew under the command of Capt. Diggs. According to the prisoners’ testimony, Capt. Almeida ordered the prize to sail for Buenos Aires, but four or five days later, a Portland man named Davis took control of the Industria and sailed for the coast of Maine. She came to an anchor in Hussy Sound, between Peaks Island and Long Island in Casco Bay. There, a fishing boat met them and carried Capt. Davis ashore. The next morning the captain returned with three sloops. Cargo, sails, rigging and iron salvaged from the Industria was loaded onto the Betsy and the Abby and brought quietly into port without attracting the attention of the customs collector.

The whole crew except for Capt. Davis was put on board the sloop Aurora, with their cut of the Spanish gold and silver. What was left of the Industria Raffaelli was disguised and abandoned. When she was recovered some time later near Cape Elizabeth, it took a while before she was identified. Her name had been blacked out and a piece of canvas with the name John of Norfolk painted on it, had been nailed to her stern.

There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that an act of piracy had been committed, but the United States piracy laws in force at the time only applied to acts of piracy against the United States. Because El Congresso sailed under the Buenos Aries flag and attacked a Spanish vessel, the American pirates were acquitted. The only action that could be taken was to condemn the sloops Betsy and Abby for knowingly subverting U.S. Customs collection. As a result of the impotence exposed in U.S. Piracy Law by this case, an expanded legal definition of piracy was adopted by U.S. Congress on March 3, 1819.

Joseph Almeida, also known as Don Jose Almeida, plundered hundreds of Spanish vessels before he was captured in 1827. He was imprisoned at El Morro in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and was finally executed for piracy against Spain on St. Valentine’s Day 1832.

Stolen cutter blown up to avoid re-taking

Coastal Maine does not instantly come to mind as an American Civil War battleground, but one explosive encounter in Portland Harbor put Maine on the map.

Confederate Second Lt. Charles W. Read was barely yet able to grow a beard when he convinced his commanding officer to put him in charge of the captured brig Clarence, and let him run it up the coast as a privateer cruiser. The bright-faced rebel captain burned or captured 22 Union vessels between May 6 and June 25 of 1863, moving his crew from prize to prize to avoid detection. He and his crew, disguised as hard-working fishermen, were sailing the captured fishing schooner Archer of Southport, Maine on the morning of June 26, 1863.

Two Falmouth fishermen, Albert T. Bibber and Elbridge Titcomb, who had been out hauling trawls, later testified that there was nothing to indicate the Archer was a vessel of war. So when they saw the schooner approaching them at a reckless pace, they assumed her crew consisted of “drunken fishermen on a frolic.”

Bibber and Titcomb were taken aboard the Archer for questioning by the captain. They told him about the gunboats being built at Portland and the two passenger steamships in the harbor, the Chesapeake and the Forest City. They also informed him that the captain of the United States revenue cutter Caleb Cushing had recently died, and that the ship was lying in Portland Harbor awaiting a new commanding officer.

The schooner Archer came to anchor off Fish Point after sunset. Her sailors quickly transformed themselves from fishermen to an armed crew of the Confederate Navy while their Falmouth captives were confined in the cabin. When Bibber and Titcomb were finally brought on deck to help guide the rebels into the harbor, it was after midnight.

Capt. Read was most interested in destroying the gunboats Agawam and Pontoosic at Franklin Wharf and taking the propeller steamer Chesapeake as his new privateer cruiser, but First Officer Brown was not confident he would be able to get the cold steamer engine running without being detected. It was decided that the cutter would be quietly taken out beyond the harbor’s armed forts under the cover of darkness before any attempt was made to burn shipping at the wharves or seize the coveted Chesapeake.

The Caleb Cushing was boarded at 1:30 am. She was taken quietly without resistance and her sails set, but the incoming tide proved a challenging deterrent and even with two boats towing her she didn’t pass through Hussey Sound till dawn. Aware that he could not return for the steamer in daylight, Capt. Read sailed seaward.

Confusion reigned onshore. Customs Collector Jedediah Jewett was alerted around 8 a.m. that the Caleb Cushing had sailed out during the night without orders. His first inclination was to suspect that Georgia born Lt. Dudley Davenport, who had temporary charge of the cutter, had deserted.

Word was sent to Fort Preble to prepare arms and soldiers of the 7th Maine Regiment. The side wheel steamer Forest City set off after the Caleb Cushing, but she was in no position to fire on the rebels. The better-equipped propeller steamer Chesapeake followed with 50 civilian volunteers, 27 soldiers and 2 brass six-pounders ready for battle. They knew their fire power was no match for the U.S. revenue cutter, which had a 32-pounder pivot gun and was said to be carrying 400 pounds of gunpowder, but Yankee zeal fueled their resolve.

Fortunately, the yet loyal Lt. Davenport had refused to disclose to the rebel privateers the secret onboard location of most of the solid shot and powder. They fired through the available ammunition while the Forest City and the Chesapeake were attempting to run them down.

When the steamers were within firing range of the Caleb Cushing, Capt. Read could see he was running out of fire power. He set the cutter on fire hoping the fire would find the hidden gunpowder before the cutter was recaptured. He loaded his crew and captives into small boats and rowed away from the ticking time bomb.

For an hour, Portlanders watched as the cutter burned, acutely aware that the 400 pounds of gunpowder she carried made it imprudent for them to approach.

“Finally,” it was reported in the Eastern Argus, “a terrific explosion shook the very heavens at 2:15 pm. Fragments of shells, masts, spars and blackened timbers are seen hundreds of feet in the air. The cutter begins to sink stem first, her gleaming guns slipping off the deck and into the deep.”

The steamer Forest City picked up the boated rebels and then captured the fishing schooner Archer. The rebel captain and his crew were sent to Fort Warren in Boston for 16 months before being traded for northern prisoners in 1864. Charles W. Read concluded his Civil War service before his 25th birthday and died a Confederate War Hero before his 50th.

Mr. Atwater Kent to the rescue

Kennebunk Beach had its usual array of summer sojourners in August 1914 but the fresh sea breezes were tainted by the scent of trepidation. Even though President Woodrow Wilson had quickly tried to balance declarations of war in Europe with his own declaration that the United States would remain neutral, the specter of war was omnipresent. As a diversion, the manager of the Atlantis Hotel invited aviator Victor Vernon and his family to stay at the hotel for free if he offered tourist rides on his new-fangled, Curtiss Flying Boat, The Betty V.

Before World War I, aviators were fearless pioneers. Some might even call them reckless. Vernon had been a car salesman for the American Automobile Manufacturing Company only a few months earlier. When the company went into receivership, Victor, who had seen a plane land on the water the previous summer, went to Hammondsport, N.Y., took a few flying lessons from a Curtiss test pilot, and purchased the newest model “hydro-aeroplane” money could buy. He had given just a few exhibitions flights on Lake Erie when he disassembled his Flying Boat and had her shipped by railroad to Portland, Maine.

Little more than a decade earlier, the Wright Brothers had made their first 20-minute flight. The Curtiss Flying Boat was touted the world over as “the sportsman’s vehicle of the future,” and “a marvel of engineering.” The mahogany-hulled, hydroplane was as beautiful as she was fast. Equipped with a 90-horsepower motor she could reach speeds of 60 miles per hour on the water and 75 mph in the air. Vernon anticipated making a fortune flying passengers over Kennebunk Beach with the Betty V.

The Atlantis Hotel, advertised as “a hotel of the very best class,” was built in 1903 in the Spanish mission style. Private bathrooms were available for those willing to pay extra; a rare luxury in 1914. Victor Vernon offered rides from Middle Beach where privileged hotel guests could watch him take off and land from the veranda. His best customer was Atwater Kent, who owned a cottage near St Ann’s by the Sea, in Kennebunkport. Kent had made his fortune by inventing an automobile ignition system that could be engaged from inside the car. He loved any cutting-edge thing with a motor and couldn’t get enough of the Betty V. He showed up day after day to fly with Vernon, sometimes with Mrs. Kent and sometimes alone.

“During Mr. Kent’s first ride with me,” Victor Vernon wrote in his memoirs, “a wave top broke over the Betty V when landing and dampened the magneto. The motor stopped and we started drifting toward a rocky section of the beach near our point of operation. I shouted to Mr. Kent what was most undoubtedly the trouble, but he, an electrical expert, already knew and offered to climb up alongside the motor, remove the magneto cover, clean and dry it out and replace — no easy job in a pitching, rolling ‘boat,’ and not good for his flannels, either. He did an expert job just in time as when I cranked the motor and she caught with welcomed roar, we were only a few feet from huge, jagged boulders and rocks stretching out from shore into deep water and being swept by the waves. He was the highest priced, but unpaid mechanic ever voluntarily serving under similar circumstances, I’m sure.”

After several weeks at Kennebunk Beach, Victor received a phone call from the Chairman of the Labor Day Celebration Committee, Bar Harbor, Maine. He was offered $500 to fly there in time to make an exhibition flight on Labor Day. All his expenses were to be covered. With the economic uncertainty of war looming Vernon accepted the offer, even though no such flight over the ocean had ever been attempted. Nationwide newspaper coverage of the flight made Victor Vernon a household name.

“Victor Vernon made an over-water flight of 150 miles yesterday from Kennebunkport to Bar Harbor,” wrote a reporter for the Lowell Sun on Sept. 4, 1914. “The hydro-aeroplane flight made at 2,000 feet took 2 hours – 32 minutes of actual flying time. Three stops were made; the first at Port Clyde for supplies, a second at Rockland and the third at Northeast Harbor, which the aviator mistook for Bar Harbor.”

By 1916, American participation in World War I seemed probable. Vernon was approached by the Signal Corps, which at that time was the aviation branch of the U.S. Army. The U.S. Air Force had not yet been organized. He accepted the position of chief civilian instructor in its new aviation training program. During the war, Victor Vernon tested Flying Boats built by the U.S. Navy to patrol for U-boats and deliver torpedoes.

The Evolving Mr. Farnsworth

Governor Percival Baxter dismissed the validity of the Ku Klux Klan in 1922.  “I do not believe that any level-headed citizens of Maine will allow themselves to be influenced by such an organization,” he told a reporter.  Two years later Baxter’s gubernatorial successor, Ralph O. Brewster, was swept into office by an army of White Knights.  Most of them had been seduced by the flimflammery of F. Eugene Farnsworth.

The first Klansmen organized in the southern states after the Civil War.  Their bigotry was aimed at newly freed African Americans.  When the federal government started prosecuting Klan crime in the 1870s, the organization was suppressed.  The “Second Klan” was formed after World War I in response to growing immigration to the United States.  In addition to feeling threatened by African Americans, the new Klan objected to equal rights for Catholics, Jews and immigrants of all nationalities.  

French Canadian Catholics were gaining influence in local Maine politics and were lobbying for state funds to support their parochial schools.  F. Eugene Farnsworth, who claimed to be a native of Columbia Falls, appealed to Protestant ministers all around the state as Maine’s King Kleagle.  He promised to eradicate parochial schools and to fight for the right of “100% Americans” to teach the bible in public schools.  In exchange, he asked that the clergy declare their support for the Klan from the pulpit.  Many of them did.  Their support and Farnsworth’s memorizing oratory gifts led to the initiation of thousands of Klansmen in a matter of months. 

There was broad social acceptance of the “Invisible Empire” and their claims of patriotism.  One newspaper advertised an impressive list of activities available to vacationers at the Merriland Camp for girls in Wells; “Tennis, croquet, golf, bathing, volleyball, dancing, canoeing, masquerades, Ku Klux initiations, pool and music.”  Farnsworth addressed appreciative crowds in Kittery, Saco, Hollis and Sanford.  The Klan purchased a very visible headquarters on Forest Avenue in Portland, with new membership proceeds.  At the August 1923 opening ceremony, followers were initiated by the light of a fifty foot burning cross, while ten thousand spectators looked on. 

A month after the flamboyant spectacle in Portland, a story broke in the Fitchburg Sentinel that changed everything.  Maine’s King Kleagle was well known in Fitchburg as Salvation Army recruiter and local barber turned travelling hypnotist, Frank Farnsworth.  He had left town in shame in 1901 after his memorized assistant, Tom Bolton, was killed onstage. 

Bolton’s job was to pretend to be hypnotized.  He was laid out between two chairs and a huge boulder was placed on his stomach.  A volunteer from the audience, who was actually employed by Farnsworth, then tried to break the rock with a sledgehammer.  During his final performance, the chair under Bolton’s head slipped and his skull was crushed by the rock.  To avoid a manslaughter conviction, Frank Farnsworth was forced to admit that his hypnotism act was a sham and that his assistant had participated in the trick with his full faculties.   

After leaving Fitchburg, Frank travelled to South America on an expedition to photograph headhunters.  He then returned to the U.S. and as F. Eugene Farnsworth, performed an illustrated magic lantern show about exotic travel destinations.  His dramatic delivery earned rave reviews in Washington D.C.  It was not a lucrative occupation but it satisfied his lust for an audience.  Farnsworth also had a short career as a movie producer in Connecticut.

National Klan officials took a closer look at Maine’s King Kleagle. Farnsworth’s daylight parades in full Klan regalia and his show biz approach started getting him in trouble with the usually clandestine organization.  Then the Klan discovered he had formed an independent women’s Klan in Maine that allowed Canadian Protestants to join.   American citizenship was not exactly a flexible requirement for the Ku Klux Klan. 

Farnsworth’s wife and daughter were stripped of their Klan membership for belonging to the rival group.  As it turned out, they had never been eligible for membership in the first place since both had been born in St Stephen, New Brunswick.  F. Eugene Farnsworth quit the Klan for “health reasons” when it was reported that $4 of every $10 Klan membership fee had found its way into his pocket. He tried unsuccessfully to organize his own copycat Invisible Empire but was eventually run out of Maine.     

The Klan supported candidate had enough momentum to carry the 1924 gubernatorial election but the hooded honeymoon was almost over.  Without charismatic leadership, the Klan all but disappeared in Maine by 1930. 

Family records held by the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick indicate that Farnsworth’s parents had moved from Columbia Falls to New Brunswick long before his 1868 birth. Like his wife and daughter, Maine’s King Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan was probably Canadian.

From East Africa to Paris Maine

An act of Congress made foreign slave-trade illegal in 1794 and a federal law passed in 1820 made it a capital crime of piracy but some Maine mariners managed to profit from the abhorrent business in a shell game of Brazilian intermediaries and falsified documents. 

 Juries were reluctant to convict traders while slavery was still legal in the southern states.  In fact, when Captain Cyrus Libby of Scarborough appeared before the Portland, Maine Circuit Court in 1846, no American had ever been hanged for the crime. 

 As captain of the Brunswick brig “Porpoise,” Libby had sailed to Rio De Janeiro, Brazil and remained onboard as master while the vessel was chartered for a year to notorious Brazilian slave dealer, Manoel Pinto da Fonseca.  Defense attorneys presented evidence at the trial that a lease signed by both parties, included a clause prohibiting any contraband trade.  Captain Libby claimed he had only been following the instructions of the vessel’s owner, George F. Richardson, a merchant born in Limington, Maine, who had since passed away. 

 Libby was acquitted by the First Circuit Court, even though the “Porpoise” had been seized with two East African boys aboard. The branded young slaves, Pedro, and Guilherme, testified that the Maine brig had sailed along the eastern coast of Africa as tender to the slaver, “Kentucky”.  They told the jury that their job had been to serve Captain Paulo Rodrigues, agent to Fonseca, who sailed aboard the “Porpoise”.  The crew had not been told they would be working for a slave-trader until they had no other way home.  They testified that Captain Libby often accompanied Captain Paulo to the African slave factories.  He had clearly been aware of the true nature of the voyage, they said, when the “Porpoise’s” boats were used to load slaves onto her sister vessel. Cyrus Libby denied any knowledge of the cargo on the brig “Kentucky” and claimed he had been shown official documents indicating that Pedro and Guilherme were free.

 While on the outward voyage, some of the 500 slaves aboard the “Kentucky” revolted.  The armed crew easily regained control but forty-six African men women and children were publicly executed and dismembered to discourage further rebellion.  The “Kentucky,” hailed from New York but was built in Prospect, ME.  She avoided capture by the over-painting of her name with “Franklin of Salem”. 

 The “Porpoise” was seized when a disgruntled member of the crew slipped a note to American authorities at Rio de Janeiro.  George W. Gordon, American Consul to Rio, on board the U. S. Frigate “Raritan” fought the Brazilian Government for jurisdiction over the slave-traders.  For the sake of international diplomacy, Secretary of State James Buchanan insisted that he release the crew but the Consul refused to hand over the “Porpoise” or the slave boys onboard.   

After the trial, Cyrus Libby was a free man but the “Porpoise” was not returned to her owners.  It had already been sold by the government for court costs.  A decade later, a Boston Court ruled that the vessel had been rightfully seized. 

 The slave known as Guilherme moved to Milton, Massachusetts and became a well respected barber.  Pedro was taken in by the U. S. Marshall for the District of Maine, Virgil D Parris, Esq., of Paris, Maine.  Pedro Tovooken Parris learned to speak English with his new family.  He studied reading, writing and arithmetic at public school and joined the debating society to hone his public speaking skills.  During the 1856 Massachusetts Gubernatorial Campaign he worked for candidate George W. Gordon, telling voters how the former Consul had rescued him from slavery. 

Pedro died of Pneumonia in 1860, while still a young man. Almost everyone in Paris, Maine attended his funeral.  His adopted brother, Percival J Parris wrote an account of the former slave’s life and illustrated it with drawings by Pedro himself.  The article was published in “Old-Time New England” in 1973. (digitized by Historic New England)

The first American ever to be convicted and hanged for the crime of trading human beings was also from Maine.  Nathaniel Gordon of Portland was convicted for carrying 897 slaves aboard the 500 ton merchant ship Erie.  Half of Gordon’s captives were children.  Lieutenant Henry Todd, of the U. S. Navy reported that the main deck was so crowded that one could scarcely put his foot down without stepping on their naked bodies.  Abraham Lincoln sealed Nathaniel Gordon’s fate.  After a long, horrific career he was executed in New York City on February 1, 1862.