Captain McLaughlin had not a whiff of malice on him. He was a well-respected shipmaster. He did, however, have the curious distinction of taking command of the barkentine Herbert Fuller in July of 1896, just three weeks after the ship’s captain, the captain’s wife and the boat’s second mate had been murdered during the night watch with an axe by a crew member as the ship sailed from Boston for Brazil with a load of lumber.

Thomas Bram, the ship’s first mate, was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death, but was granted a second trial after a successful appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeal hinged on Fifth Amendment issues. He was convicted again but not sentenced to death this time, served 15 years, and was eventually granted a full pardon by President Woodrow Wilson. Thus the case remains officially unsolved. Debate continues even today on true crime websites on the question of whether the murderer was another crew member who went by the name Charley Brown long before it was associated with the lovable loser comic strip character.

It may seem a distraction from such a juicy and sordid tale then to return to the details of the McCarty’s. But were it not for my research on the McCarty’s I wouldn’t have discovered that it was Captain McLaughlin who had set the Herbert Fuller to sail on its very next trip, less than a month after the blood of its previous captain had been washed away. And so it is that historical accounts of Westport merchant mariners include two key names, McCarty and McLaughlin. The names are virtually linked arm and arm in Westport history, particularly at McCarty Cove. A search through available archives yields nuggets of insight into these sailors and their times.

The first Westport captains were actually Edgecomb captains. Florence McCarty, born in Ireland in 1766, was the patriarch of the sea-faring Westport family. He married a girl almost certainly from Westport but recorded as being from Edgecomb in 1787 and the following year they had a son, James. (Edgecomb included Westport at the time, thus often obscuring the likely Westport connections of many ships and their owners and captains listed in records as hailing from “Edgecomb,” before Westport officially separated in 1828.)

While Florence is listed as a captain in the Maine Maritime Museum’s records, there are no ships directly associated with him. It was James McCarty who by his deeds and progeny etched the family name into Maine maritime records and onto the map. Mariners navigating North on the Sheepscot River today can find McCarty Cove on nautical charts about halfway up the eastern shore of Westport Island.

James made a baker’s dozen children with three different wives, two of whom he outlived. Sailing was in the blood of almost all the McCarty boys. James Jr., Dennis, Ozias, Benjamin Franklin, Henry, Turner, Elijah, Charles, and Edward all went to sea. Two died there. The McCarty’s captained brigs, barks and schooners up and down the East Coast and to Caribbean and South American ports throughout the 19^th and into the 20^th centuries. Only one son, Oliver, has no maritime record; he simply was “removed to Portland” (the mystery behind that phrase may never be known) in 1850 at the age of 6. James had two daughters. One of them was the mother of the young woman who married Thomas McLaughlin, captain of the Herbert Fuller and many other ships.

The first ship listed as captained by a McCarty was the 48-foot schooner Golden Rule, built in Edgecomb, “Massachusetts” in 1817, three years before Maine was accepted into the United States as a free state in the one-for-one Congressional compromise that also ushered in Missouri as a slave state, thus maintaining an even tally of slave versus free states.

Mastered by 29-year-old James McCarty, the Golden Rule was owned in her early years by Samuel Tarbox, who built a house (still in operation today as an inn that attracts tourists and diners) just down-island and inland about a mile and half from the cove by which James McCarty built his own house and sea-going operation, of which all that survives in 2016 is that chandlery and those seaweed-laden granite pilings.

Generations of McCarty’s devoted their lives to skippering and often owning shares of dozens of ships — Grapeshot, Guess, Flying Fish, George Washington, Cyclone, Tornado, Harriet, Nightingale, Wanderer, Daisy — carrying fish, lumber, ice, livestock or other goods from ports in Maine as well as Boston and New York. The vessels were “enrolled” for coastal trips or “registered” for international voyages under the hands of one McCarty master or another for nearly 100 years. Many of these schooners may have been tied at one time or another to the pier at McCarty Landing, as it was called in those days.

Look for the conclusion at a later date.

Harry Castleman can be contacted at hcharryc@aol.com

Special thanks to Maine Maritime Museum Senior Curator Nathan Lipfert and the staff of the museum library.