It was a risky business. Among the McCarty captains who perished at sea was James’s son Elijah, a master at age 19 on the brigantine, Wanderer. He built a “gingerbread” house for his wife and two children on Westport, “one of the finest ever built on the island…with wallpaper from Paris,” but he was lost at sea before they ever lived in it. Elijah’s “last command at the of age 26 was the fast-sailing bark, Grapeshot…which had a cannon for a figurehead.” She sailed from New York with horses and mules for Barbados in 1862. Neither the ship nor Elijah was ever heard from again.

Captain James lost another son to the sea, Florence, so named for the grandfather who had been the first McCarty on Westport. Young Florence was lost at age 22 off Seguin Island, just 12 miles from the family homestead up the Sheepscot at McCarty Cove. Was there a fierce storm that washed Florence overboard within sight of the island’s lighthouse? The answer went under the waves with him. Today sunbathers on a placid day at Popham Beach have a picture postcard view of Seguin and its 220-year old lighthouse, a three-mile ferry ride away.

A third-generation McCarty captain, Edward, also perished at sea. He died and was buried in the depths four days before reaching port in Brazil in 1886. That fall his widow “came to Bath with her (four) children and rented a house on Elm Street.”

There are harrowing accounts of other sons of James who survived the elements. Benjamin Franklin (“Frank”) McCarty was stranded on Juan Fernandez Island (also known as Robinson Crusoe Island) 400 miles West of Chile “for a fortnight when the bark on which he was mate caught fire and beached on its shore.” Frank made it back to Maine and in 1865 was master of the Wiscasset-built 125-foot, three-masted bark, James McCarty, so named for and partly owned by his 80-year old father.

One McCarty ship had as many lives as a cat. The Tornado, a 91-foot “fine hermaphrodite brig” built in Boothbay in 1851, captained by Ozias McCarty and owned by him, his brothers, father James and others from Westport, plied the West Indies trade. The Tornado weathered one near disaster after another. On the return trip from delivering livestock and provisions to “the islanders” of Bermuda in 1855, she was “blown off the coast and with split sails and damaged yards made New York in distress.” She ran aground later the same year but “after most of the cargo had been lightered she came off safely.” Homeward bound after a trip to Rio Grande Do Sul (Brazil) she hove to in South Florida in “exceedingly rough conditions for more or less 20 days.” Winter squalls and sleet battered her “sails, rigging and yards.” There was near calamity on trips to and from Jamaica where she once “touched at Fortune Island” (Bahamas) and another time lost her sails and spars in a “severe blow.”

Finally the McCarty’s seemed to have had enough of the well-named Tornado. But her notoriety only grew when she found new owners and controversy around 1860 as the Civil War approached. Now under the command of 26-year old Captain Lincoln Tibbetts of Boothbay, the Tornado sailed from New York with “eight thousand kegs of gunpowder” bound for New Orleans. Long before his involvement in the southern U.S. trade just before the war, Tibbetts had been captain, as a minor no less, of a vessel engaged in the “African trade” (a curious term left undefined in the historical record of Tibbetts). “Fortunately for the Union cause a tempest dismasted” the Tornado on her way South. She made it to Saint Thomas under a jury rig. By the time she had been repaired there and was ready to set sail in 1861, Louisiana had seceded and the decision was made to point her back north and not deliver the powder to New Orleans. The Tornado made New York the day after the shelling of Fort Sumter.

The McCarty family fortunes prospered. The fishing and shipping trade was booming under sail. Upon his death at age 80 in 1868, Captain McCarty’s estate was valued at $10,600 (nearly $180,000 in 2015) comprising “165 acres, 2 houses, barns, wharves, fishyard…shares in 12 vessels.” The McCarty sons and their sons, if they didn’t die at sea, were succeeding financially. James Jr. not only captained ships but for a time also owned a music hall on Main Road in Westport, just a short buggy ride from the cove, before the property was transferred in 1863 to the Methodist Episcopal church which no doubt put it to more heavenly use.

It was James McCarty’s granddaughter, Jeannette, who connected the clan with Captain Thomas McLaughlin when she married him in 1870. Jeannette McLaughlin lived in the little white house with the black shutters (the one in the photo with the schooner and the mystery man on the pier) at McCarty Cove until 1920 and Captain McLaughlin resided there with her for some period as well.

For more than fifty years McLaughlin mastered schooners and barks, many made in Wiscasset or Bath, including two built at the Percy and Small yard, now the site of the Maine Maritime Museum. He was captain of the schooner Frolic of Belfast, which burned to the water’s edge in the winter of 1862, he ferried ice to Galveston on the Etna in the summer of 1881, and he was on the Oregon during the Spanish American War when she arrived, for some reason, in Rio De Janeiro, far from the fighting. Though rich in achievement and adventure, his time at sea was generally without human-instigated controversy.

None of the vessels except notably the Herbert Fuller (the scene of the three murders) and one other garnered any notoriety before or during McLaughlin’s command. The other was the Boothbay-built Village Bride, which over her 15-year lifespan as a coastal schooner had ties to several McCarty captains as well as Thomas McLaughlin’s father-in-law, who had married into the McCarty family. The Village Bride had two lives. The first ended in 1865 when, under the command of Captain David Terhune of Georgetown, she sank with a load of oysters in the Hudson River off Manhattan after colliding with the steamer Saxonia. The Village Bride was raised and reconditioned the next year and stayed out of trouble until 1871, when captained by Thomas McLaughlin in what some accounts say was his very first command, she was lost at Great Egg Harbor, New Jersey. Captain McLaughlin survived and had better luck in most of his subsequent trips.

He had that bizarre distinction of occupying the captain’s quarters of the Herbert Fuller on July 27, 1896 less than a month after the mutilated bodies of its previous captain and his wife had been removed from the same cabin. Why did McLaughlin take the job and why was the Fuller sent back out so soon after the gruesome murders? We can perhaps assume that McLaughlin needed the work and that there was no other command readily available. Meanwhile, the owners of the Fuller no doubt lost money on the lumber cargo that was not delivered as promised to South America after the ship was turned back North in the wake of the murders earlier that month. They continued to lose money every day the Fuller remained in port. In need of a new captain, they found that McLaughlin was willing and apparently not afraid of ghosts.

In 1896, steamships were clearly winning business away from sailing ships when the need was for speed, but if it was still the same load of lumber in the hold of the blood-tainted Herbert Fuller, the cheapest mode of shipping was by schooner. Business interests being paramount and the investigating authorities having no further need to hold the ship, Captain Thomas McLaughlin and a new crew cast off for the next destination. Today we can only guess at the specific goings-on of that voyage, or for that matter, many routine sailings of the other barks and schooners commanded by McLaughlin or his McCarty relatives.

Still, it may be Captain McLaughlin, husband to a McCarty granddaughter and sometime resident of that little white house in the photo on the wall in my family’s summer house, who is most notable among all the captains who set sail from McCarty Cove. Thanks to the MMM in Bath for preserving evidence that he stepped aboard to captain the Herbert Fuller, a ship that would have seemed a floating house of horrors to those reading about her in the newspapers. Writing about him in 1941, just six years after he died at age 92, author Fannie Chase offered a brief tribute to the man she called the “master mariner of Westport.” She said “during his long and varied experience at sea, Captain McLaughlin never had a mutiny and never put a man in irons.” While this is an odd legacy, it is more than could ever be said for the Fuller’s unlucky previous captain. And it’s a great story to tell and retell about one of the sea captains who once stood on the pier at McCarty Cove. Is it Captain McLaughlin or one of the McCarty’s looking into the schooner in that old photo? I like to think so, but the photo will never tell.

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.