Palatine set forth over the seas with thrifty Dutch merchants and

emigrants, bound for Philadelphia, with all their goods. A gale delayed

them and kept them beating to and fro on the icy seas, unable to reach

land. The captain died--it was thought that he was murdered--and the

sailors, a brutal set even for those days, threw off all discipline,

seized the stores and arms, and starved the passengers into giving up

their money.



When those died of hunger whose money had given out--for twenty guilders

were demanded for a cup of water and fifty rix dollars for a

biscuit--their bodies were flung into the sea, and when the crew had

secured all that excited their avarice they took to their boats, leaving

ship and passengers to their fate. It is consoling to know that the

sailors never reached a harbor. The unguided ship, in sight of land, yet

tossed at the mercy of every wind and tenanted by walking skeletons,

struck off Block Island one calm Sunday morning and the wreckers who

lived along the shore set out for her. Their first work was to rescue the

passengers; then they returned to strip everything from the hulk that the

crew had left; but after getting her in tow a gale sprang up, and seeing

that she was doomed to be blown off shore, where she might become a

dangerous obstruction or a derelict, they set her on fire. From the rocks

they watched her drift into misty darkness, but as the flames mounted to

the trucks a scream rang across the whitening sea: a maniac woman had

been left on board. The scream was often repeated, each time more

faintly, and the ship passed into the fog and vanished.



A twelvemonth later, on the same evening of the year, the islanders were

startled at the sight of a ship in the offing with flames lapping up her

sides and rigging, and smoke clouds rolling off before the wind. It

burned to the water's edge in sight of hundreds. In the winter following

it came again, and was seen, in fact, for years thereafter at regular

intervals, by those who would gladly have forgotten the sight of it (one

of the community, an Indian, fell into madness whenever he saw the

light), while those who listened caught the sound of a woman's voice

raised in agony above the roar of fire and water.



Substantially the same story is told of a point on the North Carolina

coast, save that in the latter case the passengers, who were from the

Bavarian Palatinate, were put to the knife before their goods were taken.

The captain and his crew filled their boats with treasure and pulled away

for land, first firing the ship and committing its ghastly freight to the

flames. The ship followed them almost to the beach, ere it fell to

pieces, as if it were an animate form, bent on vengeance. The pirates

landed, but none profited by the crime, all of them dying poor and

forsaken.