THE FIRST TOURISTS
Captain Sam Haley refused to go ashore. During the worst of two American wars against Britain, when most Shoalers fled or were forced to relocate to the mainland, this crusty old sea captain, with his wife, Mary, and the twelve Haley children, carved out a hardscrabble kingdom on Smuttynose, then known locally as Haley’s Island. “The people who remained,” one historian wrote of this era at Isles of Shoals, “were ignorant, degraded, and worthless.” But while the wretched fishers of Star Island barely survived the American Revolution and the War of 1812, it appears that the Haleys on Smuttynose thrived. Besides fishing and running their island store, the Haleys also operated a ropewalk for making rope, a windmill-powered granary, distillery, brewery, cherry orchard, salt-works, boathouse, hotel, bakery, a cooper’s shop for making barrels, a brickworks, and a blacksmith shop. Today the stewards who oversee the island still sleep in the squat two-room Haley Cottage, built perhaps as early as 1770. Modern visitors can also see Sam Haley’s handiwork in the stone pier and the stone breakwater to Malaga Island that encircle the cove. Legend says that the old captain paid for the breakwater after he discovered five bars of pirate silver, but there is no evidence of that. Like all islanders, the Haleys salvaged whatever gifts the sea delivered, from driftwood to the cargo of shipwrecked vessels.
The most famous shipwreck at the Shoals occurred in the winter of 1813, two years after the death of the old captain. So it was his son, also named Sam Haley and also wed to a woman named Mary (they had eleven children), who discovered the bodies of fourteen Spanish sailors one frigid January morning. The ship Concepcion en route from Cadiz, Spain, had crashed onto the southeasterly tip of the island during a blinding storm. Legend says that a few of the men survived long enough to crawl toward the lamp in the window of Haley’s house, but died of exposure before reaching shelter. Gosport town records incorrectly listed the wrecked ship as the Sagunto. What booty Haley and his children salvaged from the Spanish ship is unknown. A single sentence in the Haley family bible offers only this brief complaint from Sam Haley: “My sons & what other men I hired picked up 14 of the dead men & buried them in my burying field; but I did not get my pay from any man.” Tourists routinely snap photographs of an historic marker at the supposed burial site. However, archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar have yet to find any evidence of the lost Spanish sailors.
Haley and his family managed to gain legal title to Cedar, Smuttynose, Malaga, and Hog islands in Maine. But by 1839, the Haley kingdom was played out. A sketch of Smuttynose at that time shows a complex grid of miniature subdivided lots along the cove and as many as ten wooden buildings of various sizes. Largest of all was the three-story Haley House, built early in the 1800s, that was possibly the first ocean hotel in the region. Little is known about the Mid-Ocean House of Entertainment other than its provocative name. In 1839, just before his death, Sam Haley Jr. sold all four islands and their contents to a mainlander from Portsmouth named Thomas Laighton.
In many ways, Thomas Laighton is the lynchpin of this entire story. Although he died in 1866, years before the infamous murders, Thomas Laighton purchased Smuttynose from the Haleys. His sons, Oscar and Cedric, later rented the house to John Hontvet, a fisherman from Norway. Laighton’s wife, Eliza, hired Karen Christensen to work at the Appledore Hotel and “let her go” just days before she was murdered in her sister’s house. Laighton’s daughter Celia Thaxter first comforted survivor Maren Hontvet on Appledore Island the morning after the murders. Celia later published the gruesome story in the pages of Atlantic Monthly. Again, Thomas Laighton’s successful hotel led to the tsunami of tourism on the Isles of Shoals that washed away all traces of the ancient fishing village of Gosport.
Like Sam Haley before him, Thomas Laighton was part-hermit and part-entrepreneur. Laighton too preferred scratching out a living on a deserted island to the company of other human beings. Brilliant, energetic, and outspoken, Laighton was forever in search of the ideal occupation to suit his iconoclastic nature. Before leaving the mainland, never to return, he had been the editor of a Portsmouth newspaper, ran a family grocery store, dabbled in politics, and invested in a failed whaling company. In 1839, he took a temporary post as lighthouse keeper at White Island, within view of the four islands he purchased from the Haley family. Laighton brought his wife, Eliza, his four-year old daughter, Celia, and a newborn son named Oscar to the forlorn lighthouse station. They lived in near isolation in a storm-battered house where there was barely enough soil for a backyard garden. Celia later romanticized her childhood days on White Island in her first book Among the Isles of Shoals, published the same year as the murders.
Laighton’s original plan, once he got his bearings, was to revive the flagging fishing industry at the Shoals and make his fortune. He also tried raising sheep and growing tobacco on his islands. None of his original ideas panned out. He did revive Haley’s store on Smuttynose, built on the site of the seventeenth-century fishermen’s tavern and six-thousand-year-old Indian hunting ground. The store alarmed the island missionaries across the harbor. They saw Thomas Laighton as little more than a “rum-runner” and a threat to the sobriety of the fishermen of Gosport. Laighton promised not to sell booze to the local fishermen, but that vow did not apply to the patrons of the old Haley hotel. Beginning in the summer of 1842, the Laighton family, now with a third child named Cedric, left their lighthouse to summer on Smuttynose Island. Here, little Celia could run free over twenty-seven wild acres. And here, Thomas Laighton finally had an inspiration that changed not only his life, but also the lives of all the fishers at the Isles of Shoals. The Mid-Ocean House that he had purchased from the Haleys was in “ruinous” condition and yet it still attracted a few adventurous seasonal guests. They arrived with purses full of money to rusticate on the primitive Isles. They craved the healthy salt air, loved the sport of deep sea fishing, gazed upon the scenic sunsets from the hotel porch, and enjoyed a shot or two of Laighton’s rum, along with endless bowls of wife Eliza’s famous seafood chowder.
When Richard Henry Dana, a lawyer and the author of Two Years before the Mast, landed on Smuttynose Island in 1843, he found Thomas Laighton sitting idly by the stone pier gazing out to sea. Dana had taken a room in a fisherman’s house on Star Island but found it less than tourist-friendly. “The whole island had a strong fishy smell,” Dana later wrote, “and in going ashore we had to walk over a surface of fishes’ heads and bones, which the fishermen leave on the beach, just where they throw them.”
At Smuttynose, Dana found the irascible Mr. Laighton only a bit more appealing. “I found that he [Laighton] had read a great deal, and was a sagacious man, but had strong prejudices and a dislike of established laws and orders, and of any person who has positions other than his own.”
But by 1846, Laighton was reluctantly ready to become an innkeeper. According to his spare diary entries, Laighton gave the old Haley hotel a fresh coat of paint, added new wallpaper, and imported clean linen and potted plants. He planted a little garden in the thin but fertile soil and found it brimful of vegetables and flowers. He even brought over busts of Beethoven and Shakespeare and a piano. He added a bowling alley in the basement. The renovated Mid-Ocean House drew paying customers principally from Portsmouth, Boston, and the North Shore of Massachusetts. Crippled with a lame leg from a childhood disease, Laighton claimed that the “healthful air” of the Shoals had cured him of all illnesses. He considered building a bigger summer sanatorium for invalids on Hog Island. Laighton, a former editor, knew how to manipulate the media. He told a visiting newspaper reporter that he intended to change the name of Hog Island to “Friendly Isle,” but he wisely selected the name Appledore.
In the summer of 1846, the Mid-Ocean House guest list included Levi Thaxter, the son of a Boston area banker and a graduate of Harvard Law School. Thaxter was drawn to Laighton’s bright young children and agreed to tutor them during a lengthy stay at White Island the coming winter. Thaxter also agreed, using his parent’s money, to become Laighton’s financial partner in a risky venture. With $2,500 from the Thaxter family, Thomas Laighton was able to build his dream hotel on Appledore. The Appledore Hotel opened for its first season on June 15, 1848, well ahead of the New England tourism boom that was still more than two decades away.
But the deal came at a heavy price. Mr. Thaxter, then twenty-four, had fallen head-over-heels in love with his partner’s bright-eyed thirteen-year-old daughter, Celia, and wanted to marry her. Thomas Laighton rejected the union and broke off the business partnership but eventually relented. Celia and Levi were married on the porch of the Appledore House three years later when she was sixteen. That same year, in 1851, Maine approved a total ban on the manufacture and sale of alcohol, making it the first dry state in the nation and a pioneer in the growing temperance movement. But there were always spirits to be found at Appledore, many miles out to sea.
Celia quickly found herself the mother of three rambunctious sons, one of them mentally and physically handicapped. She also found herself married to a much older man who preferred reciting poetry to finding a steady job. Raised at the Isles of Shoals and fiercely independent, Celia did not take easily to marriage or to motherhood. She grew to dislike living off the largesse of her wealthy Boston in-laws, who, at first, called her “Levi’s mermaid.” There were good years at their house in Newtonville, a town outside of Boston, but she grew lonely. Celia took her frustration out in Victorian verses that were composed, as she told her literary friend, Annie Fields, “between the pots and kettles.” In her first published poem, Celia Laighton Thaxter described her sadness at being “land-locked” so far from her beloved islands and family. “I but crave the sad, caressing murmur of the wave that breaks in tender music on the shore,” she wrote. Although they never divorced, Celia and her husband soon grew apart. She lived much of her time among family and friends at Appledore, while Levi made his home on the mainland.
While the history of the early Gosport fishermen comes to us from the stern judgmental reports of Christian missionaries, life at the Appledore Hotel usually comes with a romantic or literary turn of phrase. Despite Levi Thaxter’s connection to famous artists of New England, it was the beautiful and brilliant Celia who joined their ranks. The summer salons in her cottage next to the Appledore Hotel were attended by the likes of painters Childe Hassam and William Morris Hunt, actor Edwin Booth (brother to Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth), musicians Julius Eichberg and John Knowles Paine, and writers from John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah Orne Jewett, William Dean Howells, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
As early as 1852, we see the Shoals through the eyes of none other than Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had recently published The Scarlett Letter and The House of Seven Gables. Hawthorne spent ten days at the Isles of Shoals, meeting up with Franklin Pierce, his former Bowdoin College classmate. Pierce was a New Hampshire native on his way to the White House, where he served one term as the fourteenth president of the United States. Four years later, having set the nation squarely on a course toward civil war, Pierce purchased land at Little Boar’s Head in nearby North Hampton, within view of the Isles of Shoals. There he planned to build his own summer resort, but never did.
Writing in his journal in 1852—with the Civil War, the Thaxter’s failed marriage, and the Wagner murders still far in the future—Nathaniel Hawthorne painted word pictures of a carefree life at the summer resort. The author chatted with old Thomas Laighton and rowed a dory among the islands with his young son Oscar. Hawthorne played whist and exchanged salty legends and ghost stories with Celia, whom he called “the pretty Miranda.” Like so many tourists to come, Hawthorne was captivated by the primitive beauty of the Shoals. “Here one may sit or walk, and enjoy life, while all other mortals are suffering,” he wrote.
One overcast day, Levi Thaxter rowed Hawthorne over to Smuttynose Island. Hawthorne was intrigued by the man then managing the Mid-Ocean House for the Laightons. He was an old soldier of Prussian descent who claimed he had fought at the Battle of Waterloo. Hawthorne described him as “a gray, heavy, round-skulled old fellow, troubled with deafness.” The author was equally taken by a forlorn, middle-aged skipper in a rotting little fishing boat who stopped in the cove for a shot of rum.
“I know not why,” Hawthorne wrote about the skipper, “but there was something that made me smile in his grim and gloomy look, his rusty, jammed hat, his rough and grisly beard, and in his mode of chewing tobacco, with much action of the jaws, getting out the juice as largely as possible, as men always do when disturbed in mind.”
Levi Thaxter and Nathaniel Hawthorne wandered all over Smuttynose Island together. They visited the grave of Captain Sam Haley just a few yards behind the dilapidated Haley Cottage. They paused at the moss-covered stones that marked the graves of the shipwrecked Spanish sailors. They wandered past stone walls built centuries before by hands unknown. They hiked to the primitive unoccupied end of the island. Here, the waves smashed against sharp granite boulders, piled up, as Hawthorne observed, as if God had carelessly tossed his leftovers here after creating the Earth. Returning to his sparse but comfortable room at the Appledore Hotel, Hawthorne jotted his impressions into his journal. Describing Smuttynose Island, he concluded, “I have never seen a more dismal place.”