Those who generalize about the human condition often find their
truths overturned by the obstinate individualism of reality.
—Julian Barnes
In the 1840s, on dark, foggy evenings on Baker’s Island, Maine, the kind of night when you could scarcely see, brothers Elisha and Joseph Gilley would leave their houses and walk to the water’s edge. There they would set about the work of faking shipwrecks on the island’s rocky ledge.
The historical record offers scant detail, but somehow, likely using torches or lanterns to signal, the brothers would guide vessels toward the shore until they foundered and came to grief. Once the crews—complicitous in the scheme—were rescued, the men would strip the wrecks of cargo, spars, masts, sailcloth, rope, and copper fittings. Weeks or months later, they would load their goods onto a “coaster” and sail to Boston. The Gilley family regularly delivered smoked fish to Boston markets and likely knew just where to sell all they had salvaged. In turn, the owners would file insurance claims stating that their boats had fallen victim to fog, rocks, or roiling seas. Many vessels had several co-owners. Making money could be challenging. When times were tough—a rotting hull, no fish, a bad market—false insurance claims offered hard-to-come-by cash.
Everyone understood that fishing and trade were risky enterprises, but at some point during the 1840s, the number of wrecks on Baker’s Island (today known as Baker Island) raised suspicions. According to Hugh L. Dwelley, a Gilley descendant who tracked down details of his ancestors’ story, “a number of complaints were said to have been lodged by marine insurance underwriters against Elisha and Joseph Gilley regarding the disposition of cargo from vessels wrecked on Baker Island.” Perhaps more irritating to the underwriters, the brothers’ father, William Gilley, was the island’s well-paid lighthouse keeper. The federal government had built the light in 1828 precisely because the waters around Baker’s were known to be dangerous. Federal authorities no doubt assumed that the keeper would support the government’s mission to enhance safety. But this appears not to have been the case: until 1849, the tiny island had no inhabitants other than the Gilley family, and William must have been aware of his sons’ hijinks. When eventually challenged about the wrecks, he replied that Elisha and Joseph “were adults for whose actions he had no responsibility.” As the family patriarch, William was likely complicit in his sons’ crimes. It is also possible that the boys held the upper hand. Justice in the era, even on more populated Maine islands, was often a matter of muscle. Whatever the case, soon after William’s 21-year lighthouse sinecure ended in 1849, he rowed off to live on nearby Great Duck Island, which he had purchased some years earlier. Not surprisingly, Elisha and Joseph got on poorly with the new lighthouse keeper, who complained of being continually harassed. By 1848, the brothers had 12 children to support and likely were intent on protecting their cash flow. After a third keeper, who arrived in 1853, voiced the same allegations as his predecessor, a government inspector proposed removing the brothers from the island and tearing down their houses. Elisha and Joseph prevailed in court and stayed put.
I first learned about the Gilley family while writing a book about the history of fishing and fishermen on another Maine island, Vinalhaven. My husband and I purchased a house there in 1986, and as time passed, I increasingly realized that my summer person’s vision of the place—remote, pastoral, semi-pristine—did an injustice to the complexity of its lived history. I started interviewing fishermen, reading, and researching in various Maine archives.
I would never have investigated Elisha and Joseph’s doings had their younger brother, John, not been the subject of one of the most famous and idealizing profiles ever penned about a Maine fisherman: John Gilley of Baker’s Island (1904), by Charles W. Eliot. The gulf separating the brothers’ criminal behavior and Eliot’s paean to the honest virtues of Maine fishermen caught my attention. So, in time, did the book’s author. Reading about his life, I learned that Eliot (1834–1926) grew up in a rich and powerful Boston family that proudly traced its presence in New England to 1669. Eliot’s mother’s family, the Lymans, made their money in New England cotton mills and Chinese opium; his paternal grandfather, Samuel Eliot, a merchant, was said to have been the richest man in Boston when he died. Wealth opened the door to political power: both Eliot’s father and his maternal grandfather served as mayors of Boston.
Writing in 1861, Eliot’s older contemporary Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. coined the phrase “Boston Brahmin” to describe men like himself and Eliot, who, he asserted, were part of “a physical and mental elite, identifiable by its noble ‘physiognomy’ and ‘aptitude for learning,’ ” which he insisted were “congenital and hereditary.” Four decades later, in John Gilley, Eliot reached beyond his Boston circle to tout the innate qualities of Maine’s “common man.” He wrote John Gilley to recall a good friend, and to showcase the special qualities of New England “stock.” Eliot believed that Maine farmers and fishermen possessed superior character and values born of their self-sufficient struggles with the soil and sea of New England; and that the “American” virtues they embodied were endangered by the rapid population transformations of the late 19th century. “In these temperate regions,” Eliot wrote, “the adverse forces of nature are not, as they sometimes are in the tropics, irresistible and overwhelming. They can be resisted and overcome by man; and so they develop in successive generations some of the best human qualities.”
If we imagine culture as a piano keyboard, each historical era taps its melody, lands hard on certain keys and leaves others silent. Occasionally someone crystallizes a moment’s gestalt and creates an anthem. Eliot’s telling of the Gilleys’ story did just that; it sold very well when it came out and remains in print today. The book’s description on Amazon repeats an unattributed quotation characterizing John Gilley as “the most remarkable delineation of pioneer life on the coast of Maine that has ever been published.” High praise.
I, too, initially experienced John Gilley as an appealing narrative about a 19th-century Maine fisherman. The real story is considerably more complicated. In writing the book, Eliot was also composing a kind of campfire song valorizing white Anglo-Saxon Protestants at a time when their hegemony, many felt, was under threat. As tends to be true of all such efforts, the verses skew toward idealization and omission.
Eliot got to know John Gilley (1822–1896) when, as a middle-aged man, he became one of many “Rusticators” building summer houses on the Maine coast. These were wealthy urbanites who favored rustic seaside cottages over the sumptuous Newport chateaus of their peers and engaged in activities like woodchopping and hiking. But “rustic” was relative. Their cottages tended to be architect-designed, shingled dwellings, often with 10 to 15 bedrooms, large staffs, impressive boathouses, and expansive acreage with water views. In 1879, Eliot bought 120 acres in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island and built a cottage in which he summered every year until he died at 92. He loved the Maine coast and worked to preserve it; an activist always, he helped initiate the movement to create Acadia National Park. His biographer, Henry James (the novelist’s nephew), believed that Eliot knew Gilley well, but I have found sparse detail about their friendship. According to a short monograph, Gilley’s daughter Laura in 1883 married Orrin Donnell, Eliot’s caretaker and boatman—no doubt providing opportunity for introductions. If not then, they may have met after 1893, when Gilley began rowing across the bay from his home on Sutton Island to Northeast Harbor, where he would sell vegetables, milk, and eggs to the new summer residents.
To appreciate Eliot’s intent in writing about Gilley, it helps to know that Eliot was not just any Rusticator. An influential educator and public intellectual, he was (and remains) the longest-serving president of Harvard University, where, over the course of four decades, he worked to reform the curriculum and shake up the school’s musty ways. He founded what would become its business school, modernized Harvard’s medical and law schools as well as its undergraduate college, raised money, changed the governance, tightened access, and readied the university for a new century.
Eliot started out modestly as a math tutor at Harvard, and his path to the presidency was serendipitous. He had his own hardships—including his father’s bankruptcy and his parents’ subsequent financial dependence on him. Still, his social position offered prerogative, and he quickly gained power and influence. He voiced many opinions throughout his lifetime, some now unpalatable. He firmly categorized all he encountered: virtuous, not virtuous; good stock, bad stock; right way, wrong way; superior, inferior. Sketching the Harvard president’s positions on immigration, journalist Adam S. Cohen writes, “Eliot was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups it could bring about as a grave danger. ‘Each nation should keep its stock pure,’ Eliot told [one] audience. ‘There should be no blending of races.’ ” In 1909, at the height of Jim Crow, Eliot was quoted in The New York Times applauding segregation and opposing intermarriage: “The future of the South depends, according to Dr. Eliot, on the preservation by the whites of their racial integrity, and, therefore, he thinks they are handling the negro problem in the proper way.” Later in life, he expressed strong support for the eugenics movement and forced sterilization. His dislikes included both monopolistic businesses and organized labor, which he saw as undermining individual liberty and character. In a talk on labor unions given a decade after he first wrote about Gilley, he expressed disapproval of strikers and striking, and then attacked the trade unions’ push for a minimum wage as having “a very unfortunate effect on individual character.”
Contemporaries described Eliot as “stiff,” and certainly his 1907 portrait by John Singer Sargent depicts him sternly—upright in his formal academic robes with only the slightest glint of a smile in his eyes. Sargent positions Eliot outdoors on the steps of a university building, sky and trees behind his head. The portraitist paints from below, looking up, deftly aggrandizing his subject. Yet Eliot’s respect for the skills of Maine craftsmen, fishermen, and farmers was genuine, deeply felt, and it stood out to his peers. In a 1998 essay for The History Journal, published by the Mount Desert Island Historical Society, historian Jaylene B. Roths quotes a Harvard faculty friend of Eliot’s grumbling that when they sailed together in Maine, Eliot peppered everyone he met with questions. He was, the colleague opined, as interested in an answer gleaned from a “carpenter or fisherman” as “in mine.”
John Gilley of Baker’s Island was published first in the popular and influential Century Magazine in 1899, and then as a book in 1904 under the title John Gilley: Maine Farmer and Fisherman. Eliot’s vision of “independent” island life is at the heart of the American story he wants to tell, a story that locates integrity in honest labor by white Protestant families. William Gilley (John’s father), a fisherman and a jack of many trades, laid claim to Baker’s around 1806, after having rowed there from Norwood Cove in Southeast Harbor with his wife, Hannah, and three children. John, the 10th of William and Hannah’s 12 children, grew up on Baker’s and spent his adult life on Sutton Island, about five miles to the northeast, near Mount Desert Island.
William “needed no money” to purchase Baker’s, Eliot tells us in a sanctifying tone: “There it lay in the sea, unoccupied and unclaimed; and they simply took possession of it.” The notion of an island free “for the taking” omits 200 years of violent European-Indian conflict over the territory that became Maine, as well as millennia of Wabanaki inhabitation of its islands. Baker’s may well have been deserted in 1812, its native people vanquished, but Eliot’s narrative ignores the reasons for this and smoothly reaffirms the larger illusion that an empty New England had been just waiting for British colonists to arrive and multiply.
Eliot carefully presents his portrait of the humble fishing family. William and Hannah farmed the land and raised their children, among them Elisha and Joseph. Hannah taught them to read and write. The girls helped their mother by tending poultry, churning butter, and spinning wool. The boys worked with their father clearing and planting land, raking hay, farming potatoes and livestock, and fishing. Hannah spun clothing from wool and made coarse linen from flax. The children went barefoot all summer, but one of the sons sewed shoes for winter. When they needed cash, they sold bird feathers, fish oil, butter, smoked herring, and eggs to various markets as far away as New York City. My research in local archives revealed similar stories. It is the way Eliot deploys them that seems curated. He allows that the Gilleys’ labors were “severe” but is quick to reassure us that they possessed the virtues of “health, strength and fortitude.” Indeed, Eliot portrays an almost Edenic existence on Baker’s:
Food at the island was habitually abundant. It was no trouble to get lobsters. No traps were needed; they could be picked up in the shallow water along the rocky shore. Fresh fish were always to be easily procured, except in stormy weather and in cold and windy February and March. A lamb could be killed at any time in the summer. In the fall … the family killed from ten to fifteen sheep; and what they could not use in fresh mutton they salted. Later in the season, when the weather turned cold, they killed a “beef critter.” … Sea-birds added to their store of food. Shooting them made sport for the boys. Ducks and other sea fowl were so abundant in the fall that the gunners had to throw away the bodies of the birds, after picking off all the feathers. … During the summer and early autumn the family had plenty of fresh vegetables.
Eliot started writing John Gilley soon after his subject’s death. He knew grief well: two of his four children had died in infancy; and in 1869, apparently on the day after he was appointed president of Harvard, his first wife, Ellen Derby Peabody, died of tuberculosis, leaving him to raise two young sons. Eliot’s sense of personal loss seems to have created an elegiac backdrop for his broader purpose. Whether he knew it or not, the wild creatures and natural resources that he describes as sustaining the Gilley family—fish, seabirds, and fertile soil—were already much less abundant than they had once been. Rusticators could buy waterfront land because Maine residents were hurting. The state’s traditional industries—lumbering, farming, cod fishing, and shipbuilding—were flagging. Its seaports were losing business. The “Yankee” life of Eliot’s childhood seemed to be disappearing, and nostalgia guided his pen. The resulting book, which Eliot’s biographer describes as a “homily,” is the writer’s ode to the “common man.” Or as Eliot puts it: “This little book describes with accuracy the actual life of one of the to-be-forgotten millions. Is this life a true American type? If it is, there is good hope for our country.”
The assertion of “accuracy” draws the eye. As does Eliot’s broader justification for undertaking his profile as a corrective. “History and biography alike neglect these humble, speechless multitudes,” he writes. But worse than neglect, he continues, is the role of “modern fiction,” which “finds it profitable to portray the most squalid and vicious sides of the life of these millions rather than the best and the commonest.” Worse, it often paints the lives of common people in “false colors.” Is he thinking of Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York), a naturalistic novel published in 1893? Crane’s book tells of a poor, young Irish girl from a hard-drinking, violent family. His account of her prostitution and suicide was considered so scandalous that Crane self-published the novel under a pseudonym. Whatever texts Eliot had in mind, it is worth noting that he created his own influential canon: the Harvard Classics, a 50-volume, 23,000-page set of works, published in 1909–10, the titles handpicked to demonstrate “human progress.” His selections included nonfiction, fiction, drama, and poetry. Notably, the series begins with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography before moving on to Plato.
One can hardly imagine what Eliot would have made of Paul Harding’s heartbreaking historical novel This Other Eden (2023), which reimagines the stigmatized, mixed-raced inhabitants of a fictional island off the Maine coast. Harding bases his story on lives lived on a real Maine island called Malaga. Its diverse community of fishermen and families called the island home for more than a century before the state of Maine, in 1912, drove them off the land in appalling fashion. The local press, neighbors on the mainland, and politicians—inspired by the same eugenic theories that Eliot favored, as well as by the wish to profit from selling desirable waterfront property to Rusticators—smeared the families as feeble-minded, immoral, lazy, and dirty people of “bad stock” and righteously destroyed their homes. They drove them off the island and institutionalized eight of approximately 40 residents in a “Home for the Feeble-minded.” Several of the founding Black inhabitants had roots in the area older than those of the Gilley family. Ironically, their lives may have come close to representing the independent ideal that Eliot fabricated for the Gilleys.
Eliot was not alone among his contemporaries in his choice of white fishermen as symbols of virtue. Another was Rudyard Kipling, whose novel Captains Courageous appeared in 1897. Kipling focused on what he construed as changing business values. For him, writes fisheries historian Matthew McKenzie, “the New England fishing industry appeared the perfect foil to contrast the old America of hard work, bravery, honesty and simple genuineness with the new industrial America driven by profit, production, and speed.” John Gilley likewise recalls Johann David Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson (1812), with its idealized tale of a shipwrecked family creating a new life on a desert island. Both Eliot and Wyss drew their portraits of island living explicitly to inscribe lessons about family, husbandry, ingenuity, virtue, and hard work. But Wyss, like Kipling, marketed his book as fiction. It is Eliot’s assertion of veritas that demands a different kind of accountability.
Eliot emphasizes the “self-contained and independent” nature of the Gilleys. The challenges of fishing in harsh seas provided “admirable training in alertness, prompt decision, resource in emergencies and courageous steadiness in difficulties and dangers,” he writes. The youth “who learns to wring safety and success out of such adverse conditions has been taught by these struggles with nature to be vigilant, patient, self-reliant, and brave.” Unlike the fiction writers he disdained, Eliot presents nothing mean or irregular that might complicate this idea. The nocturnal law-breaking of brothers Elisha and Joseph aside, Eliot ignores larger contradictions in his depiction of island life—for example, he overlooks (or perhaps takes for granted) the interdependence of the Gilleys and the surrounding community. Though isolated in bad weather, the Gilleys were otherwise in frequent contact with kin and neighbors. At least once, Hannah stayed with her parents when giving birth, and when the weather allowed, she made a point of rowing her children to church in Southeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island.
Given his preoccupation with showcasing the family’s self-reliance, it is not altogether surprising that Eliot skates over the Gilleys’ dependence on the federal government. William’s employment as lighthouse keeper, a job he held for 21 years, came with an annual salary of $350, a free house, and lighting in the form of “all the sperm oil he could use in his household.” Eliot acknowledges that a secure salary was worth “a fortune to any coast-of-Maine family seventy years ago.” He also writes that it allowed William to help his adult sons start their own lives, a detail likely crucial to John’s success. Yet he makes no effort to reconcile William’s sinecure with his own portrait of a ruggedly independent family. Government subsidy, kin support, and inherited wealth—and in Elisha and Joseph Gilley’s case, insurance fraud—were what ensured the Gilleys’ economic well-being. Eliot’s omission of these factors enables him to deny the hardscrabble reality of subsistence farming and the temptation for even people “of good stock” to pursue illegal wealth. (His denial extended to include his own ancestors: it was the exceptional Boston family that got “Brahmin” rich without engaging in war profiteering and piracy during the American Revolution, dealing in illegal Chinese opium, or participating in the transatlantic slave trade, including by financing the southern enslavers through bank loans or investing in industries dependent on slavery for their profits, like cotton mills.)
Cod fishing around Mount Desert in the mid-19th century was sufficiently lucrative work to enable some families to accumulate savings and buy their own properties, seemingly without the benefit of inherited wealth. But for these fishermen, too, frontier self-sufficiency was more myth than fact. The federal government subsidized cod fishing from 1793 to the end of the Civil War, and the yearly payments were crucial to fishermen’s ability to make a living. When John Gilley died in 1896, he left a 45-acre estate worth $15,000. No doubt he was more entrepreneurial than some peers, but it’s fair to suggest that his father’s assistance and federal subsidies had much to do with his success.
Possibly because no one told him otherwise, but perhaps for his own purposes, Eliot recasts the demise of William’s lighthouse sinecure. Here, as ever, Eliot is eager to portray the family patriarch as a virtuous citizen hero who leaves his job not as a consequence of Elisha and Joseph’s troublemaking but out of high-minded principle. The keeper’s position was political spoils. When the Whigs took power in 1849, Eliot implies, William, a committed Democrat, refused to change his political allegiance in order to keep his post. When it was suggested he do so, according to Eliot, William “replied with some expletives, that he would not change his political connection for all the lighthouses in the United States.” Maybe. John turned 21 in 1843 and might have left home before Elisha and Joseph fell into insurance fraud. But it’s likely that he knew that his brothers’ misbehavior was a significant factor in his father’s job loss. Did he not tell Eliot? It would have been enlightening to hear the two men converse. What did John choose not to recount? What did Eliot choose to overlook or alter?
John Gilley was indeed an able, resourceful, and industrious man. At various times, he “coasted” down to Boston to trade goods, fished the Grand Banks, farmed animals and crops, shot birds and sold their feathers, and smoked, boxed, and marketed herring. Starting in the 1840s, and even more so during the Civil War, oil from menhaden became valuable as a replacement for linseed oil. Gilley set up a small factory for extracting it. And he always fished inshore—for mackerel, cod, haddock, and lobster. Eliot foregrounds his subject’s successes while minimizing instances of strife, suffering, or conflict. With one exception: in the early autumn of 1874, Eliot writes, when John’s fish smokehouse burned down, costing him a large portion of his livelihood, John
succeeded in rescuing a pair of oiled trousers and his precious compass, which stood on a shelf by the door. Everything else was burned up clean. John said but little at the moment, and looked calmly on at the quick destruction; but when he went to bed that night, he broke down and bewailed his loss with tears and sobs. He had lost not only a sum of money which was large for him,—perhaps five hundred dollars,—but, what was more, he had lost an object of interest and affection, and a means of livelihood which represented years of patient labor.
Eliot notes Gilley’s immediate grief. The manly tears demonstrate appropriate feeling. Yet there is no aftermath. Eliot closes the curtain, leaving us to wonder at the event’s effect on Gilley. If John had gone mute for six months, or doubled his rum intake, or mistreated his family, his struggle likely would have been painted over by Eliot’s wish to eschew the “sordidness” he attributed to fiction, and to illustrate the triumph of fortitude over suffering. Or perhaps Gilley was fine. Or Eliot may simply have been shielding a friend whose death he was still grieving. We can’t be sure. Whatever Eliot’s motivation, his omissions matter. Taken together, they transform his “true” story into a troubling fantasy of inherent superiority.
There’s a final complicating dimension to Eliot and Gilley’s relationship. John was 71 when he started selling fresh farm produce, chickens, and milk to summer residents. He would row the several miles from his home on Sutton’s Island to Northeast Harbor to make his deliveries. Not wanting empty boat space on the return trip, he would take home laundry for one of his daughters to wash and iron. He’d deliver it his next time out.
It was this work that killed him.
In 1896, at age 74, John Gilley drowned while returning from delivering milk to a Rusticator family that had lingered into the autumn. The sea was rough that October day. He and a companion made it safely to the mainland, but on their way back, with the younger man rowing, the boat took a wave, filled with water, and capsized. Eliot recounts what happened next:
It was nearly three quarters of an hour before the rescuers could reach the floating boat, and then the young man, though unconscious, was still clinging to the boat’s keel, but the old man, chilled by the cold water and stunned by the waves which beat about his head, had lost his hold and sunk into the sea. In half an hour John Gilley had passed from a hearty and successful old age in this world, full of its legitimate interests and satisfactions, into the voiceless mystery of death.
Eliot pointedly ascribes Gilley’s drowning to his younger companion’s “inattention or lack of skill” but offers no evidence. Perhaps he knew the man or had heard stories. Perhaps he felt bereft and angry; yet it seems a peculiar assertion. Drownings have always plagued fishermen and mariners. Did he believe Gilley immune to accident in bad weather? His blame feels misplaced. Perhaps the writer wished to underscore once again that character matters most.
But suppose Eliot were tacitly, even unconsciously, refusing a different narrative? What if the final scene can be read two ways, like one of those ambiguous images that looks first like a rabbit, then like a gull? What if Gilley drowned because he took too big a risk to serve his Rusticator customer? In this version of the homily, Eliot would shift from being a champion of the common man to a member of a wealthy summer community—one inhabited by the type of people who (perhaps less intentionally than by the pursuit of their own desires) drove mixed-race islanders from their homes and transformed independent white fishermen into employees, thereby undermining the very self-sufficiency that Eliot sought to venerate. What if an act of service drowned John Gilley? The young companion, then, becomes an object of deflection for Eliot’s guilt, a spar for the aging Brahmin to cling to as fiercely as he did to his fanciful worldview.
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