The Brahmin and His Imaginary Friend

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.