To the editor:

The article on the “Grand Design” in your March issue by Steve Cartwright and the great research done on this shipwreck by Julia Lane triggered a lot of memories. I first heard of this wreck in Edward Rowe Snow’s Storms and Shipwrecks of New England (1944). It was basically the same story that Cyrus Eaton tells in his Annals of Warren (1977). Then I remembered that he had done an update on that story and it took a while to find it among my collection of two dozen of his books.

Edward Rowe Snow is more famous around Boston than he is in Maine despite his ancestry here. For a few years, I was one of many assistants on his lecture tour, a most interesting experience to say the least. I was in my 20s by this time and already a historian working as the assistant to the curator of the Cohasset (Mass.) Historical Society.

Anyway, Ed Snow’s updated account is in his True Tales and Curious Legends (1969) in the chapter “My Irish Ancestor.” He became very interested in the wreck in 1943 at the funeral of his father in Rockland, Maine, when, in the course of swapping family stories, he asked the group how many were related to the “Widow of Mr. Desert,” Mrs. Isabella Galloway, and was astounded when everyone raised their hand…

The most fascinating part of Snow’s chapter is the finding of the actual grave of Isabella Galloway. There were two places to look, Ship Harbor on Mt. Desert Island and Warren. Visiting the first, he found nothing, but at the second, in a small-unused graveyard near the St. George River, he found a large stone slab. With help from his wife, Snow rolled it over to find engraved on it: ISABELLA WIFE OF D. 1783 A. GAMBLE D. 1779.

The mystery is why Isabella is called the “Widow of Mt. Desert” and why the shipwreck took place there. Snow said that two small vessels put out from Warren to rescue those on Grand Manan but believes one was wrecked on Mt. Desert. There is no proof of this, he added.

I…applaud Ms. Lane for her efforts and seeing that they are presented to the general public, I have been a historian for most of my 73 years and I am amazed at how quickly and thoroughly relics and their story can disappear — lost, stolen, destroyed. Once it is gone, it is gone for good.

Robert Fraser
Belfast