One of the more recent additions to the Long Island Collection is a group of letters written to Capt. Shamgar Slate by his wife, Maria Folger Eldredge Slate (1824-1889). Shamgar Hand Slate was born in Sag Harbor on Dec. 4, 1818, to Clarissa Hand Slate (1788-1861) and Oliver Slate (1779-1861), the local blacksmith. Shamgar and Maria married in the summer of 1841 and settled into a Federal-style house at 245 Main Street on Sag Harbor's Captains Row. Before 2013, the house retained most of the original features, although it recently underwent renovation.
As the couple settled into married life, Shamgar operated the whaling ship Neptune, which was managed and owned by Sag Harbor's S. & B. Huntting & Co. When the ship returned from a 20-month journey in 1841, it had acquired 30 barrels of sperm oil, 2,695 barrels of whale oil, and 22,206 pounds of whale bone.
In the 1850s, Shamgar was master of the whaleship Little Hamilton, with James M. Godka as his first mate. They set sail for San Francisco in October of 1848, headed for the gold fields there. It took them 139 days to complete the journey. The letter seen here, from March 9, 1850, was one of many written by Shamgar's wife during that voyage and addressed to him on the Little Hamilton. In it, Maria describes how she gave birth prematurely to their son, and he died three days later. Several of their children died young.
Like many of Sag Harbor's later whalers, Shamgar ended up sailing the Pacific Ocean in a clipper ship, in his case on Wizard, which traveled between San Francisco and Hong Kong. He died of dysentery in 1857, during the Wizard's fourth trip, and was buried in Macao. This letter, and the others from Maria Slate, offer insight into the daily lives of the families Sag Harbor's whaling captains left behind.
Mayra Scanlon is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library's Long Island Collection.
