In May 2019 I got a call from my cousin Margaret who had found an article about some of our 19th century ancestors written by a journalist from the Chesapeake Bay area. Gary D. Crawford lives there on Tilghman Island, not far from Mary’s Delight, the estate of my great-great-great-grandfather Dr. Absalom Thompson, and writes for a local monthly magazine. After reading several of Gary’s articles about the Thompson family I called him, and our conversations eventually revealed more links between us than his interest in my distant ancestors, and inspired the article that follows, reprinted with his kind permission from the June 2019 issue of the Tidewater Times.

Link One – The Ocean and the Atoll

If you approach Earth from outer space, at just the right angle, you’ll see why the gods dubbed it the water planet.  One side of the globe is almost entirely covered by water.  It’s the Pacific side, of course, and those of us who have lived out there are forever awed by its immensity.

Here and there in that vast ocean are thousands of tiny specks of land.  Like a handful of sand grains scattered across a basketball court, those bits of land are minute and very far apart.

One of those specks is a circular coral reef just 3½ miles long, quite small even by Pacific standards.  Some of the reef is above water, but much is not.  The total land area is no more than one square mile.  There is no harbor and no pass through the reef into the lagoon.

  It lies in the far southern reaches of the Tuamotu Archipelago, part of French Polynesia, though there is no indication it has ever supported a population of anything but seabirds.  The first recorded sighting by a westerner was when Captain Samuel Grimwood of the Discoverer, spotted it in January of 1828 and promptly dubbed it “Grimwood’s Island.”  Four years later, the American whaling captain Nathaniel Cary also reported it; he called it “Barstow’s Island” after his ship, the Gideon Barstow.  Following local tradition, the French government named it Morane (mo-rah-ney).

On some maps, however, this island appeared as “Cadmus,” referring to an American whale-ship of that name which went aground there on August 4, 1842.

  The crew had no warning before the lookout cried out in the darkness, “Breakers ahead!”  Captain Edwin Mayhew tried to steer away, but she “missed stays” (failed to come around to take the wind on the other side of her sails) and crashed hard onto the coral rocks.  As the ocean swells were pounding Cadmus to death, the captain managed to get one whaleboat lowered; others clung to debris or simply swam ashore.  All but one made it safely to dry land, what there was of it.

In the morning they saw that Cadmus was hopelessly wrecked, so they collected the items that had washed ashore.  They reckoned the casks contained fresh water and provisions for 60 days at most, but there was little chance that a vessel would pass near enough to that remote location.  They had the one boat, but it could carry only eight men.

The closest island was about 100 miles away but they knew that it too was uninhabited.  The nearest inhabited island was Pitcairn, which they had passed several days earlier and which now lay 360 miles upwind.  After discussion, they agreed that their best chance was for the captain to sail the boat north to Tahiti where the American Consul could render assistance.

All was quickly made ready and the next day the captain set off accompanied by his first mate and six crewmen.  A gale blew them off course and damaged their supplies, but they got some assistance from a passing ship and after eleven days managed to arrive safely in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti.  A fast schooner was immediately dispatched to retrieve the remaining men waiting on Morane Atoll.  The crew was reunited two weeks later, having lost only John Turner, the man who drowned on the night of the wreck.

One of the six men in Captain Mayhew’s boat on their sail to Tahiti was a young Eastern Shoreman, who called himself Charles Rochester.  Oddly, it wasn’t his real name.

Link Two: The Atoll and the Eastern Shore

On the other side of the world from these events—and 175 years later—I wrote a story about an interesting fellow named Thompson, born and raised in the Bay Hundred, Talbot County.  My article was entitled “Abby – The Boy with Six Names” and the editors of this fine magazine published it in their February 2016 issue.  You can read the whole thing at www.tidewatertimes.com, but here’s a brief summary of that piece.

His father, Dr. Absalom Thompson, once owned all of Tilghman’s Island, for just four years, which had led me to learn about him.  For some reason the good doctor gave his son the extraordinary name of Absalom Christopher Columbus Amerigo Vespucius Thompson, which I facetiously shortened to “Abby.” When the lad was about 16 years of age, he attended a medical school in Baltimore, completing the program in 1841.  Then, at the tender age 20, Abby suddenly disappeared from the face of the earth.

Dr. Thompson, a widower, was bereft.  He made inquiries but the authorities could find no trace of Abby.  He never gave up hope that his only child was still alive somewhere and in his will, he left everything to the boy “if he should return.”

  Just a few months after Dr. Thompson passed away in 1842, a letter arrived from the Pacific with stunning news.  Abby was alive!  He explained that he had gone a-whaling and would be back in a year or two.  For reasons we may never know, when school was over he left Baltimore and traveled to Fairhaven, Massachusetts, a whaling town near New Bedford.  (Fairhaven is also where, some decades later, Capt. Joshua Slocum would spend 13 months rebuilding a derelict local boat, the Spray—and then sail it around the world singlehanded, the first man ever to do so.)

There in Fairhaven, Abby signed aboard the whaler Cadmus, Capt. Edwin Mayhew.  He registered as “Charles Rochester of Easton, Maryland, aged 22.”  The register reveals that Abby stood less than 5’4” tall, which may be why he added two years to his age.  But why he sailed away under an assumed name, without letting anyone in his family know, we may never know.

Eventually Abby did return, via South America, to the Eastern Shore.  Here he met Sarah Haddaway of Bay Hundred.  On May 3, 1844, they were married.

Abby then began a new career as a schoolteacher, taking a position in Wilmington, Delaware, where their first two children were born—first Anna, then Sarah.  Their third daughter arrived after the family returned to Wittman, in 1847.  She was given the wonderful name of Atlantis.

In 1852, Abby (who now called himself “Absolom C. C. Thompson”) moved the family south to Talberton, Georgia, where George, their fourth and last child was born.  When war came, Thompson made use of his medical training, serving as a surgeon in the Confederate Army.  He was wounded in 1862, fell sick in 1865, and left the service in that year.  He became a Methodist minister in 1870 and passed away seven years later.

And there, I thought we had heard the last of him.

Link Three:  Abby to Joseph

When the eldest Thompson girl, Anne Elizabeth, married and had a daughter of her own, they named her in honor of her aunt, the one with the splendid name: the baby was christened Atlantis Octavia McClendon.  And when she married and had a daughter, she was named Janet Atlantis.  Then she married and had a son, Joseph Stevenson.

So… (I hear you wondering)…what?  Who is Joseph Stevenson and why is he of any interest?  Well, as it turns out, he contacted me recently from his home in Astoria, Oregon, at the mouth of the Columbia River.  He had just discovered my 2016 article about Abby and, as his great-great-grandson, Joseph was most interested in what I had written about him.  Much of what I had turned up apparently was completely new to the family.  After an exchange of emails, we talked on the phone and discovered a few things we had in common.  For one thing, we’re almost the same exalted age; for another, we both like digging into the past.

But finally I posed The Question, the one that still bugs me about Abby.  Why the heck would this kid run off to sea without saying a word to friends or family?  Why just skip out, leaving his father to wonder whether his only son was alive or dead?  Yes, he did come back—but not until his father was dead.  It seems, to me, a callous and cruel thing to do.

  To my dismay, Joseph said he didn’t know either.  Whatever explanation for his disappearance Abby might have offered to the family, apparently it was not passed down the generations.  We speculated.  Did Abby have a falling out with his dad?  Did he feel he was being pushed into the medical profession against his will?  Was a woman involved?  Or was he just thoughtless, like many young people unable to imagine his father might suddenly pass away?  Did the family have any idea about all that?

Joseph said they hadn’t a clue.  Abby seems to have been a rock-solid citizen down in Georgia for the last 25 years of his life, so there is no hint of instability or flightiness.  (Here, by the way, is the only known photo of Absolom C. C. Thompson later in life.)

There was a pause in our conversation as we both mulled it over.

Suddenly Joseph said, “You know what?  I suspect it may simply have been wanderlust.  I think the guy just wanted to get away and see the world.  Especially the Pacific…”

Link Four: Joseph to Me 

Hey, I thought, maybe so.  After all, it had happened to me.  After teaching high school in Ohio for two years, I had chucked it all and joined the Peace Corps.  Why?  Because volunteers were being recruited to serve in a different part of the world—in Micronesia—way out in the far western Pacific.

Anyway, I signed up and went out in 1967.  It changed my life, but this isn’t about me.  I just need to explain that after my two-year hitch as a volunteer, I began training incoming Peace Corps volunteers in a whole lot of island locations throughout the Pacific: Palau, Saipan, Yap, Truk, Ponape, Funafuti, Hawaii, and Tonga.  In other words, Joseph’s suggestion that wanderlust had pulled Abby away from the Eastern Shore made sense for me.

And then I discovered why it made sense to Joseph.  He said, “Yeah, I guess wanderlust must run in the Thompson family.  I sure had it.  I ended up in Tahiti, too, like Abby.”

Oh, really?

I listened intently as Joseph briefly described his youthful adventures sailing around the Pacific Ocean on various yachts.  It began with boat-repair work in Hawai’i, then sailing from Samoa to Tonga, Tonga to New Zealand.  From New Zealand he sailed to Tahiti, where his great-great grandpa had arrived after the shipwreck.  OK, this was getting strange.

It got even stranger when Joseph mentioned his interest in music.  He plays the violin and had carried one all around the Pacific.  In Samoa he spent some weeks stretching a sharkskin over a coconut shell to make a three-string ukulele he called Leroy, then set sail for Tonga in a very leaky boat.  It soon became clear the boat was in need of serious repair, so they put into Nuku’alofa, the capital of the Kingdom of Tonga.

(Tonga? Oh my.)

Link Five: Me to Tonga

At one time in the 70s, I was employed training Peace Corps volunteers in Hilo, Hawaii.  There I met Soane Hurrell, who was doing the same.  He was working in another program preparing people to serve in his home country, the Kingdom of Tonga (in the South Pacific), while I was helping train volunteers for service in Micronesia (in the North Pacific).  We soon discovered we had other interests in common, especially a love of music.  Soane played classical guitar—seriously, from music.  I played the recorder and we located some duet music that we could enjoy playing together.

Months later, the training center in Hilo closed and left us both out of work.  By now fast friends, Soane and I decided to follow our most recent trainees into Tonga, where Soane had not been for many years and I had never been.  So we flew from Hilo to Honolulu to Samoa.  A fancy cruise ship was in the harbor there, island-hopping their way to Australia.  They agreed to let us go (cheaply) from Samoa on to their next stop, which was Tonga.

  Three days later we landed in Nuku’alofa Harbor and Soane took me off to meet his large and friendly family.  I stayed in Tonga for some months, enjoying good times, meeting people, learning to play classical guitar, and waiting for my next job.  One of the places I visited occasionally was a new hotel, right on the waterfront, called the Dateline Hotel.

And why was it called that?  The International Date Line is that necessary place on the earth where the date switches.  Consider: When it’s 5 a.m. Tuesday here in Maryland, it’s 2 a.m. Tuesday in California, right?  Hawai’i is three hours earlier yet, so in Honolulu it’s 11 p.m. and still Monday.  But you can’t keep doing that all the way around the world, because sooner or later you’re back here in Maryland with the right time but the wrong day.  In other words, somewhere in the world it is necessary to “jump” the date ahead to Tuesday—and that’s what happens at the International Date Line.  It was put way out in mid-Pacific to avoid causing problems in populated areas.

So the IDL, running from the North Pole to the South Pole and passing just to the east of Tonga, is what suggested a name for their new hotel back in 1964.

  A map of the island is inlaid in the lobby floor; I liked to imagine that one side of the room was in “tomorrow.”  Another reason I liked the Dateline Hotel was that they sometimes had a Tongan band playing live music in the bar.

My stay in Tonga came to an end when I was called back to work in the North Pacific,   training more Peace Corps volunteers for Micronesia.  Soane got a job there, too.  So we said goodbye to his family and flew away.

Link Six: Soane to Brian

Later, Soane came to the States to visit friends in San Mateo CA, where many Tongans now live and work.  After some months, he decided to visit my parents in San Diego, whom he had never met.  I was told they welcomed him as a third son.

When my brother Brian finished some adventures of his own, down in Norfolk Harbor, he went back to San Diego for the first time in a few years.  When he showed up at my parents’ apartment, Brian was surprised to find a Tongan man had taken his place.  All quickly became good friends.  Brian and Soane soon got jobs (sandblasting road equipment) to earn money for air fare.  They wanted to go to Tonga, where my work had taken me for the second time.  That was all in the 1970s, you understand, when we were all young and footloose.

Link Seven: Joseph to Tonga

  Now with that background, let’s return to the present day.  During our telephone chat, Joseph mentioned that he had really enjoyed his month in Tonga.  Not only did they get their boat fixed so they could sail on, but he made friends with some memorable Tongans.  One evening he dropped into the Dateline Hotel and immediately was attracted to the music playing in the bar.  (Oh yes!)

The band was a much-liked group of local musicians who called themselves “The Oldtimers.”  They were led by an older fellow named Peni Filimoehala who sang and played the viola.  When Joseph produced his Samoan ukulele, they asked him to play with them.  They were playing mostly familiar American standards, so he was able to join in fairly easily.

Another time, Peni invited Joseph to join them at another gig, at the Friendly Islands Motel.  There, however, it was mostly Tongan folk songs, which captivated Joseph.  Mesmerized, he refused to contaminate their music with his bad ukulele playing.  Instead he got their permission to do some tape recording.

I was listening to all this in stunned silence.  “Wow,” I exclaimed.  “Now there’s a coincidence!”  After all, just a few years earlier, I had stood in the Dateline Hotel and listened to the music there.  Joseph then promised to send me some of his recordings and, sure enough, two days later an email arrived with two MP3 recordings attached.  Wow, indeed.  It took me back.

Link Eight: Soane to Joseph

A week or so later, I got a phone call.  It was Soane, calling from his home in San Leandro CA, just wanting to wish me a happy birthday.  I told him about Joseph, my Abby story, the wreck of the Cadmus, and Joseph’s visit to Tonga.

Soane listened intently.  When I mentioned the Tongan music, he suddenly interrupted.  “Hey, I’ll bet that was Peni’s band!”

“It was!” I said with delight.  “I wondered if you’d know who he was talking about.  Did you know Peni Filimoehala?”

“You bet I knew him.  He played at all our family’s weddings.  He was my mother’s uncle.”

So, yes, the Pacific is vast.  It is very far from Wittman on the Eastern Shore to Nuku’alofa in the South Pacific.  There is half a world between Tilghman and Tonga.

Even so, sometimes lines of destiny and interconnection do exist, below the surface.  And miraculously, once in a great while, we are lucky enough to learn about them. We can only wonder about the many other connections there may be, links that we will never discover.

AFTERWORD

Mr. Crawford’s article barely scratches the surface of what he uncovered about the Thompsons, most of which came as a complete surprise to me and my living relatives, probably the most notable example being connections between the Thompsons and two slaves who later loomed large in the struggle for emancipation: Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.  My great-great-grandfather A. C. C.  Thompson — “ The Boy With Six Names” —  knew both when all three were children, and later, as grownups he and Douglass….but wait, let’s save that for now. It is enough to acknowledge that yes, my forefathers were indeed slave owners, and for rest of the story, watch this space.

Joseph Stevenson, Astoria OR, July 2019