(MARI)TIME WARP! 1882: DETAILED MEMORIES OF BARNEGAT PIRATES (PART 1)

Welcome to Toms River Seaport Society’s (Mari)Time-Warp, taking our supporters back through the nautical history of the Barnegat Bay and Toms River watershed areas!

Today we share the account of an enterprising reporter who interviewed old-time residents of our shore area, including one retired “pirate,” to get details on the activity of famed “Barnegat Pirates,” published by the Philadelphia Times on July 24th, 1882 and rediscovered thanks to Newspapers.com.

PIRATES OF LONG BEACH.

The Philadelphia Times
July 24th, 1882

CAPTAIN PAXON'S LAWLESS CREW.

Tales of Shipwreck and Plunder Told by the Old Salts of Barnegat--How Vessels Were Lured on the Beach and the Seamen Butchered.

The capture of Captain Tom Paxon and four members of his notorious band and the establishment of the present life-saving service on the New Jersey coast in 1848 had the effect of breaking up the organization of the much-dreaded Barnegat pirates and the half hundred barbarous wreckers whose deeds made the twenty miles of coast between Egg Harbor and Forked river a terror to honest sailors. Only one member of this viking band is known to be alive and he is a surly hermit in an Ocean county swamp. During the reign of the Barnegat pirates Long Beach gained a reputation that clung to it for years, and even now there are many ignorant sailors who dread the place.

In January last the German bark Fatherland went ashore a few miles south of the Barnegat light, and after much difficulty the men of the Life Station got a line from the shore to the vessel, but to their astonishment the crew refused to make use of the life-rope. Two men went out to the bark and finally succeeded in convincing the frightened mariners that Barnegat wreckers were creatures of the past.

Long Beach is twenty miles in length and from a quarter to half a mile wide. The outside is fringed with monster dunes of white sand, washed up by the Atlantic, and the inside, which is washed by Barnegat Bay, is low, marshy and covered with swamp grass, reeds and cattail. Clumps of cedar trees, strangely distorted by frequent storms, dot the island, or Beach, as it is commonly called, and give it rather an inviting appearance when seen from a distance. There are several primitive hotels on the Beach now, and hundreds of people go there every summer to bathe, fish and battle with mosquitoes, but when the pirates reigned they alone inhabited the place. Barnegat Bay, which separates the beach from the mainland, is from five to six miles wide, and, with the exception of its narrow and tortuous channel, is very shallow.

WHERE THE PIRATES LIVED ASHORE.

The shore of the mainland is low and swampy--so swampy that many square miles of it cannot be traveled over by man except in winter. Bears, catamounts and other wild animals live in safety in the depths of Big and Cedar Swamps. The country back of the swamps does not differ from any other part of Southern New Jersey. There is the same abundance of sand, pine trees, dwarf oaks, mosquitoes and green flies everywhere.

The majority of the Barnegat pirates lived at or near the mouth of Forked river. All were watermen and many owned boats stout enough to cross Barnegat bay on the stormiest night. Then, as it is now, every coast native over eighteen years of age was a captain and every pirate whose name has been handed down to this generation has that handle to his cognomen. Tradition and the salty historians of Ocean county have it that Captain Tom Paxon, who had been the mate of a slaver, was the first professional wrecker and shore pirate on Long Beach, but the hermit of Big Swamp, who was a wrecker himself and should know, declares that Captain Jack Norton, who was at one time a local Magistrate, is entitled to the credit that is given to Captain Paxon. All, however, agree that Paxon was a leader of the band.

All vessels bound in for Sandy Hook make their course very near the Jersey coast and the pirates took advantage of this and by false lights on stormy nights lured many vessels to destruction. Paxon's wife was a [biracial] woman and he had three sons--big, brawny ruffians--who were famous along the coast as whisky drinkers and rough-and-tumble fighters. Captain Job Manly, who, although sixty-eight years of age, commands a yacht that carries people from the mainland to the Beach, is in his way an oracle.

"Know them Paxons?" repeated Captain Job, as he shifted the tiller to his left hand in order that his right could be more freely used in emphasizing his remarks; "why, that was I know Tom Paxon like an old red dog; knowed the whole caboodle of 'em, in fact, though I never did 'sociate with 'em. I was a young sort of a chap then, but my old man he used to say there never was a Manly cut out for a pirate. 'Twasn't because we was skeerish, cause, by Jinks, if I do say it myself, as shouldn't, we was a fightin' family.

BURIED IN THE SEA

"Why,continued the ancient mariner, "my old man plugged a feller--. Oh yes, about Paxon. Well, the first time I heerd much about Captain Tom was along in the thirties. That was when a coaster came ashore down near Squan, and next day old Captain Heber--by Jinks! he was a good old man; use-ter ride a circuit, he did--well, Captain Heber he found a sailor half buried in the sand on the beach, and when he dug the body out the skull was smashed with a club. Well, the old man was such a good old man that he was 'stonished at sich goins on, and he came to Barnegat and raised a dickens of a fuss. Next morning a lot of people went over to get the body and bury it decent, but when they got there all they found was a trail through the sand where some one had dragged the body down on the ebb tide and chucked it into the sea.
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Everybody believed the Paxons caught that poor, miserable, unfortunate sailor after he swam ashore and, so as to keep his mouth shut about a false light on shore, they brained him. Well, it wa'n't long after that when some fishermen near Cedar creek found the corpses of two men lying on the beach, and by Jinks, they had been strangled to death, for all around their throats were hand-marks. They had been robbed, for their pockets were turned inside out, and a little way up the beach the fishermen found a letter and some scraps of paper that must have belonged to the sailors. No, nothing ever came of that, but Captain Paxon came a-floating around in a day or so in a mighty nice life-boat. He told my old man that he picked her up on the beach, but my old man he always said that air yawl brought them two murdered sailors ashore."

"Captain Job, can you remember what kind of a looking man Tom Paxon was?"

"Well, not exactly," replied the oracle, thoughtfully, "'cept he was a biggish sort of a man, with one eye. I knowed his boy, Abe, first rate. Abe was a wrecker, like the old man. That's the feller married big Mag Odell; you offen heard me speak about big Mag, hain't you, Captain John?" said the ancient narrator, appealing to a weather-beaten young man who sat smoking on the shady side of the sail.
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Captain John answered, "Um, hum," and Captain Job went on: "The Odells and Hollidays and Nortons and Perlys and a lot more people got going together and respectable people had to take a back pew and keep their mouths shut."

DECEIVED BY FALSE LIGHTS

"Every night a storm came up you'd see a gang sailing over to the beach. There ain't many people living around here now, but there was a good deal fewer here then. Whenever there was a wreck on the beach most everybody used to turn out and save things that came ashore. Nothing wrong in that, you know; but when Paxon and Holliday and that crew got to doing wrong, no decent people would go with them and they had nearly all the night jobs to themselves. I tell you, no one will ever know how many poor fellows came ashore on that beach, only to be cast back by them devils."

At this point Captain Job became so lost in his subject that he dropped the tiller and as the yacht went about the boom dislodged young Captain John and swept him, pipe and all into the bay. When Captain John was picked up and the yacht put back on her course the commander was corked up. The accident had evidently put the old man out of humor, but he came around again in a few minutes, when the dripping Captain John said: "Captain Job, how about the pirate's cow?"

The old man's eyes kindled and he said: "By Jinks, that'so. I forgot all about her. Gentlemen, you know when it was blowing a gale them wreckers, or pirates as they call 'em, used to build a big fire on the beach in front of the sand hills and out of sight from any place but the sea. Then the man at the wheel, thinking it was a lighthouse, would steer in and wreck the vessel. The fire worked all right, but when the sailors came ashore they discovered how they had been drawed in. So the wreckers wanted some kind of a big light that they could put away quick after a vessel got in the breakers. Well, some how or other they got hold of a big ship lantern. Some said she'd hold a bucketful of oil. Then Captain Holliday he took over a cow on a raft and turned her loose on the beach. After that, when the weather was bad outside, they'd lash that big lantern on that cow, light the wick and lead the innocent old beast up and down the beach. That light would deceive any sailor in the world 'cause it kept moving slowly and gradually, drawing the ship into the breakers, and then you know all they had to do to hide the light was to turn the cow around, or they could put it out in a jiffy, drive off the beast and no one but themselves would know anything about it. They say the cow worked like a charm, but you couldn't blame her, 'cause she didn't have no idea what she was doing.

Any number of reputable people substantiate Captain Job's description of this wonderful bovine. She was kept on the island eight or ten years and carefully cared for every winter. When Abe Paxon was arrested in 1847 for robbing a wrecked vessel the cow, with the what other personal property, was sold by his wife to obtain enough money to engage a lawyer to defend her husband. The cow was bought by Judge William M. Hawley, of Ocean county, who kept her as a curiosity until she died of old age. Captain Israel Holmes, of Barnegat, declared that when he feasted his eyes on the old cow just before the war "she was about twelve hands high and the skinniest-looking thing" he ever saw.

When Captain Job finished his interesting account of the peculiarities of the wreckers' cow the yacht had reached the island on which the beast had performed such excellent service for her employers.

A dozen guests and as many natives lolled around on the porch of the hotel. The guileless landlord, with a frankness that is not common with owners of summer resorts, was telling a group of new arrivals who inquired about the insect life on the island that a few evenings before a south wind brought up a cloud of mosquitoes that darkened the sky and sent a drove of cattle on the beach bellowing into the surf with tails as erect and rigid as jackstaffs. The newly arrived guests shuddered at the picture this primitive boniface drew. Of course, the landlord is a captain. So is the cook and the barber and the hostler and even the sad-looking young man who mixes solferino-colored cocktails.

It is Captain Ben Peters, however, who, after Captain Job Manley, knows most about Barnegat pirates, and he tells what he knows without coaxing. He began where Captain Job stopped, and for four hours reeled off piratical stories that must have made the flesh of some of his nervous hearers creep.
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He was a young man when a French ship called the Liberty, loaded with silks and other valuables, was wrecked on Long Beach. The beach was alive with wreckers that night, and when the crew came ashore in life-boats they were hurried across the island, carried over the bay and deposited near Barnegat pier by the pirates. The vessel was beached and went to pieces and the shore was covered with valuable goods. These goods, principally silks, were loaded on the wreckers' vessels in the bay and taken to secret hiding places in Cedar swamp, near Forked river.

to be continued...

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