Talk:Theodosia Burr Alston

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Texas Legend of Theodosia's Fate

Unsolved Texas Mysteries (Wallace O. Charlton, Charlie Eckhardt, Kevin R. Young, ISBN 1-55622-136-3) has a chapter "The Mystery Lady of the San Bernard" which tells a story from the oral history of the Stephen F Austin colony of a Karankawa Indian who wore a woman's gold locket engraved with the word THEODOSIA. The Indian said the locket belonged to his "white wife," given to him in "The Great Storm." The author deduces that the storm was the 1816 hurricane and Theodosia was a captive on a pirate ship wrecked by the storm. Shipwrecks have been located at the mouth of the San Bernard River, but the locket is lost.

Posted by 71.159.147.100, 16:38, 21 September 2008

Death date

If no one objects, I'm adding a question mark after her 1813 death date, since no one really knows for sure what happened to her.--68.35.11.25 (talk) 07:07, 15 November 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Portrayals in Fiction

Theodosia Burr Alston is a character in Gore Vidal's historical novel "Burr".

Pazouzou (talk) 03:23, 20 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Suggested Explanations

In the paragraph dealing with Foster Haley's claims in the Charleston newspaper News and Courier, I removed the linking brackets about the name John Howard Payne, as they linked to a wiki page dedicated to the famous actor, playwright, poet and songwriter of the same name, who certainly doesn't seem to be the captain of a privateer. Venyr (talk) 23:11, 4 January 2010 (UTC)Venyr[reply]

Nags Head "Wrecker-Pirate" Conspiracy

The disappearance section is riddled with uncited conspiracy theories/ghost stories about crypto-pirate wreckers off Nags Head, NC. This is an ill-informed conflation of two distinct periods and two distinct professions in US maritime history, and is directly contradicted by the main article on historical ship salvage in the US. The last vestige of true piracy on the Outer Banks was destroyed over a century before Burr-Alston's disappearance, and the golden age of legal maritime salvage didn't begin until after piracy on the east coast was definitively dead and buried.

The conflation of blatantly-illegal piracy and explicitly legal (but aggressive and opportunistic) salvage operations during the heyday of the "wreckers" period led to much contempt and anger, generally from the wealthy ship owners who paid the wreckers' hefty fees for the recovery of a portion of their cargo, a prospect which they interpreted as extortion at the hands of petty roughneck extortionists who, as the shipping magnates saw it, were "of the same common origins and base motives as the pirates they had supplanted, regardless of their actual legal standing." (McEwan, 1982) Even if the cost of paying the wreckers was less than the ultimate cost of claiming the insurance on 100% of the cargo, they tended to find the experience of dealing with local salvagers intensely distasteful.

As a result, there were many spurious written reports of bloodthirsty roughneck wreckers "luring ships to their doom on the rocks" (via a variety of methods) so they could swoop in and capture their cargoes for a hefty fee, including a famous false etymology for the name of Nags Head, NC itself. As the main article reports, these are all now regarded as libel by the shipping companies, and no confirmed case of a US or Caribbean wrecker deliberately luring a ship to it's doom have ever been recorded.

The simple truth of the matter is that Theodosia Burr Alston probably died in a normal shipwreck in the area, and her untimely and unfortunate fate was exploited by the begrudged east coast shipping companies against the salvagers in an effort to "not let a tragedy go to waste". Vintovka Dragunova (talk) 06:11, 29 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Vandalism

What does it take to get some protection for this page? I love the song Dear Theodosia as much as any #Hamiltrash kid does, but I've been reverting Hamilton-related vandalism on a regular basis. Lwarrenwiki (talk) 13:12, 19 March 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Thoedosia's Age When Mother Died

It states in the page that she was 11 when her mother dies. She actually was ten. Theo was born on June 21st, 1783. That means on June 1st, 1793 she would be ten. Her mother died in May of 1794 which would have meant Theo was still 10 years old. Correct? Wrkaiser03 (talk) 12:44, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]