A Loyalist’s Life
The discovery of Mary Port Macklin’s lost memoir reveals a Revolutionary-era saga of love, loyalty, imprisonment, and exile—from Charleston’s “Noah’s Ark” to British St. Augustine and the Bahamas.
By James Cusick
Mary Port Macklin’s lost memoir. One afternoon in March 2002, the Department of Special Collections at the University of Florida library in Gainesville received a package containing a most unusual manuscript. Carefully sheathed in layers of protective paper was a thin notebook of 38 leaves, its cover nearly gone, its pages worn and water damaged, its ink script faded by age. Sent on offer from a dealer in rare books, this rather unprepossessing item was described in the accompanying catalog as “a home-made folio blank-book, perhaps an account book re-used upside down after excision of about a dozen leaves,” measuring 31.2 by 19.5 centimeters, the pages bearing the watermark “Arms of England, C. S. & Co. 1815.” There was no mention of provenance or historical significance.
However, the catalog entry could not fail to arouse curiosity: “Manuscript Autobiography,” it read, “by the Revolutionary Hostess of Charleston’s ‘Noah’s Ark,’ later a Privateer’s Wife in St. Augustine, Florida. An eccentric autobiographical narrative, relating to the hard life of Mary Port, later Macklin, her emigration from England to South Carolina, and her subsequent life and travels in America.”
Written out in the notebook was a memoir chronicling the travails of a young woman caught in the upheavals of the American Revolution.
It became apparent that the memoir of the hitherto unknown Mary Port Macklin was a unique find in Florida history. Consider this as a tale: a 19-year-old English girl loses her family, is married against her guardians’ wishes, and sets off with her husband for Charleston just as the American Revolution sweeps through South Carolina. Far from leading ordinary lives, this couple salvages a scuttled sailing vessel from the shallows of the Ashley River, turns it into a floating dockside eatery (patronized by the royal governor) and soon runs afoul of American Patriots. Unwilling to renounce their loyalist sympathies to King George III, the Macklins suffer imprisonment and confiscation of property. They leave Charleston to seek refuge in more secure St. Augustine in British East Florida. There, John Macklin takes service with Governor Patrick Tonyn as commander of a privateer, and later signs on as a regular in the Royal Navy. But as war presses forward, John abandons Mary—whether by intention or due to the circumstances of naval service is never made clear. She sinks into illness and destitution, and late in life, living in the Bahamas, writes a memoir of her once promising but blighted life. John’s fate is little better. He returns to England and is incarcerated in the Fleet Debtor’s Prison. In its bleak cells he languishes for several years, hoping all the time that the Crown will compensate him for his wartime record. He and Mary never meet again.
The stuff of cheap novels and romances? If so, it at least has the distinction of being true. An investigation into the background of Mary’s memoir not only helped to authenticate the narrative, but resulted in a second discovery—the compensation claims of Mary’s husband, John, filed before a Parliamentary board of inquiry at the close of the American Revolution, and preserved in the archives of the Public Record Office, London. More is known about the origins of this file than about the memoir. It is one in an enormous morass of legal suits collectively known as the American Loyalist Claims. Numbering in the thousands, these claims represent the efforts of American Tories to recover at least a portion of the financial losses they suffered when they had to abandon their homes in the rebelling American colonies if they remained loyal to the British cause. The circumstances of John Macklin’s claims had never previously attracted notice. Indeed, had his wife’s memoir not surfaced, John’s history would probably have continued as an unnoticed footnote to history.
Hence the story offers us two viewpoints of the same events.
Mary’s memoir is a touching personal reminiscence committed to paper after the American Revolution and from internal evidence, written in the Bahamas after East Florida was returned to Spain in 1784. John’s testimony to the board of the claims commission in London is dry and perfunctory, composed immediately after the Revolution that ruined him. Although the accounts of husband and wife do not always agree in every specific, on the whole they provide a strikingly vibrant and cohesive account of their troubles. The memoir and the compensation claim give us a glimpse into the lives of two people driven apart long ago by the mischances of war, and finally reunited here as narrators of history.
The memoir is an intriguing example of 18th-century women’s writing.
Mary was apparently literate but unlettered, and wrote her life story in a phonetic orthography, which, when read aloud, must closely mimic her Hampshire, England, dialect.
Born in 1751, she was an orphan by 19, traumatized first by the death of her mother, then of her elder sister, who succumbed to what Mary describes as a leprous infection, and finally of her father, a retired purser, who died at the table one evening in a fit of apoplexy so sudden that he had “half a Bisket in his mouth and the other half in his hand.”
Into this stricken young girl’s life enters John Macklin, the brother of a man married to Mary’s best friend. John literally sweeps her into marriage, apparently as part of a plot to evade the 100 watchful eyes of her guardians, and to prevent her betrothal to an elderly sea captain they have chosen for her.
Initially, things go well in married life. Mary secures her inheritance and the Macklins relocate to Portsmouth, where they open a perfume shop and lodging house.
In 1774, for reasons that neither Mary nor John confide, the couple decided to emigrate to South Carolina. Perhaps they were just seeking a new start. In any case, this decision was a fateful one. Arriving in mid-summer in Charleston, with a stock of goods worth about £300, they apparently intended to establish themselves once again in the perfumery business. Soon, however, John’s ideas took a different turn, and, in one of the most colorful episodes related in Mary’s memoir, he salvaged a derelict sloop abandoned in the Ashley River and fitted it out as a “beef steak club.”
Perhaps it was the wharf’s convenient location that first prompted John Macklin to create a “floating eatery” there.
If the investment of £50 in such an unusual undertaking seemed strange to Mary, she did not comment on it. Rather, she took pride in being proprietress of such an oddity. It was christened Noah’s Ark and on its deck the Macklins catered to the royal governor and members of his council and staff who dined monthly on the ship quarterdeck. At most, though, the “ark” seems to have survived in business for only two seasons. John later opened up a more conventional tavern, the “London Coffee House” on Elliott Street near the Charleston Exchange.
The Macklins were engaged in the running of this tavern (also their place of residence) as South Carolina moved against British rule.
Charleston, though not as radical or violently anti-British as Boston in the 1770s, was nonetheless a stronghold of merchants and planters who desired, if not a break with England, at least an end to Parliamentary interference in colonial commerce and domestic affairs.
By 1776, the colonial legislature of South Carolina, reconstituted as the General Assembly, was requiring a new oath of allegiance from all white male inhabitants of military age. They were to swear loyalty to the state of South Carolina and renounce George III.
Anyone refusing the oath could be punished with imprisonment, confiscation of property, or exile.
As recent immigrants from England, the Macklins were among those who felt the full fury of rebel coercion. John’s activities did not help matters. By his own admission, he was spying for British interests, eavesdropping on conversations at his tavern, and passing along any statements that smacked of sedition. He refused to take the oath abjuring allegiance to King George, and paid for it with time in jail. Upon release, John tried to insulate himself, probably with Mary, from further retaliation by moving outside of Charleston to Ashley’s Ferry. Then, in 1778, the Assembly imposed a new, revised oath.
This one not only required fealty to the state, a renunciation of the king, and a willingness to bear arms against the king, but also insisted that oath-takers report “all plots and conspiracies that shall come to [their] knowledge against the said state or any other state of the United States of America.”
Again John refused to swear to it, and he was imprisoned. Mary seems to have been imprisoned with him, and later recalled spending a miserable eight months there. With John unable to earn a livelihood and beleaguered by creditors and fearful of physical harm, John left Carolina and headed for St. Augustine in British East Florida, a safe haven for people with pro-British sentiments.
In St. Augustine, John immediately signed up for British service, but on his very first mission at sea he was captured and returned to Charleston.
Treated harshly, he won release in a prisoner exchange; again he reached St. Augustine, this time with Mary.
John left almost at once on privateer raids for Governor Patrick Tonyn, taking command of a ship called the Polly. In the autumn of 1779, as John was readying himself for an expedition, Mary fell sick with fever, brought on by a walk in a rain storm. Awakening in the middle of the night with excruciating pain in all of her limbs, she sent John to fetch Dr. Andrew Turnbull, the noted physician who had created the New Smyrna indigo plantation in East Florida.
“He indeverd to Blead mee in the Feete and the side of my Nees,” Mary wrote, “but it could not be don. He then went home and Retorned in a Short Spece of Time and Leade a Blister Plaster on Each of My Leegs and one on Each of my Arms.”
John, obliged to report aboard ship for duty, faced a traumatic leave-taking from his wife. In near hysterics, she begged him not to go, asking who would bury her? Mary’s anxieties about separation were well founded. Although the couple did not know it, they were about to be parted forever.
John left for Savannah but arrived while American forces and a French fleet were attempting to take the town by siege. Unable to make port he took his ship to the Bahamas, and there seems to have entered regular service with the Royal Navy. During the next four years, he would be present at nearly every major coastal engagement in the southern theater of the Revolution. Records show that he survived the Revolution and returned to England. However he never returned to St. Augustine, and there is no evidence that he reunited with Mary.
Meanwhile Mary’s fortunes in St. Augustine steadily declined.
Confined to bed on the second story of her residence, she soon learned that the man appointed to attend to her needs in John’s absence had died. The owner of the house rented it to another family. They shortly moved in, leaving Mary in possession of her bedchamber, but little else. Meanwhile, the Lindsays, a local family, began to visit her out of charity, and brought her food and necessities. With the aid of crutches, she was eventually able to regain her feet and walk about with difficulty. But she told the Lindsays, “it was Imposobell that I could Liv a more Rached and Miserabell Liff then wot I did with the Pepell that was put in the hous, and I Could not think why thes Pepell was put in, as my Husband had Informed mee the hous was our own, that he had Bote it and Ped for it with the sher of his Pris Money.”
Mary eventually became a dependent of the Lindsay family. At the end of the Revolution, and following the Treaty of Paris, when England returned East Florida to Spain, she left the province with them and went to the Bahamas. Her memoir suggests she remained in the Lindsay household, possibly as a retainer.
John’s fate is unknown. He served in the British Navy, being wounded in three separate actions, but by 1787 he was back in London, incarcerated in the Fleet Prison for debt. He received enough money from the claims commission to gain release, but after that he disappears from history.
Their experiences are unlikely to alter our historical understanding of the Revolutionary War in the American South. But their separate stories add new first-hand accounts to the annals of that time. Mary’s memoir, written from a woman’s viewpoint, is especially valuable in this respect. She emerges from its pages as a woman puzzling over the vagaries of fate. The events she chose to remember—her refusal to accept her guardians’ choice in a marriage partner, her rising prospects as John’s wife in Portsmouth and Charleston, and her misfortunes and dashed hopes after he abandoned her in East Florida—are not only a rare vignette of an individual’s experiences in a tumultuous time, but a fascinating example of one 18th-century woman’s attempt to record the course of her life.
Reprinted from El Escribano, Vol. 4, 2004 with permission from the St Augustine Historical Society.
