The Sea Gypsy

She limped into the marina on a misfiring 9hp outboard engine. The nearly derelict sailboat, the Elizabeth Coffin, and her Captain were a matched set; female, aged, weather-beaten, run down. The dockmaster pointed her to the slip next to ours, and the dockhands tied her up, while the Captain sat in the cockpit without assisting.

When she arose, the reason was clear. Large and lame, she was barely able to navigate the gunnel of her boat. Moving at a funeral pace and carrying her cane she laboriously lowered herself from vessel to dock while we watched goggle-eyed. She slowly followed our dockmaster, Peter, to the office to pay for a three-nights berth.

We learned from Peter that her name was Hattie Shattuck. She was a 78-year-old widowed single-hander. Mrs. Shattuck had never tied up to this marina, and we marveled that she was able to travel at all, much less alone, given her advanced age and evident frailty.

“Yeah, she may look bad, but she was sharp as a tack mentally. Even dickered down the fee,” said Peter.

Shattuck is an old New England whaling name, and the practice of naming boats for the women of the family bespeaks of that seagoing community as well.

Mrs. Shattuck came back to the Elizabeth Coffin (no home port under the moniker), climbed below decks, and didn’t emerge for three humid ninety-degree days. My husband and I argued on the morning of the second day.

“Don’t get involved,” he said.

 “Tom, she could be sick or dead in there. I’m going to check.”

I rapped on her hull amidships and was rewarded with a strong, cross voice,

 “Who is it? What do you want?”

 “Ms. Shattuck, it’s your neighbor. I just wanted to check if you are alright.”

“I’m fine. Just a little warm in here.”

“Do you need anything? We have ice.”

No reply. I waited a few minutes, shrugged, and went about my business. Well, not entirely. I mentioned my concerns to Peter. He shared them.

“It’s not a matter of IF she gets hurt, it’s a matter of WHEN”, he said. “And I don’t want it to happen in my marina!”

Trying again, I asked Mrs. Shattuck the next day about the name of her boat, again, by calling through her hull. I asked if she was from New England.

“My husband was. I’m not from nowhere.”

Again, there was no response to my follow-up question.

Next morning, having coffee, we heard voices coming from the direction of the Elizabeth Coffin. Sounded like an argument. I peered out a porthole. Two young police officers, accompanied by Peter, were talking with Mrs. Shattuck. Shamelessly eavesdropping, I heard enough to realize that this was a welfare check, and that Mrs. Hattie Shattuck was,

“FINE, thank you very much, and if you DON’T MIND, I don’t need anything from YOU.”

Eventually the officers left the dock with Peter.

These community outreach officers knew Hattie Shattuck well. They had been trying for over a year, ever since they became aware of her situation, to get her to accept services, placement in an assisted living, doctor’s visits. She adamantly refused them all.

“She’s said no to everything, every time we ask.  Won’t even let us aboard. She’s like some Sea Gypsy. In one place for a while, but always moving on. We tried the family; her kids don’t want nothing to do with her.”

Since she was in no imminent danger, and not a harm to others, their hands were tied. The local police and Sheriff’s department had been following Hattie’s endless rambling odyssey up and down the Inter Coastal Waterway (ICW) from Daytona to Jacksonville and back again.

Her trek began the week after her husband died, two years ago. No sooner had the funeral service ended, she packed her bags and moved aboard his old sailing-catamaran. She hired some guys to get its ancient outboard in reasonable shape and off she went, ghosting up and down the Intercoastal Waterway the roughly 90 miles from Jacksonville to Daytona beach and back. She took her little old dog, Clevis, with her on her sojourn but then he died too, leaving her truly alone.

Mrs. Shattuck had been seen dragging anchor near Crescent Beach, and been sighted tied to a mooring in the municipal marina. The Jacksonville marinas and police all knew her or knew of her. 

She could no longer climb to the bow to make sure the anchor was set once she dropped it from the cockpit, so she often dragged from her nighttime position “on the hook”, and floated aground. There the Elizabeth Coffin would stay until the tide came back in and her Captain could motor on. Many marinas refused her dockage, alleging that her craft was a hazard, and that Hattie Shattuck dunned their fees.

We found this out the hard way when Peter wryly admitted that the credit card she’d given for three nights slip rent was no good. He told Ms. Shattuck, who said she’d make good once her Social Security arrived in two weeks.

Two weeks! Paul thought fast. He didn’t want to take this lady’s Social Security money, and he sure didn’t want this disaster-in-waiting in his marina for two weeks. He cut a deal; he agreed to charge her no slip fee and get her some diesel if she promised to leave by the Friday next, one week after the decrepit Elizabeth Coffin lurched into dock. He tried to convince her to hire crew, but no way.

“I run my boat, and I run her ALONE”.

They wrangled about it for a while, then Peter saw it was no use. Hattie Shattuck agreed with the rest of his terms from her crossed arm stance in the cockpit, and then laboriously climbed below.

Late Thursday evening, the night before the scheduled departure day, I heard quiet voices and small bangs and clangs outside on the dock. Noise really carries through a boat’s hull. Arising to peer out the forward head porthole, I saw an emaciated-looking man, with silver scant hair and gnarled fingers, handing bagged groceries out of a small cart to Mrs. Shattuck. Well, I was glad to know there was someone from whom she’d accept some assistance! I crept back to bed.

Next morning, a small curious crowd gathered to see Hattie Shattuck off at slack tide on Friday. Peter, along with Luke, one of the dockhands, got permission to board and took hold of her tattered lines, readying them for departure. Hattie fired up the outboard with a metallic hollow knocking sound and turned on her VHF radio. The marina hands made sure her anchor was in place on the anchor roller such that the rode wouldn’t foul the next time she berthed on the Waterway. They tied up her fraying lines to the rusted life rails, and jumped back to the dock. We all pushed her hull in the right direction, and the Elizabeth Coffin motored slowly into the river.

“Which way do I go to get out of here?”

Hattie Shattuck called. We pointed her towards the 312 bridge and exchanged horrified glances. Slowly the battered Elizabeth Coffin eased out of sight.

I couldn’t stop thinking about this misanthropic Sea Gypsy. She was surely at risk, though probably not a great danger to others, except when she dragged anchor at night in a crowded anchorage. What had her life been, that she chose this solitary yet liberated existence? What did she want for the rest of her life? Clearly, she loathed the idea of being a senior in public assistance housing. Seeing a bit of her stubbornness, I could imagine she knocked heads with her children, but what had transpired that they eschewed her utterly? A mystery.

Three weeks later, Hurricane Dorian blew through the state, bringing high winds. We were so involved with shoring up our own boat and making it to our folks in North Carolina that it wasn’t until a day later that I thought of Mrs. Shattuck, with sudden horror. Would she have even realized the storm was coming? She had a VHF radio which could receive weather warnings, but we had only seen her turn it on when she was underway. Did she leave it on when she was anchored out? Clearly, this woman was ill-prepared for even a small gale, much less a hurricane.

I scoured the news, looking for rescue stories, but found nothing. The whiskey-soaked philosopher who hung about the marina office proclaimed that when Poseidon raised a hurricane with his trident, he often called old sailor folk to join him. He nodded sagely as he spoke, slurring slightly. Well, hmm.

I spoke to Peter, who had asked about her to his contacts in the marine police. They relayed the following tale. According to Peter’s sources, when the winds started to rise, Mrs. Hattie Shattuck dropped anchor near one of Jacksonville’s three bridges on the St. Johns River. She dragged anchor of course, and onlookers saw the Elizabeth Coffin being pulled by current and blown by high winds into the river’s deep channel. The onlookers called the police and the Coast Guard. But before help arrived, witnesses claimed they saw, with their eyes slitted to squint through the spray and gusts, the portly figure of Hattie Shattuck. She was climbing precariously to the heaving port coaming of the Elizabeth Coffin. Witnesses swore they saw her leap, not fall, into the churning water.

I was unable, despite days of researching Hattie Shattuck’s name, her backstory, talking to community resources, scanning the news, asking my most canny marine gossipers, to learn her fate. There was news of water rescues, but none of an elderly lame woman. There were reports of drownings, but none with Mrs. Shattuck’s name or description. Some people claimed to have seen her pulled from the water by another boat, but I could never learn what happened to Hattie Shattuck or the Elizabeth Coffin.

So, as with many of the compelling strangers who have intersected my life in boating, and as a doc, I am left pondering, trying to envision this unique individual’s fate, philosophy, and assign some meaning to the crossing of our paths.

There was clearly deep trouble in Hattie Shattuck’s past as evinced by her estrangement from her own children. Could she have been nothing more than a personality-disordered crank? I don’t want to think so.

Is she currently an angry captive in a state-run home for the aged, frightening the other residents and trying the staff’s patience to the max? Did she think of her deceased husband and poor Clevis and make a leap of faith, hoping to join them in a heaven of her own imagining? Are my sources wrong? Did she drown?

I sometimes lay in bed at night, wondering and hoping someday to learn what happened to that obstinate, isolated, imperiled old woman, but I know the chances of that are slim at best.

So as always, when the truth is unknown and unknowable, the task of the storyteller is to somehow complete the fable of the Sea Gypsy. Maybe it’s naïve, but when I can’t know, when I don’t have proof of villainy, I choose to see the bit of hero that may exist in alluring eccentrics I’ve encountered, like Mrs. Hattie Shattuck. I choose to see in Hattie Shattuck an exemplar of tough and dogged determination to live life one’s own way, even to the extent of choosing the manner of one’s death, at the hands of Poseidon.

Paula  Lyons, MD

4/25/2020