Driven as crucially by the Puritan settlers’ will to prosperity as by their more famous desire to freely worship, the New Haven Colony’s earliest days were marked by heady ambitions and grave disappointments. Founded in 1638 on £36,000 of capital—“by far the largest investment of all the New England settlements,” according to Michael Sletcher in New Haven: From Puritanism to the Age of Terrorism (2004)—the colony nevertheless struggled to generate profitable trade. By 1645, a series of failed ventures, including along the Delaware River (where Dutch and Swedish traders destroyed a competing New Haven settlement), had produced “great losses” for the colonists and left “their large estates… rapidly declining” (Edward R. Lambert, History of the Colony of New Haven, 1838.
In January 1646—though some sources say 1647—New Haven’s entrepreneurs were desperate enough for a turnaround that some of them literally did turn around. In a Hail Mary bid to establish formal trade with England, the very country they’d fled, the settlers filled a ship they’d commissioned from builders in Rhode Island with “the best part of their commercial estates,” Lambert writes. Also aboard were 70 people, including prominent colonists sent to act as trade emissaries. So eager were they to sail to England to make their pitch—and avoid the decades of stagnation that would otherwise ensue—that they ignored the ship’s own pitch: a chronic tilt that, as legend has it, prompted the captain himself to predict their doom.
After cutting a three-mile path through harbor ice instead of waiting for it to melt, the colonists who remained ashore watched their last and best hope for prosperity pass over the horizon, then waited for word of its faring or sight of its return. Amid growing worry, they never received either, unless you count, in June 1647 (though some sources say 1648), a collective vision of a “phantom ship” that appeared to come into harbor before dissolving into ether. Its witnesses interpreted it as a sign from God that the ship they’d sent two winters before had, indeed, been taken by the sea.
The phantom ship, later publicized by Cotton Mather and eulogized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, still haunts New Haveners today. It floats in the New Haven Museum, in Sterling Memorial Library and in Kimberly Triangle. It rests on the bottom of the seaside Canal Dock Boathouse.
And, like any proper specter, the ship can have you seeing it even where it isn’t. A similar ship sails across New Haven’s city seal, which appears repeatedly inside City Hall and is purportedly symbolic of broader historic seafaring activities. A ship with a similarly non-specific reference point appears, also repeatedly, on and around the Long Wharf Maritime Center. A stained-glass ship very similar to renderings of the ghost ship is displayed at SCSU’s Buley Library, behind a plaque that specifically identifies it as a different ship, the Hector, which carried the colony’s first settlers here in 1638.
All of them conjure the phantom ship to a horizon in my mind, reminding me of the dream that started it all and the tragedy that all but finished it.
Written by Dan Mims. Photographed by Dan Mims except for image 1, which features Vision of the Phantom Ship (ca. 1850) by Jesse Talbot and was provided courtesy of the New Haven Museum. For full image captions, check out the email edition.
