Hurricane season always makes me think of Miss Nancy Underhill. According to the often repeated legend, the young Isles of Shoals school teacher suddenly disappeared near the rock formation that now bears the name “Miss Underhills Chair.” Records indicate she was born in 1814 and grew up in Chester.
We know from an 1847 letter by a 12-year-old Celia Laighton Thaxter that Miss Underhill was also working for the Laighton family that was building the Appledore Hotel at the time. There was “a very amiable lady here,” Celia wrote to a friend in Boston, “who is employed in sewing the bedding of the new house. … She is a most excellent lady.”
A Portland newspaper reported a “MELANCHOLY DISASTER” on Sept. 12, 1848. On the previous evening, according to the paper, the 34-year-old Methodist missionary and teacher went out on the granite cliffs of Star Island, accompanied by a few friends. They visited a spot where Nancy, listed as a teacher from Portsmouth, often sat to contemplate “the sublime works of God.”
While modern storytellers and tour guides often claim the teacher was pulled off a high rocky spot by a “rogue wave,” that’s not what happened. According to the press, Nancy Underhill descended into a rocky “declivity” and ventured dangerously close to the sea during a rising storm. At 7:30 p.m., Miss Underhill was “launched into eternity” by the tide. “The wave struck her,” a witness recalled, “and in a moment she was dashed out from our sight.”
If we believe the not-always-reliable 19th century author Samuel Adams Drake, Nancy’s father, a Quaker, refused to sanction his daughter’s marriage to a Methodist. The engagement was broken and the man married another woman. Nancy threw herself into missionary work and became a beloved teacher of students at Gosport on Star Island. Drake contends, on the day she died, Nancy’s friend was also swamped by “a tidal wave of unusual magnitude,” but he was able to keep his footing on the slippery rocks and survived.
Why, against the warnings of friends, did the young teacher venture dangerously close to an angry sea? An 1848 copy of the Nashua Telegraph suggests Miss Underhill died “within sight of the same spot” where her fiancé, a man named Roby, had died 10 years earlier. A Methodist minister, also from Chester, Roby “was drowned in a similar manner” at the Isles of Shoals the report suggests. Accident, suicide, risky behavior or wild weather? A week after her disappearance, the woman’s body was discovered on a beach in York, Maine, her bonnet and shawl still in place.
Copyright J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
Two Tragic Muskie Moments