Edward H. Smith

“ Indeed, unless probability be false and romance true, “the most brilliant woman of her day in America” perished at sea a little more than a hundred and fifteen years ago, caught off the Virginia Capes in a hurricane that scattered the British war fleet and crushed the “miserable little pilot boat” that was trying to bear her to New York. In that more than a century of intervening time, however, a tradition of doubt has clouded itself about the quietus of Aaron Burr’s celebrated daughter which puts her story immovably upon the roster of the great mysteries of disappearance. ”

“ Even where research seems to arrive at positive results, the general will cling to their puzzlement, for a romantic mystery is always sweeter than a sordid fact.
Even in the modern world, so closely organized, so completely explored and so prodigiously policed, those enigmas continue to pile up. In our day it is an axiom that nothing is harder to lose sight of than a ship at sea or a man on land. ”

“ No one who was not alive in the late nineties of the last century and of age to read and be thrilled, can have any conception of the wonder and excitement this man and his voyage caused, of the cloud of doubt and mystery which hung about his still unexplained end, of the rumors and tales that came out of the North year after year, of the expeditions that started out to solve the riddle, of the whole decade of slowly abating preoccupation with the terrible romance of this singular man and his undiscoverable end. ”

“ Shipping in the Atlantic was in a perilous way and excitement was high among newspaper readers ashore, who watched the game of hide and seek with all the interest of spectators at some magnificent sporting event. Nor was the sympathy all against the German, for the odds were too heavy. The wildest rumors were floating in by every craft that reached port from the Southern Atlantic, by radio and by cable. On October 27, a Ward Line boat came into New York with the report that she had observed a night battle off the Virginia Capes between the German raider and British men-of-war. ”

“ From the Phoenicians who stole babes to feed to their bloody divinities, the Minoans who raped the youth of Greece for their bull-fights, and the priests of many lands who demanded maidens to satisfy the wrath of their gods and the lust of their flesh, down to the European Gypsies, who sometimes steal, or are said to steal, children for bridal gifts, we have this dread vein running through the body of our history. ”

“ The death of Miss Arnold’s father once more set the rumor mongers to work and a variety of tales, bolder than had been uttered before, were circulated through the demi-world of New York and hinted in the newspapers. These rumors have not been printed directly and there has thus been no need of denial on part of the family. It must be said at once that they are mere bruits, mere attempts on the part of the cynical town to invent a set of circumstances to fit what few facts and alleged facts are known. ”

“ The public excitement was nigh boundless, and ingenious fabulations or diseased imaginings came pouring in upon the harried police and the distracted parents with every mail.
Rumors and false alarms multiplied enormously. As the story of the young woman’s disappearance continued to occupy the leading columns of the daily papers, day upon day, the disordered fancy of the unstable elements of the population came into vigorous play. ”

“ Leaving aside the ships, which are a small part of our argument, we may note that, for all the difficulty, thousands of human beings try to vanish every year. Plainly there are many circumstances, many crises in the lives of men, women and children, that make a complete detachment and forgottenness desirable, nay, imperative. Yet, of the twenty-five thousand persons reported missing to the police of the City of New York every year, to take an instance, only a few remain permanently undiscovered. ”

“ As a matter of fact, never a year passes without the loss of some ship somewhere in the wild expanse of the world’s waters. Boats go down, leaving usually at least some indirect evidence of their fate. Now and again, as in the case of the Archduke Johann Salvator’s Santa Margarita and Roger Tichborne’s schooner Bella, not a survivor lives to tell the tale nor is any bit of wreckage found to give indication. Here we have the genuine marine mystery. ”

“ John Bentley, the director of public safety in Jersey City, and Captain Rooney of the Jersey City police, found that these Gypsies, two or three men and one woman, known sometimes as Cruze and sometimes as Costello, had suddenly left the carnival show. It could be traced, but not they. But the mere fact that there had been Gypsies in the neighborhood was enough to give fresh life to the old fable. Gypsies stole children to bring luck to the tribe. Ergo, they had taken Jimmie Glass, and the way to find him was to run these nomads to earth and force them to give up the child. ”

“ There had been no demand for his ransom. No doubt Small had gone away for reasons sufficient unto himself. Probably his wife understood these impulsions better than she would say. There were rumors of infelicity in the Small home, and these proved later to be well grounded. The police simply felt that they would not be made ridiculous. Neither did they want to stir up a sensation, only to have Small return and spill his wrath upon their innocent heads.
But the days spun out, and still there was no news of the missing man. Many began to turn from their original attitude of knowing skepticism. ”

“ The original enigma of the fate of Roger Tichborne, upon which this colossal structure of fraud and legal intricacy was founded, received, to be sure, not the slightest clarification from all the pother and feverish investigating. If ever there had been any good reason to doubt that the young Hampshire aristocrat went helplessly down with the stricken Bella and her fated crew, none remained after the trials and the stupendous publicity they invoked. ”

“ Nothing except a natural cataclysm is so excitant of mass terror as the first suggestion that there are child-stealers abroad. What fevers and rages of the public temper may result from such crimes will be seen from some of what follows. The most celebrated instance is, of course, the affair of Charlie Ross of Philadelphia, which carries us back more than half a century. We have here the classic American kidnapping case, already a tradition, rich in all the elements that make the perfect abduction tale. ”

“ Clarke naturally tore the letter open with quaking fingers and read:
“Mrs Clark: Do not look for your nurse and baby. They are safe in our possession, where they will remain for the present. If the matter is kept out of the hands of the police and newspapers, you will get your baby back, safe and sound.
“If, instead, you make a big time about it and publish it all over, we will see to it that you never see her alive again. We are driven to this by the fact that we cannot get work, and one of us has a child dying through want of proper treatment and nourishment. ”

“ Parents refused to allow their children out of doors without escort; rich men called up at all hours of the day and night, demanding special police to protect their homes; excited women throughout the city and later throughout the State and surrounding communities proceeded to interpret the apparition of every stranger as evidence of kidnappers and to bombard the police of a hundred towns and cities with frantic appeals. The absence of this obscure child had become a public catastrophe. ”

“ Some urgent whip of that divine vice, our curiosity, drives us to the exploration and will not relent until we discover whether they have been devoured by the Polyphemus of crime, bestialized by some profane Circe or simply made drunk with the Lethe of change and remoteness.
The unreturning adventurer—the man whose destiny is hid in doubt—has tormented the imagination in every century. In life the lost comrade wakes a more poignant curiosity than the returning Odysseus. ”

“ Perhaps, in some year to come, approaching death will open the lips of one or another who knows the secret and has been sealed to silence by the fears and needs of life. But it is just as likely that the words of her dying parent contain as much as can be known of the truth about the missing Dorothy Arnold. ”

“ So Masilewski went to work. Carefully and slowly he traced back the stories of Barbara Ubrik’s mother, the exchanged babies, the theft by the old Jew and the captivity with the Gypsies. He discovered the record of Barbara’s parents’ marriage, got the young nun’s birth certificate, learned about her admittance to the convent, the part played in her life by Father Gratian and the early chastisement. How he did these things one needs hardly to recount, but unrelenting care and watchful judgment were necessary. He must never let the enemies of the nun know that a detective was at work. ”

“ There would be a smudge of smoke on the horizon and within minutes the long slender German cruiser would come churning up out of the distance with the speed of an express train, firing a shot across the bows and signalling for the surrender of the trader. The prize crew came aboard, always acting with the most punctilious politeness and treating crew and passengers with apologetic kindness. ”

“ In the following decades many strange rumors were bruited, many false trails followed to their empty endings, and many spurious or unbalanced claimants investigated and exposed. The Charlie Ross fever did not die down for a full generation, and even to-day mothers in the outlying States frighten their children into obedience with the name and rumor of this stolen boy. He has become a fearful tradition, a figure of pathos and terror for the generations. ”

“ Yet Andrée was prepared to steer his balloon after a fashion. His gondola was, as already said, oblong, with a front and back. The front was provided with two portholes fitted with heavy glass, through which the explorer hoped to make observations in the course of his flight. As a practical balloonist, he knew that, once his car was in the air, the great bag was almost certain to begin spinning and to travel through the air at various speeds, increasing the rate of its giddy rotations as its rate of travel grew greater. ”

“ These are the peculiarities which mark the Dorothy Arnold case as one of the most irritating puzzles of modern police history, a true mystery of the missing.
It is one of the maxims in the administration of absent-persons bureaus that disappearing men and women, no matter how carefully they may plan, regardless of all natural astuteness, invariably leave behind some token of their premeditation. ”

“ No doubt the kidnappers would soon appear now. They had probably chosen this locality, with the swift trains running by, for their rendezvous. Once possessed of the gold, they would catch the next flyer for either coast and be gone out of the reach of local police. Perhaps they would even have the missing boy with them and surrender him as soon as they had been paid the ransom.
Thus buoyed and heartened, the father drove on. Suddenly the road entered a cleft between two abrupt hills or butts. A sense of impendency oppressed the lonely driver. ”

“ Ross relied absolutely on the police and put himself into their hands. He asked how he was to reply to the third letter and was told that he should pretend to acquiesce in the demand of the abductors, meantime actually holding them off and relying on the detectives to find the boy. But this subterfuge was quickly recognized by the abductors, with the result that a warning letter came to Mr. Ross at the end of a few days. He was told that he was pursuing the course of folly, that the detectives could not help him, and that he must choose at once between his money and the life of his child. ”