The Recluse of St. Helena

St. Helena stamp commemorating Fernao Lopes

History is full of “castaway” stories.  However, few are as remarkable as the life of a now little-remembered man named Fernão Lopes.  He made Robinson Crusoe look like a day-tripper.

Lopes was born into the Portuguese aristocracy sometime around 1480.  He grew up during Portugal’s Golden Age, when the country was expanding its influence throughout Europe.  Among the areas colonized by the Portuguese was Goa, a state on the southwestern coast of India.  

Lopes first entered history in 1506, when he set out for India as part of the 8th Armada, led by one Tristao da Cunha.  It’s believed that Lopes was a converted Jew.  At the time, Jews were suffering severe persecution, but considering that Lopes was performing active military duty for his king, he was granted a certain amount of immunity.  Also sailing with the Armada was a military commander named Alfonso Albuquerque, who carried with him secret orders to become Goa’s new viceroy.  Albuquerque was a skilled general, but brutal and ruthless, and there are some hints that an immediate friction developed between him and Lopes.

Lopes would come to deeply regret that.

When the fleet arrived at Goa, Albuquerque had little trouble asserting his authority over the region.  After a time, he moved on to deal with other matters, leaving Lopes and other troops to guard their fort.  In 1512, the king of Bijapur sent an army to reconquer Goa.   Their leader, Rasul Khan, launched a siege of Goa, cutting off food supplies to the Portuguese soldiers.

The Portuguese soon found themselves in an utterly miserable situation.  They had not been paid in months, and were now facing imminent starvation.  To save themselves, Lopes and around 70 other soldiers defected.  They converted to Islam and joined the Bijapur army.  (It has been suggested that as Lopes and many other Portuguese soldiers were married to Goa women, this also influenced their decision.)

When Albuquerque heard of this disaster, he naturally launched a counterattack, which resulted in a military stalemate.  The peace terms included the requirement that the turncoat Portuguese men be handed over to Albuquerque, on the condition that their lives were spared.  

Albuquerque, technically speaking, followed this agreement.  He did not execute the renegade soldiers.  Instead, he did something even worse.  Lopes and his confederates were horrifically tortured for three straight days.  Half the men died.  As Lopes was considered the leader of the group, his punishment was the most savage of all.  In the public square, his ears and nose were cut off, along with his right foot and left thumb.  His hair and beard were scraped off by clam shells and pig excrement was spread over his body.  When the ordeal was finally over, Lopes and the few other maimed prisoners who were (arguably) unlucky enough to have survived were cast out to fend for themselves.

For the next two years, Lopes somehow managed to survive by begging for food.  (It is unknown what happened to his wife.)  After hearing of Albuquerque’s death in December 1515, Lopes decided it was safe to return home.  In early 1516, he boarded a ship bound for Lisbon.

Along the way, his ship made a stop at the island of St. Helena.  The island--which was so tiny and remote it was not discovered until 1502--was uninhabited, but as it was rich in trees and fresh water, the Portuguese armadas frequently made brief stops there for water.

As soon as Lopes’ ship arrived at the island, he made a fateful decision--whether it was one he planned in advance or did out of a sudden impulse can never be known.  He quietly sneaked off the ship and disappeared into the forest.  The captain, who had become friendly with Lopes, ordered that the island be searched for him, but the disfigured ex-soldier had hidden himself well.  The others had no choice but to leave him behind.  The captain left food and other supplies for Lopes, along with a note alerting any other ships that might stop by that the island had a new resident, and he should not be harmed.

For the next 14 years, Lopes lived on St. Helena in complete solitude.  His only companion at during this period was a rooster who had managed to swim ashore after falling off a ship.  It is said he domesticated the rooster as a pet.  His existence became known to other Portuguese ships that stopped at the island.  They would often leave Lopes provisions, including livestock and seeds, but he avoided any direct contact with them. 

If you’re going to divorce yourself from the human race, St. Helena is among the pleasanter places to do so.  The climate was temperate, the ground fertile.  Lopes planted various fruit trees and raised livestock.  Before long, the ships that stopped off at the island were able to get not just water, but fresh fruit and meat.  Lopes gradually became less fearful of visitors, occasionally talking to the sailors who came ashore.  Back in Portugal, the hermit of St. Helena became an almost legendary figure.  His mutilated body--symbol of his martyrdom--and insistence on solitude led him to be seen as an almost saintly figure.

Lopes’ fame became so great that in 1531, the Portuguese king, Joao III, requested a meeting with him.  Lopes was unhappy about returning to Lisbon, but he obviously had no choice in the matter.  After visiting the king and queen, Lopes traveled to Rome, where he met with Pope Clement VI.  The Pope absolved him of his earlier “sin” of apostasy, and issued a proclamation that Lopes should be granted his one request: to go back to St. Helena and be left quite alone.

By the end of 1531, Lopes was back at his island refuge, where he remained until his death in 1545.  It is not known if he was buried on St. Helena or in Portugal, but I think the former is much more likely.  It seems certain that this is what Lopes himself would have wanted.

There has been some speculation about why Lopes chose to spend the last 30 years of his life in isolation, but to me it seems obvious: after his horrific experience at the hands of Alfonso Albuquerque, Lopes must have had the mother of all cases of what we today would call PTSD.  After what humans did to his body and soul, it is small wonder that he would not want to have anything to do with them ever again.  He must have felt that the remote Eden of St. Helena was his only hope for safety and some measure of peace.  Perhaps even happiness.

From the little we know, it’s possible that this hope was fulfilled.

The Hermit of Maple Island

"Cape Vincent Eagle," December 22, 1927

One day in the spring of 1865, a stranger arrived in a small Northern New York hamlet called Fishers Landing.  He was so silent and secretive, it ironically earned him what was undoubtedly unwanted attention.  Years later, a Watertown newspaper recalled that the visitor was “very reticent and refused to talk of cities he had visited or say where his home was located.”  This curious traveler was no ordinary vagrant--he was well-dressed, intelligent, and was obviously what used to be called “a gentleman.”  He was described as about thirty, with swarthy skin, black hair and a noticeable southern accent.

The man took a hotel room, where he holed up for some days.  Then, he moved to Clayton’s Maple Island, in the middle of the St. Lawrence River.  He built a crude lumber hut, which, as it turned out, would be his home for the rest of his days.  He almost completely disappeared from human view, with no company except a supply of books and his violin.  He only left the island to make rare visits to local farms to buy food and other basic necessities.  He paid for his purchases with British gold.

One night in the fall of 1865, the area was hit by a violent storm.  When it was observed that a fire had broken out on Maple Island, those on shore assumed it had been struck by lightning.  Then, three or four men could be seen running around the island, presumably Good Samaritans helping Maple Island’s sole resident escape the flames.

The next morning, when some of the locals went to the island to offer assistance to the hermit, they found that something far grimmer had taken place.  The hut had been burned down, and his boat and stash of gold pieces were missing.  The hermit’s body was found near the shore on the opposite side of the island.  He had been, in a reporter’s graphic words, “literally chopped to pieces with an ax or other sharp weapon.”  

Although it was assumed that the motive for the murder was robbery, no one had any idea who committed this gruesome deed.  It was said that a week before the murder, three strangers with southern accents had arrived in the area.  On the day of the murder, they rented a boat.  After they returned the boat late that night, they hired someone to row them to Alexander Bay.  They were never seen again.  If these were indeed the hermit’s killers, it does not appear that anyone even tried to have them traced.  After the coroner gave the mangled remains a cursory examination and the corpse was buried on a strip of sandy beach near the burned out-hut, the investigation into this killing was essentially over.  (Regarding this burial, in 1891, a local resident claimed that in 1877 “a certain Wall Street broker, now dead,” had robbed the grave of the hermit’s skull, which he had made into a tobacco box.)

In the years following the hermit’s death, people have had a great deal of fun speculating about who this man was and why he was killed.  According to some reports, his murderers had slashed his chest with three crosses in the shape of a triangle.  This was known to be the symbol of the Knights of the Golden Circle, a pro-Southern, pro-secession secret society.  That led to the theory that the murder of the hermit was some sort of assassination carried out by the Knights.  Many people found it plausible that this reclusive southern gentleman was somehow involved with that ever-popular inspiration for wild legends, the Lincoln Assassination.  In 1896, the “Watertown Re-Union” pointed out that Jake Thompson, a Toronto-based agent for the Confederacy, had paid John Surratt $100,000 in English gold to help assassinate Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and other Union leaders.  Surratt was accompanied by John A. Payne, brother of Lewis Payne, who would later be hanged for his attempted assassination of William Henry Seward.  John Payne was said to be the treasurer of the Knights of the Golden Circle.

Some authorities came to believe that the hermit may well have been John Payne.  According to this scenario, it was Payne who was actually given the $100,000 which was meant to be divided up among the would-be assassins.  Instead, Payne fled with the gold and hid himself on Maple Island, hoping to remain invisible until the coast was clear.  Unfortunately for him, his former co-conspirators succeeded in tracking him down, whereupon they took their bloody revenge.

For what it’s worth, this story was corroborated years later by one Robert McAdam.  As he was on his deathbed, he confided to a friend that he had been another member of the secret society to which Payne belonged.  McAdam and Payne had been part of the plot to kill Lincoln.  McAdam was supposed to get a share in the gold Payne had received.  After Payne betrayed them, he had been one of the three men who had killed him.  After all, by running off with the gold, Payne had broken his oath of loyalty to the Knights, which, according to the rules of the society, meant death.

In 1914, the daughter of a now-dead woman named Jenny Hickey shared her mother’s story.  Hickey had been a dairy maid at one of the farms which sold food to the hermit.  She was often assigned to deliver these goods to the hermit’s island hut.  As the man was handsome and personable, she enjoyed making these visits.

Understandably, Jenny became very curious about why such a charming and cultured man chose such a lonely, sparse existence.  When she questioned him, he was reluctant to share anything about himself, but she was able to learn that he had fought for the Confederacy under Stonewall Jackson and Lee.  He showed her a book of Confederate war songs, revealing that he was the author of one of them, the “Death of Jackson.”  The songwriter was listed as  “John A. Payne.”  The hermit begged Hickey to never reveal his identity, as it could well cost him his life.  A few days later, Hickey’s sailor fiance returned home after a long voyage, and they were soon married.  She never returned to the farm, and never saw the hermit again.

However, local historian A.E. Keech dismissed all the Payne stories as “pure fiction.”  Keech also refuted the allegations that the hermit’s body had been found mutilated with crosses.  According to him, after the fire on the island, the hermit merely vanished forever.  He believed the mysterious man was really another southerner, Godfrey J. Hyams.  During the Civil War, Hyams was first assistant to Toronto’s chief Confederate commissioner.  In 1864, he learned of the Confederate plot to burn down New York City, and tipped off the Federal authorities.  As a reward for this bit of double-dealing, he was paid $100,000 in cash, after which he wisely fled town.  On his way to Halifax, he realized he was being followed, so he changed his route and sought an obscure hiding place, which he found on Maple Island.  As with the Payne theory, the Keech scenario has him murdered by the men he had betrayed, with his body either spirited away or lying on the bottom of the river.

Was the hermit a former Confederate who paid the ultimate price for disloyalty to his friends?  Or, more prosaically, was he just some ordinary uninteresting citizen with, for whatever reason, a strong taste for solitude?  (To be frank, I lean toward the latter.)  In either case, the tale of the Hermit of Maple Island provides New York’s Thousand Islands region with its most colorful legend.