Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/294

276 — and a young Italian girl, Celeste Paolini. Misfortune soon began; Captain Hasty sickened and died of malignant small-pox, and was buried beneath the waves in the harbor of Gibraltar. There they were detained a week by adverse winds, setting sail again June 9. Two days after, little Angelo was also attacked with small-pox, and was restored with difficulty. At noon of July 18 they were off the coast of New Jersey; the weather was thick, the officer in command steered east-north-east, hoping, with the southeast wind that was blowing, to be next morning in a position to take a pilot and run before the wind past Sandy Hook. So sure was he, that they packed their trunks for landing. By nine there was a gale, by midnight a hurricane; but the commander kept the vessel close-reefed, on her fatal course, till at four o’clock on the morning of July 19 she struck on that fatal Fire Island beach which has engulfed so many.

The story of that shipwreck has been told again and again; nor is it possible now to obtain much new material to remould the description. But to one point it is right to call attention; the too hasty assumption drawn from time to time, in the successive reproductions of the story, that Madame Ossoli sacrificed the lives of the party by her persistent refusal to be separated from husband and child. Had she done so, I know no one who could justly condemn her; it was within her right and her husband’s to elect whether they and their boy