"My father's fortune all came from the sea. He was a seaman, and a
good one. He had money, so he never suffered when he was worn out, but
all are not like that. I want to make a place for the others. I want
it to be a _snug harbour for tired sailors_."
So the will, July 10, 1801, reads that Robert Richard Randall's
property is left to found: "An Asylum or Marine Hospital, to be called
'The Sailors' Snug Harbour,' for the purpose of maintaining aged,
decrepit, worn-out sailors."
One of the witnesses, by the bye, was Henry Brevoort.
The present bust of Randall which stands in the Asylum is, of course,
quite apocryphal as to likeness. No one knows what he looked like, but
out of such odds and ends of information as the knee-buckles and so
on, mentioned in the will, the artistic imagination of St. Gaudens
evolved a veritable beau of a mariner, with knee-buckles positively
resplendent and an Admiral's wig. And, though it may not be a good
likeness, it is an agreeable enough ideal, and I think everyone
approves of it.
Robert Richard Randall is buried down there now and on his monument is
a simple and rather impressive inscription commemorating this charity
which--so it puts it--was "conceived in a spirit of enlarged
Benevolence."
Shortly afterwards he died, but his will, in spite of the inevitable
wrangling and litigation of disgusted relations, lived on, and the
Snug Harbour for Tired Sailors is an accomplished fact. Randall had
meant it to be built on his property there--a good "seeded-to-grass"
farm land,--and thought that the grain and vegetables for the sailor
inmates of this Snug Harbour on land could be grown on the premises.
But the trustees decided to build the institution on Staten Island.
The New York Washington Square property, however, is still called the
Sailors' Snug Harbour Estate, and through its tremendous increase in
value the actual asylum was benefited incalculably. At the time of
Captain Randall's death, the New York estate brought in about $4,000 a
year. Today it is about $400,000,--and every cent goes to that real
Snug Harbour for Tired Sailors out near the blue waters of Staten
Island. So the "honest privateering" fortune has made at least one
impossible seeming dream come true.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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