In November, 1729, one Captain Lothrop, Boston to Martha’s Vineyard, espied off Monomoy a vessel in distress, and boarding her discovered shocking evidence of her state. Of the one hundred and ninety souls who had set sail from Ireland for the port of Philadelphia, no less than one hundred, including all the children but one, had died of starvation. Twenty weeks they had been afloat, and were out of both water and food. “They entreated him to pilot them into the first harbor they could get into, and were all urgent to put them ashore anywhere, if it were but land.” Lothrop would have taken them to Boston, but, when they threatened to throw him into the sea, landed them hastily with some provisions, at Sandy Point where there was but one house. A writer in a current number of the “New England Weekly Journal” remarks that “notwithstanding their extremity, ’twas astounding to behold their impenitence, and to hear their profane speeches.” Their captain proceeded to Philadelphia where he was arrested for cruelty to passengers and crew, sent in irons to Dublin, and met his just deserts by being hanged and quartered. The one young survivor of that wretched company, James Delap, found his way to Barnstable, and was apprenticed to a blacksmith there. In due time he married Mary O’Kelley, of Yarmouth, and in winter practised his trade, in summer was a seaman on the Boston packet. This Irishman was something of a Tory, and in 1775 emigrated to Nova Scotia where he died. A son, master of a vessel in the king’s service, perished on Nantucket where his boat was wrecked in a furious blizzard; two of his daughters married in Barnstable. When the emigration of loyalists was well under way, boat after boat, crowded far beyond safety, set out from Boston and New York for Nova Scotia, where, as one such traveller said, “it’s winter nine months of the year, and cold weather the rest of the time”; and where, even were they fortunate enough to escape disease or starvation or wreck on the voyage, they were to suffer privations beyond any the early Pilgrims endured. In March, 1776, “a sloop loaded with English goods, having sailed from Boston for Halifax, with sundry Tories and a large number of women and children, some of whom were sick with smallpox,” was cast ashore at Provincetown. Nathaniel Freeman was one of a committee appointed “to repair forthwith to the place and prevent the escape of the passengers and crew and secure the vessel and cargo,” and the selectmen of Truro shared in the task. What became of the sick women and children we are not told, but we may be reasonably certain that the rancor of the Whigs was not vented on them. Another of these Tory refugee ships was wrecked on Block Island, and it was said that for years after the ghosts of those who perished there could be seen struggling in the surf and their cries heard by men ashore.