A sketch of the life of Elizabeth Emmons, or The female sailor. :
Who was brutally murdered while at sea, off the coast of Florida, February 3d, 1841.
Description
- Language(s)
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English
- Published
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Boston: : Published by Graves & Bartlett., 1841.
- Edition
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Second edition.
- Note
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"Extract from a letter" dated "Key West, February 5th, 1841," communicating death of Elizabeth Emmons (pages [35]-36) signed: S.L.
False imprint and copyright. Neither the firm of Graves & Bartlett, nor the individual names of Lyman Graves and Frederick Bartlett appear in the Boston directory.
"[Entered according to act of Congress, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-one, by Lyman Graves and Frederick Bartlett, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.]"--Verso of title page (p. [ii]]).
Apparently fictitious. None of the "facts" of Elizabeth Emmons' life, that she was born on April 21, 1817, that she was the daughter of Nathaniel and Jane Emmons of Boston, that her father was a jeweler who lost his business, home and life as the result of intemperance, and that she sailed aboard the Swift from Boston on May 3, 1835, can be substantiated. Nathaniel Emmons, clerk at the Union Bank, and Nathaniel H. Emmons, partner in the firm of T.B. Wales & Co., merchants, are listed in the Boston directories for many years. Neither had a wife named Jane. Interestingly, the 1841 Boston directory, and only that directory, lists, in addition to the abovementioned Nathaniel and Nathaniel H. Emmons, a Nathaniel Emmons, jeweler, boarding at no. 6 Distil-House Square. May 3rd fell on a Sunday in 1835, and no ships sailed on Sundays. No ships named Swift cleared on May 2nd or 4th either. Finally, no story about the murder of a female sailor could be found in the Boston daily advertiser during February 1841.
- Physical Description
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iv, [1], 6-36 pages, [1] leaf of plates :
frontispiece portrait ;
17 cm.
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University of Michigan
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