Shipwrecked Orphan Leaves Legacy

Some days, when the tide swells and the sands shift, when the waves crash so loudly it seems the whole island will be swallowed by the Atlantic, a small, dark-haired woman walks alone along the beach.

She doesn’t search for Spanish coins as other islanders do, nor the treasure chest that legend says is buried between the bluffs. No, Ernestine Holston has just one thing on her mind as she sinks into the sand and whispers her wind-swept prayer: a small boy washed ashore from a Spanish wreck nearly 200 years ago.

Tears in her eyes, Holston tells how the boy’s mother strapped him to a hatch cover and desperately pushed him into the ocean as their ship went down. Islanders found him on this beach, an olive-skinned child with a shock of black hair who spoke a few words in a language no one understood.

They reared him as one of their own.

They called him James Alone.

Changes Name to Lunn

The boy grew up like other boys, gathering oysters and digging for clams, roaming the piney marshes of Assateague, becoming as much a part of island life as the shaggy wild ponies and the tales of treasure and the howling ocean winds.

One day when he was about 20, James Alone rowed to the mainland and walked 30 miles to the county courthouse in Accomac. He changed his name to James Lunn. Then he made his way back to the island and never left again.

Assateague has always swirled with shipwreck lore, from the wild ponies that legend says swam ashore from a Spanish wreck, to the gold-filled chests that pirate Charles Wilson is said to have buried on a bluff. But the story of James Alone endures in a much more personal way.

For, as Holston’s grandmother told her when she was a child, it’s not just the wild ponies that have Spanish blood.

So do hundreds of islanders.

James Lunn married twice and had four children: James T. Lunn, John Pernell Lunn, Delany Lunn and Comfort Lunn. They married and had children of their own, and their children had children. Their descendants moved to the neighboring island of Chincoteague, where today about 25% of the population of 3,500 can trace their roots to the first Lunn. The “Mediterranean Chincoteaguers,” they are called, with their bronze skin.

Barretts and Birches and Hills and Clarks and, of course, the Lunns themselves. James Alone’s descendants are everywhere: watermen and horsemen, restaurant owners and motel operators. They work in the Coast Guard and at the mainland NASA base and in the National Park Service. They fish in the scallop boats, preach in the churches, teach in the schools.

“Nearly everyone on this island is connected,” Ernestine Holston says, shaking her head in wonderment, “all because of one child.”

But it took many years, and the intervention of an outsider, before those connections unfolded.

Ernestine was 12 when her grandmother showed her the spot where the Spanish boy was found. She told her about growing up on Assateague, how the Lunns and all the other families had moved to Chincoteague in the early 1900s, forced off their island by an absentee landowner who closed access to the best clam beds. She described life in the village, nestled beneath the red and white lighthouse, where James Alone had grown up. The village is in ruins now. The cemetery, where he is believed to be buried, is overgrown.

She handed Ernestine the family Bible, thick, leather-bound, its pages yellow and crumbling with age. Tucked inside is an obituary, printed on the stationery of J.T. Lunn & Sons, Planters and Packers of Fancy Oysters and Clams. It reports the 1913 drowning of the company’s owner, James T. Lunn, Ernestine’s grandfather. And it tells how his father washed ashore from “a stranded French bark.”

“That,” Holston says, “is how I learned where I was from.”

The facts have been revised over time, and Holston now believes, as others do, that James Alone came from a Spanish treasure ship called the Juno, which sank in 1802. There is no record of a French wreck off Assateague.

Holston opens a scroll of brown paper that seems to unravel forever. Names tumble over it, falling across the page in rough genealogical formations, about 350 scratched in her late husband’s handwriting. He was so intrigued by the James Alone story that he spent his last 20 years researching it.

“My husband used to say that everyone on Chincoteague is on this chart,” Holston says. “Or connected to someone on it.”

A Curious Stranger

But her husband didn’t talk much about his research, and the connections might have remained locked away if a stranger hadn’t sailed to Chincoteague in 1996.

Ben Benson is far from a typical “come here,” the islanders’ term for outsiders who settle on Chincoteague. Tanned and genial, the 41-year-old ex-Navy submariner, who made his money in the timber industry, came searching for two things: solitude and shipwrecks. After a couple of heart attacks, Benson abandoned corporate life for the ocean. He planned to test his underwater equipment in the murky waters off Chincoteague before trolling for treasure in the Caribbean.

Four years later, he’s still on Chincoteague, immersed in a search for Spanish treasure and in the tale of the Spanish castaway.

“When I first came here, I’d never heard of the Juno,” Benson said, “and I certainly hadn’t heard of James Alone.”

Littered around his office are pictures of Spanish galleons, old shipping records and a flaming-red sonar image of the wreck Benson believes is the Juno. The 34-gun Spanish frigate, en route from Puerto Rico to Cadiz, sank in a fierce storm in 1802. It was carrying 425 passengers, including Spanish soldiers (the Third African infantry battalion) and some of their wives and children. Records indicate that it also carried chests of silver and gold.

For three days, the Juno lurched helplessly in the surf. Legend says islanders could hear the cries of the doomed as it vanished in the fog.

Benson learned about the tragedy after his equipment detected a wreck, buried in shallow waters, about 1,500 feet from Assateague.

Fisherman directed him to a huge 18th-century anchor, snagged in nets in 1989 and now propped outside Captain Bob Payne’s ramshackle souvenir store. Attached to the anchor, in a crust of barnacles, was a pewter plate. A name faintly engraved on the back seemed to spell JUNO.

Clues Surface

Islanders have a tradition of beachcombing after a storm, gathering whatever bits of history the ocean throws up. They are cautious about showing their treasures to outsiders, afraid the government will lay claim to the bounty.

But when Benson placed an ad in the Chincoteague Beacon, offering $1,000 for information about Spanish wrecks, islanders flocked to his office. They brought pieces of eight, muskets, an ornately carved table, an anchor.

And they brought the story of James Alone.

The coins were from the late 18th century. The marriage records of James Lone Lunn, dated 1835 and 1842, fit the time frame. He would have been a young boy when the ship went down.

Benson borrowed Holston’s chart, hiring genealogists to research it further. He sent researchers to probe archives in Spain, Puerto Rico and Virginia. He found documents relating to the Juno, newspaper accounts of its sinking, official letters of condolence and the names of those who perished, including Captain Don Juan Ignacio Bustillo.

With permission from the state of Virginia, Benson dove on the site, recovering anchors, musket balls, coins, pewter plates, even a small cannon. He was forced to stop when Spain claimed jurisdiction over the site.

But he hasn’t stopped researching the story of James Alone or seeking out Lunn descendants, many of whom hope Benson will eventually trace the identity of theboy’s parents. Benson has already narrowed it down to three couples on the ship.

“When Mr. Benson came to Chincoteague, he cut quite a path,” says James T. “Jimmy” Lunn III, who runs a mobile home park in Accomac. Lunn, the great-grandson of James Alone, knew little about the story until Benson sought him out.

Jimmy Lunn didn’t grow up on Chincoteague; his father left the island before he was born. But he visited often enough, and still does. His head is full of Lunn memories, weekends he spent with his father driving over the four-mile-long bridge from the mainland to Chincoteague for great family gatherings at his Uncle Elmer’s house.

Jimmy remembers Elmer, who was in the Coast Guard. And Minnie, his sister, who married a Watson. And Lillie, Holston’s mother. And the cousins.

Many of the Lunns settled on Ridge Road, alongside the Daisys. Descendants of both families still live there today, despite the fact that in 1929 Archie Lunn killed Dexter Daisy with his bare fists. The fight was over a woman--Molly Mason, Archie Lunn’s wife.

“I think there was drinking involved,” says Lillie Birch, 78, whose house is decorated with old photographs of the Lunns, her family.

On this evening, Birch will join Holston and Gloria Tull, both great-granddaughters of James Alone, for dinner. They’ll catch the early bird special at Etta’s Restaurant, run by Janet Gadow, another Lunn descendant. Next morning, they might buy fresh shrimp at Bill Clark’s stand on Maddox Boulevard. His great-grandmother was Comfort Lunn.

And on and on all over Chincoteague, from Don’s Seafood restaurant, where owner Tommy Earl Clark (great-great-great-grandson of James Alone) nurses his organic baby clams, to the Island Motor Inn, where Ann Stubbs (great-great-great-granddaughter of James Alone) marvels at how many islanders she is related to.

A Mother’s Courage

And to Holston, poring over her husband’s chart in her red-brick house on the north corner of the island. Sometimes, especially after a storm, she makes a solemn pilgrimage to Assateague to gaze at the ocean and ponder the last act of a desperate mother who strapped her child to a piece of wood and pushed him into the waves.

“Because of her bravery,” Holston says, “we are all here today.”

A mile or so from Holston’s house, on a tiny porch on Ridge Road, a 6-month-old baby frolics in the sun. He’s a striking child who inherited his mother’s dark beauty and blazing eyes. His name is Lane. One day, his mother will tell him the story of the boy who washed ashore from a Spanish wreck, the one islanders found on the beach, the one they reared as their own. Lane’s great-great-great- great-great-grandfather.

The boy they called James Alone.

Chincoteague Island home page:

https://www.chincoteague.com