Justice Hathorne's son Joseph subsided into the quiet
of farm-life. The only notable association with his name is, that he
married Sarah Bowditch, a sister of the grandfather of the distinguished
mathematician, Nathaniel Bowditch. But it is in the beginning of the
eighteenth century that the Hathornes begin to appear as mariners. In
the very year of the justice's death, one Captain Ebenezer Hathorne
earned the gloomy celebrity attendant on bringing small-pox to Salem, in
his brig just arrived from the Barbadoes. Possibly, Justice John may
have died from this very infection; and if so, the curse would seem to
have worked with a peculiarly malign appropriateness, by making a member
of his own family the unwilling instrument of his end. By and by a
Captain Benjamin Hathorne is cast away and drowned on the coast, with
four other men. Perhaps it was his son, another Benjamin, who, in 1782,
being one of the crew of an American privateer, "The Chase," captured by
the British, escaped from a prison-ship in the harbor of Charleston, S.
C., with six comrades, one of whom was drowned. Thus, gradually,
originated the traditional career of the men of this family,--"a
gray-headed shipmaster in each generation," as the often-quoted passage
puts it, "retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy
of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast." But the most
eminent among these hardy skippers is Daniel, the son of farmer Joseph,
and grandfather of the author.
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