Sunday, October 18, 2009

By Strangers Honored and By Strangers Mourned

In her book, This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust argues that 19th-cntury Americans spent a lot of time worrying about the disruption of the "good death" during the Civil War. One of their principal concerns was that men regularly died far from home, away from the (often female) family members who should have witnessed their last words, observed the evidence of their salvation, and performed proper mortuary rituals. In many cases, nurses, doctors, and local civilians stood in for absent family members, performing the duties that mothers, wives, and sisters could not.

This same concern occupied the minds of maritime families in earlier decades. When men died at sea or in foreign ports, their family members hoped that they had been attended in their last moments and sometimes imagined attendants into being.

A good example of this concern can be found on a cenotaph in Plymouth, MA. Isaac Wethrell was 19 years old when he died in "Martinico" in January of 1803; his brother William was 22 when he died in St. Thomas two months later. The Wethrell brothers' parents commissioned a single cenotaph for their sons, choosing to honor them with a quotation from Alexander Pope:
By foreign hands, thy dying eyes were closd
By foreign hands, thy decent limbs composd
By foreign hands, they humble grave adornd
By strangers honoured, and by strangers mournd



Erected
to perpetuate the memory
of two sons
of Thomas & Sarah Wethrell
who died in the West Indies.

William Wethrell
Decd at St Thomas
March 23d 1803
Aged 22 years.

Isaac Wethrell
Decd at Martinico
January 23d 1803
Aged 19 years.


By foreign hands, thy dying eyes were closd
By foreign hands, thy decent limbs composd
By foreign hands, they humble grave adornd
By strangers honoured, and by strangers mournd

3 comments:

VJESCI said...

http://www.aplacetoburystrangers.com/

Robert J. said...

I think one of the most stunning memorials written "by foreign hands" is the Ataturk memorial to the Anzac soldiers killed at Gallipoli -- men who had been his enemies:

"Those heroes who shed their blood and lost their lives, you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours. You, the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears, your sons are now lying in our bosoms and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they become our sons as well."

In sight of Troy, three thousand years later, it's hard not to hear the voice of Hector:

"Achaeans there may give him funeral and heap a mound for him by Helle's water. One day a man on shipboard, sailing by on the wine-dark sea, will point landward and say: 'There is the death-mound of an ancient man, a hero who fought Hector and was slain.' Someone will say that someday. And the honor won by me here will never pass away."

Caitlin GD Hopkins said...

Thanks for the link. It's a beautiful inscription and a beautiful view, though the monument itself is a bit clunky.