CRANSTON, R.I. -- Rhode Island legend tells of a spectral ship that haunts the waters off Block Island, bursting into flame and sinking into the ocean.
Depending on the version of the story, the ship augurs bad weather, and may also appear on the Saturday between Christmas and New Year's.
The tales hold that the ship is the ghost of one that wrecked on the island's northern point shortly after Christmas 1738.
And while there's good evidence that a British ship, the Princess Augusta, carrying a load of passengers from territory that would become Germany, ran aground on the island on Dec. 27, 1738, there's accord on little else about the incident.
A deposition taken from the ship's crew shortly after the incident -- and republished in 1939 -- tells of a voyage in which provisions were scarce, half the crew had died, and others were hobbled by the extreme cold.
In the document, crew members said a heavy snowstorm drove the ship aground. They testified that Captain Andrew Brook encouraged those on the ship to save what they could of it and its cargo ''both before and after She broke to Pieces. . . ."
According to folklorist Michael Bell, of Cranston, within the century after the incident, two versions of the story became popular.
The on-island version told of the residents' generosity rescuing and nursing back to health the ill and starving passengers, who had been abused and exploited by the captain or the crew. The other version was immortalized by the 19th-century poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier, who was born near Haverhill, Mass.
Whittier's ''The Palatine" appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1867. In it, Block Islanders recall the wreck -- and some islanders' roles in causing it by igniting false signal lights to draw the ship aground.
Then, according to the poet, they plundered the ship ''like birds of prey/Tearing the heart of the ship away,/And the dead never had a word to say/And then, with a ghastly shimmer and shine/Over the rocks and the seething brine,/They burned the wreck of the Palatine."
A year after the wreck, in another storm, the Palatine -- apparently called by that name because it carried immigrants from the Palatinate -- reappeared in flames.
In the poet's account, a century after the wreck and plundering, the islanders are still haunted by a blazing ghost ship which appears on some moonless nights.
It's not a flattering portrait, and it clearly rankled islanders of the poet's day.
In his 1877 history of the island, Samuel Livermore tried to refute Whittier's version of the Palatine disaster.
''Poetic fiction has given the public a very wrong view of this occurrence, and thus a wrong impression of the Islanders has been obtained," Livermore wrote.
