Chapter II: Part 2

In 1801, just after her father had received the famous tied vote for the Presidency and declined to enter into the conspiracy which aimed to prefer him to Jefferson, recipient of the popular majority, Theodosia Burr was married to Joseph Alston, a young Carolina lawyer and planter who later became governor of his state. Thus, about the time her father was being installed as Vice-President, his happy and adoring daughter, his friend and confidante to the end, was making her twenty days’ journey to her new home in South Carolina, where her husband owned a residence in Charleston and several rice plantations in the northern part of the state.

At the time of the famous duel with Hamilton, in 1804, Burr was still Vice-President, still one of the chief political figures and at the very height of his popularity and fortune, an elevation from which that unfortunate encounter began his dislodgment. Theodosia was in the South with her husband at the time and knew nothing either of the challenge or of the duel itself until weeks after Hamilton was dead.

Of the merits of the Burr-Hamilton controversy or the right and wrong of either man’s conduct little need be said here. As time goes on it becomes more and more apparent that Burr in no way exceeded becoming conduct or violated the gentlemanly code as then practised. Hamilton had been his persistent and by no means always honorable enemy. He had attacked and not infrequently belied his opponent, thwarting him where he could politically and even resorting to the use of his personal connections for the private humiliation of his foe. The answer in 1804 to such tactics was the challenge. Burr gave it and insisted on satisfaction. Hamilton met him on the heights at Weehawken, across the Hudson from New York, and fell mortally wounded at the first exchange, dying thirty-one hours later.

It is evident from a reading of the newspapers of the time and from the celebrated sermon on Hamilton’s death delivered by Dr. Nott, later president of Union College, that duelling was then so common that there existed “a preponderance of opinion in favor of it,” and that the spot at which Hamilton fell was so much in use for affairs of honor that Dr. Nott apostrophized it as “ye tragic shores of Hoboken, crimsoned with the richest blood, I tremble at the crimes you record against us, the annual register of murders which you keep and send up to God!” Nevertheless, the town was shocked by the death of Hamilton, and Burr’s enemies seized the moment to circulate all manner of absurd calumnies which gained general credence and served to undo the victorious antagonist.

It was reported that Hamilton had not fired at all, a story which was refuted by his powder-stained empty pistol. Next it was charged that Burr had coldly shot his opponent down after he had fired into the air. The fact seems to be that Hamilton discharged his weapon a fraction of a second after Burr, just as he was struck by his adversary’s ball. Hamilton’s bullet cut a twig over Burr’s head. The many yarns to the general effect that Burr was a dead shot and had practised secretly for months before he sent the challenge seem also to belong to the realm of fiction. Burr was never an expert with fire-arms, but he was courageous, collected and determined. He had every right to believe, from Hamilton’s past conduct, that his opponent would show him no mercy on the field. Both men were soldiers and acquainted with the code and with the use of weapons.

But Hamilton’s friends were numerous, powerful and bitter. They left nothing undone that might bring upon Burr the fullest measure of public and private reprehension. The results of their campaign were peculiar, inasmuch as Burr lost his influence in the states which had formerly been the seat of his power and gained a high popularity in the comparatively weak new western states, where Hamilton and the Federalist leaders were regarded with hostility. At the expiration of his term of office Burr found himself politically dead and practically exiled by the charges of murder which had been lodged against him both in New York and New Jersey.

The duel and its consequences marked the beginning of the Burr misfortunes. Undoubtedly the ostracism which greeted him after his retirement from office was the immediate fact which moved him to undertake his famous enterprise against the West and Mexico, an adventure that resulted in his trial for treason. The fact that he was acquitted, even with the weight of the government and the personal influence of President Jefferson, his onetime friend, thrown against him, did not save him from still further popular dislike, and he was at length forced to leave the country. It was in the course of this exile in Europe that Theodosia wrote him the well known letter from which I quote an illuminating extract:

“I witness your extraordinary fortitude with new wonder at every new misfortune. Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me so superior, so elevated above other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love and pride, that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I afterwards revert to myself, how insignificant my best qualities appear. My vanity would be greater if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man.”

Burr remained abroad for four years, trying vainly to interest the British government and then Napoleon in various schemes of privateering. The net result of his activities in England was an order to leave the country. Nor did Burr fare any better in France. Napoleon simply refused to receive him and the American’s past acquaintance with and hospitable treatment of the emperor’s brother, once king of Westphalia, failed to avail him. Consequently, Burr slipped back into the United States in 1812, quite like a thief in the night, not certain what reception he might get and even fearful lest Hamilton’s wildest partisans might actually undertake to throw him into jail and try him for the shooting of their chief. The reception he got was hostile and suspicious enough, but there was no attempt to proceed legally.

Theodosia, who had never ceased to work in her father’s interest, writing to everyone she knew and beseeching all those who had been her friends in the days of Burr’s ascendancy, in an effort to clear the way for his return to his native land, was overjoyed at the homecoming of her parent and expressed her pleasure in various charmingly written letters, wherein she promised herself the excitement of a trip to New York as soon as arrangements could be made.

But the Burr cup of misfortune was not yet full. That summer Theodosia’s only child, Aaron Burr Alston, sickened and died in his twelfth year, leaving the mother prostrated and the grandfather, who had doted on the boy, supervised his education and centered all his hopes upon him, bereft of his composure and optimism, possibly for the first time in his varied and tempestuous life. Mrs. Alston’s letters at this time deserve at least quotation:

“A few miserable days past, my dear father, and your late letters would have gladdened my soul; and even now I rejoice in their contents as much as it is possible for me to rejoice at anything; but there is no more joy for me; the world is a blank. I have lost my boy. My child is gone for ever. He expired on the thirtieth of June. My head is not sufficiently collected to say any thing further. May Heaven, by other blessings, make you some amends for the noble grandson you have lost.”

And again:

“Whichever way I turn the same anguish still assails me. You talk of consolation. Ah! you know not what you have lost. I think Omnipotence could give me no equivalent for my boy; no, none--none.”

This was the woman who set out a few months later, sadly emaciated and very weak, to join her father in New York, hoping that she might gain strength and hope again from the burdened but undaunted man who never yet had failed her.

The second war with England was in progress. Theodosia’s husband was governor of South Carolina, general of the state militia and active in the field. He could not leave his post. Accordingly, the plan of making the trip overland in her own coach was abandoned and Mrs. Alston decided to set sail in the _Patriot_, a small schooner which had put into Charleston after a privateering enterprise. Parton says that “she was commanded by an experienced captain and had for a sailing master an old New York pilot, noted for his skill and courage. The vessel was famous for her sailing qualities and it was confidently expected she would perform the voyage to New York in five or six days.” On the other hand, Burr himself referred to the ship bitterly as “the miserable little pilot boat.”

Whatever the precise facts, the _Patriot_ was made ready and Theodosia went aboard with her maid and a personal physician, whom Burr had sent south from New York to attend his daughter on the voyage. The guns of the _Patriot_ had been dismounted and stored below. To give her further ballast and to defray the expenses of the trip, Governor Alston filled the hold with tierces of rice from his plantations. The captain carried a letter from Governor Alston addressed to the commander of the British fleet, which was lying off the Capes, explaining the painful circumstances under which the little schooner was voyaging and requesting safe passage to New York. Thus occupied, the _Patriot_ put out from Charleston on the afternoon of December 30th and crossed the bar on the following morning. Here fact ends and conjecture begins.

When, after the elapse of a week, the _Patriot_ had not reached New York, Burr began to worry and to make inquiries, but nothing was to be discovered. He could not even be sure until the arrival of his son-in-law’s letter, that Theodosia had set sail. Even then, he hoped there might be some mistake. When a second letter from the South made it plain that she had gone on the _Patriot_, Burr still did not abandon hope and we see the picture of this sorely punished man walking every day from his law office in Nassau street to the fashionable promenade at the Battery, where he strolled up and down, oblivious to the hostile or impertinent glances of the vulgar, staring out toward the Narrows--in vain.

The poor little schooner was never seen again nor did any member of her crew reach safety and send word of her end. In due time came the report of the hurricane off Cape Hatteras, three days after the departure of the _Patriot_. Later still it was found that the storm had been of sufficient power to scatter the British fleet and send other vessels to the bottom. In all probability the craft which bore Theodosia had foundered with all hands.

Naturally, every other possibility came to be considered. It was at first believed that the _Patriot_ might have been taken by a British man-of-war and held on account of her previous activities. Before this could be disproved it was suggested that the schooner might readily have been attacked by pirates, since her guns were stored below decks, and Mrs. Alston taken prisoner. Since there were still a few buccaneers in Southern waters, who sporadically took advantage of the preoccupation of the maritime powers with their wars, this theory of Theodosia Alston’s disappearance gained many adherents, chiefly among the romantics, it is true. But the possibility of such a thing was also seriously considered by the husband and for a time by the father, who hoped the unfortunate woman might have been taken to one of the lesser West Indies by some not unfeeling corsair. Surely, she would soon or late make her escape and win her way back to her dear ones. In the end Burr rejected this idea, too.

“No, no,” he said to a friend who revived the fable of the pirates, “she is indeed dead. Were she alive all the prisons in the world could not keep her from her father.”

But the mystery persisted and so the rumors and stories would not down. For a number of years after 1813 the newspapers contained, from time to time, reports from various parts of the world, generally to the effect that a beautiful and cultured woman had been seen aboard a ship supposed to be manned by pirates, that such a woman had been found in a colony of sea refugees in some vaguely described West Indian or South American retreat, or that a woman of English or American characteristics was being detained in an island prison, whither she had been consigned along with a captured piratical crew. The woman was always, by inference at least, Theodosia Burr.

Nor were the persevering Burr calumniators idle, a circumstance which seems to testify to the fear his enemies must have had of this strange and greatly mistaken man. Theodosia Burr had been seen in Europe in company with a British naval officer who was paying her marked attentions; she had been located on an island off Panama, where she was living in contentment as the wife of a buccaneer; she was known to be in Mexico with a new husband who had first been her captor, then her lover and now was in the southern Republic trying to revive Burr’s dream of empire.

The death of Governor Alston in 1816 caused a fresh crop of the old stories to blossom forth and the long deferred demise of Aaron Burr in 1836 released a still more formidable crop of rumors, fables and speculations. It was not until Burr had passed into the grave that there appeared on the American scene a type of romantic who made the next fifty years delightful. He was the old reformed pirate who desecrated his exit into eternity with a Theodosia Burr yarn. The great celebrity of the woman in her lifetime, the tragic fame of her father and the circumstances of her death naturally conspired to promote this kind of aberrant activity in many idle or unsettled minds. The result was that “pirates” who had been present at the capture of the _Patriot_ in the first days of 1813 began to appear in many parts of the country and even in England, where they told, usually on their deathbeds, the most engaging and conflicting tales. It took, as I have remarked, half a century for all of them to die off.

The accounts given by these various confessors differed in details only. All agreed that the _Patriot_ had been captured by sea rovers off the Carolina coast and that the entire crew had been forced to walk the plank or been cut down by the pirates. Thus the fabulists accounted for the fact that nothing had ever been heard from any of Mrs. Alston’s shipmates. Nearly all accounts agreed that Theodosia had been carried captive to an unnamed island where she had first been a rebellious prisoner but later the docile and devoted mate of the pirate chief. A few of the relators gave their narratives the spice of novelty by insisting that she, too, had been made to walk the plank into the heaving sea, after she had witnessed all her shipmates consigned to the same fate. The names of the pirate ships and pirate captains supposed to have caught the _Patriot_ and disposed of Theodosia Burr Alston ranged through all the lists of shipping. No two dying corsairs ever agreed on this point.

Forty years after the disappearance of Mrs. Alston this typical yarn appeared in the _Pennsylvania Enquirer_:

“An item of news just now going the rounds relates that a sailor, who died in Texas, confessed on his death bed that he was one of the crew of mutineers who, some forty years ago, took possession of a brig on its passage from Charleston to New York and caused all the officers and passengers to walk the gang plank. For forty years the wretched man had carried about the dreadful secret and died at last in an agony of despair.

“What gives the story additional interest is the fact that the vessel referred to is the one in which Mrs. Theodosia Alston, the beloved daughter of Aaron Burr, took passage for New York, for the purpose of meeting her parent in the darkest days of his existence, and which, never having been heard of, was supposed to have been foundered at sea.

“The dying sailor professed to remember her well and said she was the last who perished, and that he never forgot her look of despair as she took the last step from the fatal plank. On reading this account, I regarded it as fiction; but on conversing with an officer of the navy he assured me of its probable truth and stated that on one of his passages home several years ago, his vessel brought two pirates in irons who were subsequently executed at Norfolk for recent offenses, and who, before their execution, confessed that they had been members of the same crew and had participated in the murder of Mrs. Alston and her companions.

“Whatever opinion may be entertained of the father, the memory of the daughter must be revered as one of the loveliest and most excellent of American woman, and the revelation of her untimely fate can only serve to invest that memory with a more tender and melancholy interest.”

Despite the crudities of most of those yarns and their obvious conflict with known facts, the public took the dying confessions seriously and the editors of Sunday supplements printed them with a gay air of credence and a sad attempt at seriousness. Whatever else was accomplished by this complicity with a most unashamed and unregenerate band of downright liars, the pirate legend came to be disseminated in every civilized country and there was gradually built up the great false tradition which hedges the name and fame of Theodosia Burr. She has even appeared in novels, American, British and Continental, in the shape of a mysterious queen of freebooters.

The celebrity of her case came to be such that it was in time seized upon by the art fakers--perhaps an inevitable step toward genuine famosity. Several authentic likenesses of Theodosia Burr are extant, notably the painting by John Vanderlyn in the Corcoran Gallery, Washington. Vanderlyn was the young painter of Kingston, N. Y., whom Burr discovered, apprenticed to Gilbert Stuart and sent to Paris for study. He painted the landing of Columbus scene in the rotunda of the Capitol. But the work of Vanderlyn and others neither restrained nor satisfied the freebooters of the arts. On the other hand, the pirate tales inspired them to profitable activity.

In the nineties of the last century the New York newspapers contained accounts of a painting of Theodosia Burr which had been found in an old seashore cottage near Kitty Hawk, N. C., the settlement afterwards made famous by the gliding experiments of the brothers Wright, and the scene of their first successful airplane flights. The printed accounts said that this picture had been found on an old schooner which had been wrecked off the coast many years before and various inconclusive and roundabout devices were employed for identifying it as a likeness of the lost mistress of Richmond Hill.

Later, in 1913, a similar story came into most florid publicity in New York and elsewhere. It was, apparently, given out by one of the prominent Fifth Avenue art dealers. A woman client, it was said, had become interested in the traditional picture of Theodosia Burr, recovered from a wrecked vessel on the coast of North Carolina. Accordingly, the art dealer had undertaken a search for the missing work of art and had at length recovered it, together with a most fascinating history.

In 1869 Dr. W. G. Pool, a physician of Elizabeth City, N. C., spent the summer at Nag’s Head, a resort on the outer barrier of sand which protects the North Carolina coast about fifty miles north of Cape Hatteras. While there he was called to visit an aged woman who lived in an ancient cabin about two miles out of the town. His ministrations served to recover her health and she expressed the wish to pay him in some way other than with money, of which useful commodity she had none. The good doctor had noticed, with considerable curiosity, a most beautiful oil painting of a “beautiful, proud and intelligent lady of high social standing.” He immediately coveted this picture and asked his patient for it, since she wanted to give him something in return for his leechcraft. She not only gave him the portrait but she told him how she had come by it. Many years before, when she was still a girl, the old woman’s admirer and subsequent first husband had, with some others, come upon the wreck of a pilot boat, which had stranded with all sails set, the rudder tied and breakfast served but undisturbed in the cabin. The pilot boat was empty and several trunks had been broken open, their contents being scattered about. Among the salvaged goods was this portrait, which had fallen to the lot of the old woman’s swain and come through him to her.

From this old woman and Dr. Pool, the picture had passed to others without ever having left Elizabeth City. There the enterprising dealer had found it in the possession of a substantial widow, and she had consented to part with it. The rest of the story--the essentials--was to be surmised. The wrecked pilot boat was, to be sure, the _Patriot_, the date of its stranding agreed with the beclouded incidents of January, 1813, and the “intelligent lady of high social standing” was none other than Theodosia Burr.

It is unfortunate that the reproductions of this marvelous and romantic work do not show the least resemblance to the known portrait of Theodosia, and it is also lamentable to find that the art dealer, in his sweet account of his find, fell into all the vulgar misconceptions and blunders as regards his subject and the tales of her demise. But, while both these portrait yarns may be dismissed without further attention, they have undoubtedly served to keep the old and enchanting story before modern eyes.

In the light of analysis the prosaic explanation of the Theodosia Burr case seems to be the acceptable one. The boat on which she embarked was small and frail. At the very time it must have been passing the treacherous region of Cape Hatteras, there was a storm of sufficient violence to scatter the heavy British frigates and ships of the line. The fate of a little schooner in such weather is almost a matter for assurance. Yet of certainty there can be none. The famous daughter of the traditional American villain--the devil incarnate to all the melancholy crew of hypocritical pulpiteers and propagandists--went down to sea in her cockleshell and returned no more. Eleven decades have lighted no candle in the darkness that engulfed her.

III

THE VANISHED ARCHDUKE

One of the most engrossing of modern mysteries is that which hides the final destination of Archduke Johann Salvator of Austria, better known to a generation of newspaper readers as John Orth. In the dawn of July 13, 1890, the bark _Santa Margarita_,[2] flying the flag of an Austrian merchantman, though her owner and skipper was none other than this wandering scion of the imperial Hapsburgs, set sail from Ensenada, on the southern shore of the great estuary of the Plata, below Buenos Aires, and forthwith vanished from the earth. With her went Johann Salvator, his variety-girl wife and a crew of twenty-six. Though search has been made in every thinkable port, through the distant archipelagoes of the Pacific, in ten thousand outcast towns, and though emissaries have visited all the fabled refuges of missing men, from time to time, over a period of nearly forty years, no sight of any one connected with the lost ship has ever been got, and no man knows with certainty what fate befell her and her princely master.

[2] Sometimes written Sainte Marguerite.

The enigma of his passing is not the only circumstance of curious doubt and romantic coloration that hedges the career of this imperial adventurer. His story, from the beginning, is one marked with dramatic incidents. As much of it as bears upon the final episode will have to be related.

The Archduke Johann Salvator was born at Florence on the twenty-fifth day of November, 1852, the youngest son of Grand Duke Leopold II of Tuscany, and Maria Antonia of the Two Sicilies. He was, accordingly, a second cousin of the late Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. At the baptismal font young Johann received enough names to carry any man blissfully through life, his full array having been Johann Nepomuk Salvator Marie Josef Jean Ferdinand Balthazar Louis Gonzaga Peter Alexander Zenobius Antonin.

Archduke Johann was still a child when the Italian revolutionists drove out his father and later united Tuscany to the growing kingdom of Victor Emanuel. So the hero of this account was reared in Austria and educated for the army. Commissioned as a stripling, he rose rapidly in rank for reasons quite other than his family connections. The young prince was endowed with a good mind and notable for independence of thought. He felt, as he expressed it, that he ought to earn his pay, an opinion which led to indefatigable military studies and some well-intentioned, but ill-advised writings. First, the young archduke discovered what he considered faults in the artillery, and he wrote a brochure on the subject. The older heads didn’t like it and had him disciplined. Later on, Johann made a study of military organization and wrote a well-known pamphlet called “Education or Drill,” wherein he attacked the old method of training soldiers as automatons and advised the mental development of the rank and file, in line with policies now generally adopted. But such advanced ideas struck the military masters of fifty years ago as bits of heresy and anarchy. Archduke Johann was disciplined by removal from the army and the withdrawal of his commission. At thirty-five he had reached next to the highest possible rank and been cashiered from it. This in 1887.

Johann Salvator had, however, been much more than a progressive soldier man. He was an accomplished musician, composer of popular waltzes, an oratorio and the operetta “Les Assassins.” He was an historian and publicist, of eminent official standing at least, having collaborated with Crown Prince Rudolf in the widely distributed work, “The Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in Word and Picture,” which was published in 1886. He was also a distinguished investigator of psychic phenomena, his library on this subject having been the most complete in Europe--a fact suggestive of something abnormal.

Personally the man was both handsome and charming. He was, in spite of imperial rank and military habitude, democratic, simple, friendly, and unaffected. He liked to live the life of a gentleman, with diverse interests in life, now playing the gallant in Vienna--to the high world of the court and the half world of the theater by turns; again retiring to his library and his studies, sometimes vegetating at his country estates and working on his farms. Official trammels and the rigid etiquette of the ancient court seemed to irk him. Still, he seems to have suffered keen chagrin over his dismissal from the army.

Johann Salvator had, from adolescence, been a close personal friend of the Austrian crown prince. This intimacy had extended even to participation in some of the personal and sentimental escapades for which the ill-starred Rudolf was remarkable. Apparently the two men hardly held an opinion apart, and it was accepted that, with the death of the aging emperor and the accession of his son, Johann Salvator would be a most powerful personage.

Suddenly, in 1889, all these high hopes and promises came to earth. After some rumblings and rumorings at Schoenbrunn, it was announced that Johann Salvator had petitioned the emperor for permission to resign all rank and title, sever his official connection with the royal house, and even give up his knighthood in the Order of the Golden Fleece. The petitioner also asked for the right to call himself Johann Orth, after the estate and castle on the Gmündensee, which was the favorite abode of the prince and of his aged mother. All these requests were officially granted and confirmed by the emperor, and so the man John Orth came into being.

The first of the two Orth mysteries lies concealed behind the official records of this strange resignation from rank and honor. Even to-day, after Orth has been missing for a whole generation, after all those who might have been concerned in keeping secret the motives and measures of those times have been gathered to the dust, and after the empire itself has been dissolved into its defeated components, the facts in the matter cannot be stated with any confidence. There are two principal versions of the affair, and both will have to be given so that the reader may make his own choice. The popular or romantic account deserves to be considered first.

In the eighties the stage of Vienna was graced by several handsome young women of the name Stübel. One of them, Lori, achieved considerable operatic distinction. Another sailed to New York with her brother and appeared in operetta and in musical comedy at the old Casino. The youngest of these sisters was Ludmilla Stübel, commonly called Millie, and on that account sometimes, erroneously, Emilie.

This daring and charming girl began her career in a Viennese operetta chorus and rose to the rank of principal. She was not, so far as I can gather from the contemporary newspapers, remarkable for voice or dramatic ability, but her “surpassingly voluptuous beauty and piquant manners” won her almost limitless attention and gave her a popularity that reached across the Atlantic. In the middle eighties Fräulein Stübel appeared at the Thalia Theater in the Bowery, New York, then the shrine of German comic opera in the United States, creating the rôles of _Bettina_ in “The Mascot” and _Violette_ in “The Merry War.”

The _New York Herald_, reviewing her American career a few years later, said: “In New York she became somewhat notorious for her risqué costumes. On one occasion Fräulein Stübel attended the Arion Ball in male costume, and created a scene when ejected. This conduct seems to have ended her career in the United States.”

This beautiful and spirited plebeian swam into the ken of Johann Salvator, of Austria, in the fall of 1888, when that impetuous prince had already been dismissed from the army and his other affairs were gathering to the storm that broke some months afterward. Catastrophic events followed rapidly.

In January, 1889, Prince Rudolf was found dead in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, with the Baroness Marie Vetsera, to whom the heir of a hundred kings is said to have been passionately devoted, and with whom he may have died in a suicide pact, though it has been said the crown prince and his sweetheart were murdered by persons whose identity has been sedulously concealed. This mysterious fatality robbed the dispirited Johann Salvator of his closest and most powerful friend. It may have had a good deal to do with what followed.

A few months later Johann Salvator married morganatically his stage beauty. It was now, after the lapse of a few months, that he resigned all rank, title, and privileges, left Austria with his wife, and married her civilly in London.

Naturally enough, it has generally been held that the death of the crown prince and the romance with the singer explained everything. The archduke, in disgrace with the army, bereft of his truest and most illustrious friend, and deeply infatuated with a girl whom he could not fully legitimatize as his wife, so long as he wore the purple of his birth, had decided to “surrender all for love” and seek solace in foreign lands with the lady of his choice. This interpretation has all the elements of color and sweetness needed for conviction in the minds of the sentimental. Unfortunately, it does not seem to bear skeptical examination.

Even granting that Archduke Johann Salvator was a man of independent mind and quixotic temperament, that he was embittered by his demotion from military rank, and that he must have been greatly depressed by the death of Rudolf, who was both his bosom friend and his most powerful intercessor at court, no such extreme proceeding as the renunciation of all rank and the severing of family ties was called for.

It is true, too, that the loss of his only son through an affair with a woman of inferior rank, had embittered Franz Josef and probably caused the monarch to look with uncommon harshness upon similar liaisons among the members of the Hapsburg family. Undoubtedly the morganatic marriage of his second cousin with the shining moth of the theater displeased the monarch and widened the breach between him and his kinsman; but it must be remembered that Johann Salvator was only a distant cousin; that he was not even remotely in line for succession to the throne; that he had already been deprived of military or other official connection with the government; and that affairs of this kind have been by no means rare among Hapsburg scions.

Dour and tyrannical as the emperor may have been, he was no Anglo-Saxon, no moralist. His own life had not been quite free of sentimental episodes, and he was, after all, the heir to the proudest tradition in all Europe, head of the world’s oldest reigning house, and a believer in the sacredness of royal rank. He must have looked upon a morganatic union as something not uncommon or specially disgraceful, whereas a renunciation of rank and privilege can only have struck him as a precedent of the gravest kind.

Thus, Johann Salvator did not need to take any extreme step because of his histrionic wife. He might have remained in Austria happily enough, aside from a few snubs and the exclusion from further official participation in politics. He might have gone to any country in Europe and become the center of a distinguished society. His children would probably have been ennobled, and even his wife eventually given the same sort of recognition that was accorded the consorts of other princes in similar case, notably the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination at Sarajevo precipitated the World War. Instead, Johann Salvator made the most complete and unprecedented severance from all that seemed most inalienably his. Historians have had to interpret this action in another light, and their explanation forms the second version of the incident, probably the true one.

In 1887, as a result of one of the interminable struggles for hegemony in the Balkans, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha had been elected Prince of Bulgaria, but Russia had refused to recognize this sovereign, and the other powers, out of deference to the Czar, had likewise refrained from giving their approval. Austria was in a specially delicate position as regards this matter. She was the natural rival of Russia for dominance in the Balkans, but her statesmen did not feel strong enough openly to oppose the Russian course. Besides, they had their eyes fixed on Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ferdinand had been an officer in the Austrian army. He was well liked at Franz Josef’s court, and stood high in the regard of Crown Prince Rudolf. What is most germane to the present question is that he was the friend of Johann Salvator.

In 1887, and for a number of years following, Russia attempted to drive the unwelcome German princeling from the Bulgarian throne by various military cabals, acts of brigandage, diplomatic intrigues, and the like. Naturally the young ruler’s friends in other countries rallied to his aid. Among them was Johann Salvator. It is known that he interceded with Rudolf for Ferdinand, and he may have approached the emperor. Failing to get action at Vienna, he is said to have formed a plan of a military character which was calculated to force the hands of Austria, Germany, and England, bringing them into the field against Russia, to the end that Ferdinand might be recognized and more firmly seated. The plot was discovered in time, according to those who hold this theory of the incident, and Johann Salvator came under the most severe displeasure of the emperor.

It is asserted by those who have studied the case dispassionately, that Johann Salvator’s rash course was one that came very near involving Austria in a Russian war, and that the most emphatic exhibitions of the emperor’s reprehension and anger were necessary. Accordingly, it is said, Franz Josef demanded the surrender of all rank and privileges by his cousin and exiled him from the empire for life. Here, at least, is a story of a more probable character, inasmuch as it presents provocation for the unprecedented harshness with which Archduke Johann Salvator was treated. No doubt his morganatic marriage and his other conflicts with higher authority were seized upon as disguises under which to hide the secret diplomatic motive.

Louisa, the runaway crown princess of Saxony, started a tale to the effect that her cousin, Johann Salvator, had torn the Order of the Golden Fleece from his breast in a rage and thrown it at the emperor, which thing can not have happened since the negotiations between the emperor and his recreant cousin were conducted at a distance through official emissaries or by mail.

Again, the Countess Marie Larisch, niece of the Empress Elizabeth, recounts even more fantastic yarns. She says in so many words that Crown Prince Rudolf was in a conspiracy with Johann Salvator and others to seize the crown of Hungary away from the emperor and so establish Rudolf as king before his time. It was fear of discovery in this plot, she continues, that led to the suicide of Rudolf. A few days after Mayerling, she recites, she delivered to Johann Salvator a locked box (apparently containing secret papers) on a promenade in the mist and he kissed her hand, exclaimed that she had saved his life--and more in the same strain.

Both these elevated ladies, it will be recalled, wrote or talked in self-justification and with the usual stupidity of the guilty. We may dismiss their yarns as mere women’s gabble and return to the solid fact that Johann Salvator, impetuous, a little mad and smarting under his military humiliations, tried to mix into Balkan politics with the result that he found himself in the position of a bungling interloper, almost a betrayer of his country’s interests.

Less than two years ago some further light was thrown upon the affair of the missing archduke through what have passed as letters taken from the Austrian archives after the fall of the Hapsburgs. These letters were published in various European and American newspapers and journals and they may be, as asserted, the veritable official documents. The portions I quote are taken from the Sunday Magazine of the _New York World_ of January 10 and January 17, 1926. I must remark that I regard them with suspicion.

The first letter purports to be a report on the violent misconduct of Johann Salvator at Venice, as follows:

“Consul General Alexander, Baron Warsberg, to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Kalnoky:

“I regarded it to be my duty to obtain information about the relations and meetings of Archduke Johann, and am sorry to have to report to Your Excellency that, _in a rather unworthy manner_, he had intercourse on board and in public with a _lady lodged on board of the yacht_, which intercourse has not remained unobserved and which he could not be induced to veil in spite of the remonstrances of (the President of the Chamber) Baron de Fin--Baron de Fin was so offended that, after much quarrel and trouble which made him ill, he left the ship and lodged in a little inn. He, on his part, reported to His Majesty the Emperor, and the Archduke is said to have, after five months of silence, written for the first time to His Majesty in order to complain of his Chamberlain. This unpleasant situation, still more troublesome abroad than it would have been at home, has been solved last Sunday, the 20th inst, by the sudden advent of Field Marshal Lieut. Count Uxküll, who brought the Imperial Order that His Imperial Highness immediately return to Orth at the Sea of Gmünden--to which he immediately submitted.

“Baron de Fin, who is still living here and is on friendly terms with me, can give to the Archduke no certificate that would be bad enough. According to his experience and observation, His Highness does not know any other interests in the world than those of his person, and even this only in the common sense; that he, for instance, wished to ascend the throne of Bulgaria, not out of enthusiasm for the people or for the political idea but only in order to lose the throne after a short time and in this way to be freed from the influence of His Majesty, the Emperor. Baron de Fin pretends that there would be no other means to cure that completely undisciplined and immoral character but by dismissing him formally from the imperial family and by allowing him, as it is his desire, to enjoy under an adopted name, that liberty that he pretends to deem as the highest good. He believes him (the Archduke) to have such a 'dose’ of pride that he would return with a penitent heart, if he then would be treated according to his new rank. I also have observed this haughtiness of the Prince despite his talks of liberalism.”

Then follows what may well have been the recreant archduke’s letter of abdication, thus:

“Your Majesty:

“My behavior for nearly two years will have convinced Your Majesty that, abstaining from all interests that did not concern me, I have lived in retirement in the endeavor to remove Your Majesty’s displeasure with me.

“Being too young to rest forever and too proud to live as a paid idler, my situation has become painful, even intolerable, to me. Checked by a justified pride from asking for re-employment in the army, I had the alternative either to continue the unworthy existence of a princely idler or--as an ordinary human being, to seek a new existence, a new profession. I was finally urged to a decision in the latter sense, as my whole nature refused to fit into the frame of my position and my personal independence must be compensation for what I have lost.

“I therefore resign voluntarily, and respectfully return the titles and rights of an Archduke, as well as my military title into the hands of Your Majesty, but request Your Majesty submissively to deign to grant me a civil name.

“Far from my fatherland, I shall seek a purpose in life, and my livelihood probably at sea, and try to find a humble but honorable position. If, however, Your Majesty should call your subjects to arms, Your Highness will permit me to return home and--though only as a common soldier--to devote my life to Your Majesty.

“Your Majesty may deign to believe me that this step was only impeded by the thought of giving offense to Your Majesty--Your Majesty to whose Highness I am particularly and infinitely indebted and devoted from the bottom of my heart. But as I have to pay for this step dearly enough--with my entire social existence, with all that means hope and future--Your Majesty will pardon

“Your Majesty’s Most Loyally Obedient Servant,
“ARCHDUKE JOHANN, FML.”

Whether one cousin would use such a tone to another, even an emperor, is a question which every reader must consider for himself, quite as he must decide whether grown sons of kings were capable of such middle-class sentiment.

There follows the reply of Franz Josef which has the ring of genuineness:

“DEAR ARCHDUKE JOHANN:

“In compliance with your request addressed to me, I feel induced to decide the following:

“1. I sanction your renunciation of the right of being regarded and treated as a Prince of the Imperial House, and permit you to adopt a civil name, which you are to bring to my notice after you have made your choice.

“2. I consent to your resigning your commission as an officer and relieve you at the same time of your responsibility for the Corps Artillery Regiment No. 2.

“3. I decide at the same time that you are to be struck out of the 'Knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece.’

“4. In disposing the suspension of your appenage (Civil List) from my court donation, I will inform your brother Archduke Ferdinand of Tuscany of the suspension of your share out of the family funds proceeds.

“5. Without my express permission you are forbidden to pass the frontiers of the monarchy from your residence abroad for a permanent or even a temporary stay in Austria. Finally,

“6. You are to sign the written declaration which the bearer of this, my manuscript will submit to you for this purpose and which he is charged to return to me after the signature is affixed.

“FRANZ JOSEF.”

“Vienna, Oct. 12, 1889.”

Some correspondence followed on the subject of John Orth’s retention of his Austrian citizenship, which the emperor wished at first to deny him.

In any event, Johann Salvator, Archduke of Austria, and Prince of Tuscany, became John Orth, left Austria in the winter of 1889, purchased and refitted the bark _Santa Margarita_, had her taken to England, and there joined her with his operetta wife. He sailed for Buenos Aires in the early spring, with a cargo of cement, and reached the Rio de la Plata in May. His wife went ahead by steamer to join him at Buenos Aires.

I quote here, from the same source as the preceding, part of a last letter from John Orth to his mother at Gmünden:

“The country here is not very beautiful. Vast plains--the grazing grounds for flocks of bullocks, horses and ostriches. The towns are much more vivid. Everything is to be found here even at the smaller places--electric lights, telephone, all comforts of modern civilization. The population, however, is not very sympathetic, a combination of doubtful elements from all countries, striving to become rich as soon as possible; corruption, fraud, theft, are the order of the day.

“I have made the acquaintance of our Consul. The officer is a certain Mikulicz, a cultured, most amiable man. The Honorary Consul is Mihanovich, a man who--a few years ago was a porter--and now is a millionaire. Social obligations have caused much loss of time, which could have been better used for business affairs. Imagine that nothing can be done in Ensenada, but we have always to go to Buenos Aires. And we have to hurry. The unloading of the cargo, negotiations about a new cargo, which I could have accepted if my merchant had not prevented me, changes of the board staff, purchase of supplies, work on board, the collection and despatch of money, &c., &c. The staff-officers have all to be changed. I have the command. Capt. Sodich is offended by the fact that I have sent away here in Plata a certain 'Sensal,’ toward whom he was too indulgent and who was a man of bad reputation. He has given me to understand, in the most impolite manner, that he could not remain under such circumstances, that he did not permit himself to be treated as a mere zero with regard to the business on land, and therefore he resigned the command, &c. I, of course, accepted his resignation, and also remained firm when he afterward returned to excuse himself. The second lieutenant, Lucich, has shown the insolence to deceive the consignee and by calculating forty-eight tons more in favor of the ship, believing to do me a favor by such an action. I have given to the consignee the necessary indemnification--and to restore the compromised honor of the ship, have dismissed the lieutenant. The third lieutenant, Leva, took fright of the sea and quit voluntarily to seek his fortune on land. Also the boatswain Giaconi asked for his dismissal, so much the fire had frightened him.[3]

[3] There had been a fire on the _Santa Margarita_ on the way to Buenos Aires.

“As present I have First Lieutenant, Jellecich, who acts as Captain and has the command--a man of forty-five years, very quiet, experienced and practical. Further, a Second Lieutenant, Mayer, Austro-German, very fit for accounts and writings; a boatswain, Vranich, who is a real jewel. Thus I hope--with the aid of God--to get on at least as well as under the command of Sodich.

“Imagine: Sodich and Lucich were atheists, and Leva has been a Spiritualist. I am happy to have made this change of personnel, with whom alone I shall have intercourse for months and months.

“In the first days of July, when everything will be ready, the journey will be continued. Now comes the most difficult part of the passage, i. e., the sailing around the dreadful Cape Horn, which is always exposed to howling storms. If all ends well, we shall be in two months at Valparaiso, which has been so beautifully described by Ludwig. God willing, we shall return from there in good health.

“I am very sorry to have received no news or, strictly speaking, no letters of yours. Neither in Ensenada nor in La Plata nor in Buenos Aires, neither poste restante nor in the Consulate, have I found your letters, and still I believe that you have been so good as to write me. I have found letters of Luise, that have been despatched by a German steamer, and also letters from London, as well as of the Swiss Bank, with which I am in communication, but not one letter from Austria. Luise informed me that she has been in Rome, and your dear telegram advised me that she has passed Salzburg. I was sorry to see from the newspapers that Karl has been ill in Baden; I should be happy if this were not true. Then I have read the many nonsensical articles written about myself, and am glad that the Consul, who has remained in communication with me, was able to state the truth. I am also glad of the marriage of Franz, the dream of the young woman is now likely to come to an end. I know nothing about Vienna and Gmünden. But I repeat that I am disappointed at not having received your letters. I hope to God you are well and remain in good health.

“My next stay will be at Valparaiso. I, therefore, ask you to address letters: Giovanni Orth, Valparaiso (Chile) poste restante.

“Requesting you to give my kind remembrances to the whole family and asking you for your blessing, I respectfully kiss your hands.

“Your tenderly loving son,
GIOVANNI.”

The vessel was accordingly made ready at Ensenada, and on July 12, 1890, John Orth wrote what proved to be the last communication ever sent by him. It was addressed to his attorney in Vienna and said that he was leaving to join his ship for a trip to Valparaiso, which might consume fifty or sixty days. His captain, Orth wrote, had been taken ill, and his first officer had proved incompetent, so that it had been necessary to discharge him. Accordingly Orth was personally in command of his vessel, aided by the second officer, who was an experienced seaman. This is a somewhat altered version, to be sure.

The apparent intention of the renegade archduke at this time was to follow the sea. He had caused the _Santa Margarita_ to be elaborately refitted inside, had insured her for two hundred and thirty thousand marks with the Hamburg Marine Insurance Company, and he had written his aged mother at Lake Gmünden of his determination to make his living as a mariner and an honest man, instead of existing like an idler on his comfortable private means. There is nothing in the record to indicate that he intended to go into hiding.

The _Santa Margarita_ accordingly sailed on the thirteenth of July. With good fortune she should have been in the Straits of Magellan the first week in August, and her arrival at Valparaiso was to be expected not later than the first of September. But the ship did not reach port. The middle of September passed without word of her. When she had still not been reported by the first week in October the alarm was given.