The wrecks of the Bristol and the Mexico
How two tragic events affected the South Shore of Long Island
By Art Mattson
By now many readers of the Herald are aware of the tall, marble obelisk rising above the Rockville Cemetery, at the border of Lynbrook and Rockville Centre. The monument stands atop a grassy mound, and reaches a total height of eighteen feet. Thus, it is easily visible from Ocean Avenue and Merrick Road, the two adjacent, heavily-traveled roads. This cold stone is a lasting memorial to two of the most important events in the history of Long Island, New York State, and the United States: the wrecks of the Bristol and the Mexico.
Carved, weathered letters on the obelisk’s mottled, white base tell of two shipwrecks in the winter of 1836-37, and of a mass grave containing 139 of the 215 victims of those wrecks. The engravings say that the Bristol and the Mexico were American vessels, and that their passengers were emigrants from Ireland and England. The captains’ names are listed: Alexander McKown of the ship Bristol, and Charles Winslow of the barque Mexico. A Bible verse proclaims, “Lord save us, we perish,” and some weary doggerel tells us, “In this grave, from the wide Ocean doth sleep, / The bodies of those that had crossed the deep.” There is a concluding, sobering note: “This monument was erected partly by the money found upon their persons.”
When I first read those inscriptions in the summer of 1972, I was curious to know more, but my search for the story behind the two catastrophes was more difficult than I ever imagined. It took over three decades. My quest steered a European motorcycling vacation to Liverpool — not because of an interest in the Beatles, but because I had learned that both ships had sailed from that city in 1836 on their final voyages.
A winter vacation in St. Croix became a hunt for information about how and why one the ships stopped in the Caribbean to fill its crew with more black sailors than any other U.S. ship of the day. And so it went; years of off-and-on research, some near and some far, all of which accelerated once I retired from banking, and culminated in a new book, Water & Ice: The Tragic Wrecks of the Bristol and the Mexico on the South Shore of Long Island.
