Tale of the Horse Rescuer

     A nightmare took over the mind of Harold Thumperton on September 15, 1818 and caused him to toss and turn all night in a restless sweat.  His dream recalled in much too vivid detail the tumultuous sail across the Atlantic that had brought him from England five years before to seek his fortune as a wheat farmer in the rich fields of Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore.

       Over the course of the eight-week journey the ship carrying Harold and his family had run into seas so rough that his fellow passengers believed the ocean would swallow them whole before they came close to the New World they had heard about for years from letters sent home by the earlier settlers of the new land.

      An avid reader of pamphlets containing the writings of William Shakespeare, during his family’s voyage he became more and more absorbed in the English bard’s Tempest. Like his own adventure, the play had taken place amid driving rain and howling winds that tossed and turned the writer’s humble sailing vessel in an ocean in a voyage propelled only by a scribe’s vivid imagination.

       A half decade later, he and his family believed they finally had adjusted to their new surroundings.  Yet, continually exhausted from laboring all day to gather enough crops to sell and feed his wife and two young children, he often barely escaped the same type of storm that had brought them to their American homestead and welcomed them to this new land.

      Fortunately, as morning’s light dawned the day after his nightmare, Harold had awoken to a pleasant and gently cloudy day.  Although exhausted from his struggle with his internal demons from the night before, he only had time for a quick breakfast of ground oats and warm milk before he prepared for another work-filled day on the farm.

     Employing many of the methods passed down by generations of his  Thumperton ancestors across the ocean, he had labored from dawn to dusk clearing,  plowing and planting his new fields during the few bouts of moderate fall climate on the barrier island on the Atlantic Ocean. 

     Unlike many of his fellow English transplants, he had brought with him to the New World a love of reading. His horizons also continued to expand thanks to the few copies of the pamphlets of the works of the bard of Avon he had brought with him from his home country.

     Although the hard work of running a farm didn’t leave him much time for his avocation, he had begun to study Shakespeare through newly-established mail courses sponsored by Maryland’s Washington University and eventually earned a degree in the discipline.

      He dreamed that, one day, he would be able to apply his education to advancing the lives of his fellow tillers of the sod by passing along his love of literature, but this remained an elusive dream. His heart and hands still primarily focused on helping grow the food to feed his family and helping out his neighbors in his small circle of life. 

      Farming had not advanced nearly as far as the world of academia. Since tractors and other mechanized equipment didn’t exist, Harold and his fellow farmers cut the wheat with long-bladed scythes and bound the sheaves by hand.   They then used the strong horses of the ocean side island to harvest this rich crop.

       Satisfying the huge appetites of the large creatures required year-round feeding not available on the inland sections of the island. During the times when their farms did not provide seasonal forage, the farmer and his neighbors would herd their horses to the island borders with the Atlantic Ocean, where they could feed on the rich salt hay. 

          For almost two decades Mother Nature had provided an almost limitless supply along the shore to help their animals thrive in the off-season, and the weather often moderated enough to help them transport the animals to the water’s edge with no problem.

         Then, in 1818, a foul wind that made Harold recall the account in The Tempest, swept up the East Coast without warning, smashing a path of destruction throughout the Sinepuxent Bay. Its force took down the small farmhouses and businesses that had grown up in the tiny village of Sinepuxent, on Sinepuxent Neck across the bay from the barrier island. The inlet there had allowed access to many ocean-going ships passing through the island from the Atlantic to the bay. 

       As the farmers on Assateague Island tried to shelter their valuable animals from the storm several trees split right down the middle, threatening to destroy them, their masters and their home.  The horses, of course, went into a panic and began to rear up and run around wildly. Two members of Harold’s herd almost crushed him in a hurry to escape.

         As he rushed after Starlight Master, his prize stallion, his rope slipped off the horse’s neck every time he attempted to lasso it. Finally, he pulled the animal to safety. The wind continued to howl, and the combination of the fearsome breezes and rains eventually flattened the village and made what once thrived as the homestead in Sinepuxent crumble and become an addition to the expanding ocean.

     The forces of nature which helped Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore contribute so much to the growth of America, destroyed the town which had, 39 years before produced Stephen Decatur, one of the country’s greatest naval heroes of the 18th century.

    Harold managed to round up the remainder of his herd on the island, but the storm had other ideas. The raging sea, so similar in depth and power to that described by his favorite bard in the literature he loved as much as his new home in America, took with his beloved village the man who his fellow workers of the island fields had come to regard as one of the saviors of the famous Assateague ponies. The forces of nature which often had partnered with the gallant farmer swept him under the surf before he could breathe his last and drowned his dream to bring Shakespeare to the masses of the Eastern Shore.