It was the inscription on a toppled and broken gravestone that started the talk about what happened to Asa Havens.
Beside being broken, the flat marble slab was partly buried, covered in lichens and blasted by 173 years of New England weather in an East Haddam cemetery. But dug up and brushed off, the inscription was still legible:
Asa H. Havens
MATE OF BARQUE GLEN
Was murdered by mutineers
SEPT 17, 1850
AGED 37
Was Havens buried at sea after the mutiny, some days sailing south of Valparaiso, Chile, as has been confidently asserted since 1988 by East Haddam’s town historian, retired dentist Dr. Karl Stofko?
Or, as others have speculated, might the Glen’s captain have felt fondly enough of Havens, a strapping 6-foot second mate, to have him preserved in a barrel of rum for the long voyage home and burial in the family plot at North Plain Cemetery , a patch of cockeyed gravestones at the end of a gravel track?
Stofko’s reputation for research and his comprehensive knowledge of local history was a powerful argument for the burial at sea theory.
“I never really questioned it,” he said recently. “But a lot of other people did. They couldn’t understand why anybody would put up a grave marker if there wasn’t anybody in the ground.”
So the question of what happened to Havens persisted as a kind of mystery — until a couple of months ago. That’s when a group of veterans affiliated with VFW Post 3336 who call themselves the Cemetery Troopers got involved.
The Troopers organized about three years ago after Post 3336 asked for volunteers to survey cemeteries in town to identify the graves of veterans that were not marked by flags and placards.
It was no small job. There are 23 cemeteries in town. Some are owned by churches or town-owned. Others are owned by non profit groups. Others, like North Plain, where Havens is buried, are privately owned.
The survey found 232 unmarked veteran graves, including that of at least one soldier who fought at Lexington and Concord . It also discovered that scores of historic stones had fallen, broken and been buried after centuries of neglect. The Asa Havens stone was one of them.
The Troopers transitioned from surveying graveyards to restoring old stones and the Havens stone became a focal point of their work.
“Asa was the talk,” said Ken Beatrice, an amateur archaeologist who began volunteering with the Troopers a year ago. “We were always talking about him. And then we finally did some research on him and that’s what got my interest.”
“The other thing that was very interesting was that his gravestone had a foot stone,” he said. “And the footstone had his initials on it. And that sort of indicated that, ‘Yes there was a burial there.’ That got us talking.”
“Asa, for some reason, became a fantastic little project that just caught my interest,” he said. “I love history anyway and this had the air about it of the mutiny and all that.”
It is unclear exactly how Havens became part of the crew of the Glen, a 287-ton barque, meaning a type of vessel with two forward masts that were square rigged and the mizzen was rigged fore and aft. The Glen was built in Freeport, Maine, north of Portland, by Maine owners. Charles B. Small, also of Freeport, was master and captain.
In July 1849, with news of the California gold strike riveting the country, the Glen sailed for San Francisco with a cargo of 200 tons of lumber, which was at a premium in the California boomtowns.
The Glen made San Francisco after what has been described as “a fairly good passage” around Cape Horn. Stofko believes Havens may already have been in California, drawn earlier like others from East Haddam by the gold stampede.
After the Glen discharged its cargo, Stofko said Small left the ship in Sacramento for some months while he and the crew headed for the mountains to try their hands at prospecting. When Glen left San Francisco on the voyage home, Stofko said Havens, “having had little success in gold mining,” had signed on as crew.
It was not out of the ordinary for East Haddam men to go to sea. It was a shipbuilding town, with heavily forested landings on the Connecticut River. East Haddam men were well acquainted with New London, a center of deep water shipping and then the country’s second most printable whaling port.
On the return voyage, the Glen stopped in Chile, taking on as cargo $300,000 of copper ore and nearly 2,000 bales of Cinchona bark, from which quinine is produced, according to Stofko. The ship also replaced the crew. That left only Small, first mate George Waite and newly named second mate Havens as the sole members of the original crew, according to Stofko.
Members of the new crew were plotting mutiny even before the Glen set sail from Chile on Aug. 29, 1985. Their aim was to seize the ship and sell the cargo. Stofko said four crew members were at the center of the plot, led by 22-year old Edward Douglass of Michigan.
Just days after departing Chile, Stofko said, the ship’s cook, one of the mutineers, poisoned the officer’s turtle soup. Both Small and Havens were violently ill, but recovered.
Not long afterward, Small was awakened by a musket shot and, according to contemporary newspaper accounts, he heard Havens cry out “murder.” On deck, he found Havens mortally wounded. Mutineers, armed with bayoneted muskets, confronted the captain and ordered him below with a threat to “blow his brains out.”
The mutineers had seized the ship’s weaponry, but neglected Small’s cutlesses. He and the first mate managed to beat back the mutineers and retake the ship. Although the first mate was badly wounded, Small managed to return the Glen to Valparaiso and handed the mutineers to the U.S. Consul, who had them delivered to New York by the U.S. Navy.
The mutiny created a sensation in New York. After they were tried and convicted, hundreds of people bought tickets to watch them hang.
Stofko said he has had no doubt that the Havens grave is empty, that he was buried at sea, ever since he noticed the broken stone and began doing research in the 1980s.
“Anyway, a newspaper, I think it was the New York Herald in 1850, had an article and it stated that Asa was wrapped in a blanket and buried at sea off the coast of Chile,” he said.
If that left any doubt, Stoko said it was settled when he was unable to probe the ground between the Havens head and footstones with a long steel rod.
“That means the ground was never dug up,” he said. “Most graves you can probe fairly easily with a probing rod because the earth has been dug up.”
The cemetery Troopers repaired and remounted the Asa Havens head stone earlier this month. Don Henson, who has studied the repair and restoration of old headstones, glued and clamped it with a powerful epoxy and it was lifted into place with a block and fall.
And at the same time, to his dismay, Beatrice revealed that Stofko has been correct all along. He said the Cemetery Troopers, after utilizing modern technology, have determined there can no longer be any doubt.
For 20 years, Beatrice and his wife, Bonnie, have worked as volunteers for the state Office of Archeology . Relying on old friendships, he arranged to have state and federal soil and archeology experts analyze soil and scan the area with ground penetrating radar at what was thought to be Havens’ final resting place.
Ken Beatrice said the radar shows some solid disturbance at a depth appropriate for burials, but the results were inconclusive. Soil profile analyses, however, were conclusive, he said.
The natural soil behind the headstone was dark brown at the surface with lighter colored subsoil beneath it. That means that Havens could not have been buried because the soil had never been disturbed, he said.
“The Asa Havens mystery has been solved,” Beatrice said. “He was not brought home to his family and interred in the North Plain Cemetery. Asa was given to the depths of the sea.”
“We were really hoping that we were going to find something,” he said. “We really wanted to find something. But it was fun.”
Sofko said he will deliver a lecture on the Asa Havens story, with all the latest updates, at the East Haddam Historical Society on Nov. 13.
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