| Flash…more
news about the Flash, the vessel that carried the Twin
Sisters most of the way to the Texian army just in time for Sam Houston’s
decisive defeat of Santa Anna at San
Jacinto.
A
day or two after last week’s column on the Flash, I got
a cordial email from Alan Barber of Sandpoint, Idaho, an electrical engineer by
training and independent historian by choice. He’s been working for several years
on a biography of David L. Kokernot, an early arrival to Texas
who figured in the fight for independence from Mexico and whose descendants are
still here.
Barber’s research on Kokernot, who he further describes as
a “Jewish peddler and Texas cattle rancher,” got him interested in the Flash.
That’s because the vessel is mentioned in the first paragraph of a memoir Kokernot
wrote in the 1870s. (www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/kokernotmemoirs.htm)
As
Barber said on his interesting blog: “When…Kokernot first moved his family to
Texas from New Orleans in 1831 it was ‘a very pleasant trip’ aboard the ‘Schooner
Flash, Captain Falwell…’ That fact has been repeated so
often that I was a little surprised to find that the Flash
was not built until four years later.”
In the course of his research he
had found no shortage of errors in the written recollections of his subject, but
after looking into Kokernot’s mention of the Flash, Barber
concluded: “This one was clearly an honest mistake, not self-promoting like many
of his errors. The Flash, I learned, had a busy and important
fifteen month's life and David had probably spent time on its deck during the
Texas Revolution.”
Not only did the Flash have
a tactical role in the Battle
of San Jacinto, she earlier carried Mirabeau B. Lamar to Texas.
Lamar, a newspaper editor from Georgia, went on to become one of the heroes of
San
Jacinto, and later got elected as the second president of the Republic of
Texas.
In addition to assisting with civilian evacuation in the so-called
Runaway
Scrap, the mass Texas exodus following the
fall of the Alamo, the Flash had earlier conveyed one Emily Morgan
to Texas.
A mulatto, Emily would become better
known as the Yellow Rose of Texas. Some believe she was in Santa Anna’s
tent during the siesta preceding the April
21, 1836 battle and can be credited for keeping the general’s mind off military
strategy at a time he should not have been allowing his thinking or his hands
to wander.
But to get back to the Flash.
“She
was registered in New York and had probably been built in New Haven, as was her
sister vessel, Kosciusko,” Barber said in the first of two emails he sent.
“The registered owner was actually John P. Austin, a cousin of Stephen
Austin, but he held it for the benefit of the New Washington Association,
for which [James] Morgan was the Texas agent.”
The Flash,
as explained last week, was a flat-bottomed schooner especially designed for carrying
cargo and passengers in shallow water. Her longest voyage was from New York to
Texas. Most of the time, she ran between New Washington (later Morgan’s
Point) on Galveston Bay to Galveston
and then New Orleans.
“The Flash's tonnage, seventy-seven, is known from
customs clearance documents in New Orleans,” Barber continued, “and from that
the length can be estimated at sixty-five to seventy feet.”
In 1835-1836,
her master was a genial Irishman named Luke Falvel (not Falwell as Kokernot
wrote). But by 1837, the Flash had a new commander, someone
known only as Marstella. He ended up running the schooner aground on the west
end of Galveston Island that spring.
While it has always been assumed
that the Flash did not survive being beached, U.S. Navy
records show that during the Civil War a schooner named Flash was seized as a
blockade runner off Brazos Santiago in far South
Texas.
Alas,
Barber says his research is conclusive that there is no ambiguity as to the fate
of the Flash. She indeed was lost only 15 months into
her career.
“It would have been a better story if the Flash
had become a blockade runner,” Barber writes, “but those wooden sailing vessels
rarely lived more than a dozen years or so when operating in tropical waters.”
I had held out hope for the Flash having made it until the Civil War largely
on the basis that Morgan had referred to its loss in an 1841 letter concerning
his financial woes. Perhaps, I suggested, he meant loss of ownership rather than
a literal loss.
But according to Barber, Morgan indeed lost the ship and
was still tangled up in a lawsuit over the matter.
Barber did a paper
on the Flash, “Schooner Flash, Captain Falwell…The Short
Life of a Texian Sailing Vessel, 1835-1837,” published earlier this year in the
East Texas Historical Journal. As his article shows, no matter her size or brief
existence, the Flash played an important part in Texas
history.
© Mike Cox
"Texas
Tales" April
23, 2009 column
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