St. Elizabeth Ann Seton leaves a one-year-old baby and sails for Italy

NEW YORK, October 2, 1803 AD — The American brig Shepherdess sailed out of New York harbour on October 2, bound for Leghorn, the Tuscan port the Italians call Livorno. The brig carried William Magee Seton, a New York merchant ill with tuberculosis, and his wife, Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, 29. With them was Anna Maria, eight, the eldest of their five children. The other four children, two boys of six and five, a girl of three and a baby just past her first birthday, stayed in the city with an aunt.

William Seton’s doctors had advised a sea voyage. He had known the mild air of Pisa sixteen years earlier and hoped it would repair his health. Four days before sailing, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote to her friend Eliza Sadler that “all say it is presumption, and next to madness, to undertake our voyage; but you know we reason differently.” She went on: “We will, dear Eliza, rest upon Him our only strength.”

Since 1798 AD William Seton’s business had been failing, and in 1800 AD further losses at sea ruined him. As a young man he had worked at Leghorn in the firm of the Filicchi brothers, merchants and bankers who traded with his father. The brothers had long known him and thought well of him, and that is why the Setons were sailing to Leghorn.

In September the Setons emptied their house in State Street, which stood just behind the Battery, the green on the waterfront. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote later: “I took delight in packing all the valuables to be sold, and felt joy in saying adieu to each article that was to be mine no more.” She was an Episcopalian, and her pastor was the Rev. John Henry Hobart of Trinity Church. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton sent her writing desk and her piano to Hobart’s house and asked him to watch over her two sons.

The four younger children went to her sister-in-law Rebecca Seton, who was 22 and her closest friend. “My heart trembles within me and I can only say, take my darlings often in your arms,” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote to Eliza Sadler in the same letter. She added that “it seems to me now like my last hour with all that I love.”

On October 2 the Shepherdess left the harbour past the Battery, with William Seton’s brother Henry, a naval officer, on board for the first day. Relatives and friends waved from the green, in front of the house the Setons had emptied. “Our William felt the passing the Battery so much that I scarcely could wave my handkerchief,” St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote to Rebecca Seton. Of Hobart’s house she wrote: “My friend and brother’s deserted dwelling started my first tear—the study windows were all I could see.”

She wrote the letter at twelve o’clock that day, with the brig off the lighthouse at the mouth of the bay. By then her husband was calm again and felt better than he had on shore. Rebecca Seton had been ill when they left, and St. Elizabeth Ann Seton told her: “Your being sick is the greatest care I leave behind me.” She also wrote that a child on board, about eighteen months old, made her miss her own baby. Then St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote: “I neither look behind nor before — only up, — there is my rest, and I want nothing.”

At ten o’clock on October 3 Henry Seton left the brig and took the letter ashore. Before he went, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton added a line: “A storm threatens, but I fear not with Him.” She sent “kisses to my little ones.”

On October 28, with the Shepherdess past the Azores and halfway to Leghorn, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote home again. Her husband was getting better every day, and she and Anna Maria were well. Of the weeks at sea St. Elizabeth Ann Seton wrote: “Not one struggle nor desponding thought to contend with — confiding hope and consoling peace has attended my way through storms and dangers that must have terrified a soul whose rock is not Christ.”