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The Adventurous John Egle
Excerpted from The Other Islanders

By Frances Ruley Karttunen

In 1978 Leeds Mitchell Jr. interviewed John Egle and wrote down a summary of his life from school days in Latvia to old age in Nantucket. Egle found the oral history project so interesting that he acquired a tape recorder and cassettes and continued recording his memoirs on his own. His family story leading up to several members' departure from Latvia is as thrilling in its details as Nikita Carpenko's stories of the Russian Revolution and flight from the Bolsheviks (Historic Nantucket, Summer 2003).

In nineteenth-century Latvia the land was largely in the hands of absentee landlords-Baltic Germans, Poles, and Russians whose large estates were worked by Latvian sharecroppers, renters, and contract laborers. The local population was in the unyielding grasp of the estate owners, and the alternatives were revolution at home or emigration to other lands. Russian suppression of rising nationalism in all the Baltic countries was carried out through the garrisoning of Cossack troops in cities and towns and terrorist reprisals against the small farmers and their families.

As John Egle told it to Mitchell, before his older brother Max fled to America he had been subjected to a near-fatal whipping with the knout-a vicious punishment used to intimidate Russian subjects. As a teenager, John himself had been drawn into revolutionary activities, and in order to evade police interrogation he sought employment on an estate distant from his home village of Tukums. In the course of those early years he came to speak German, Polish, and Russian in addition to his native language. Eventually, despite his best efforts to disappear, the authorities located him, and he had to take a last leave of his devastated parents and flee his home country. Members of the Latvian underground hid John Egle and his friend Charles Duce, who was also a fugitive, in the coal hold of a Finnish freighter, and they sailed away, never to see Latvia again.

Members of the Duce and Egle families had come away from Latvia by stages, preceded by the oldest man and followed by the younger men and women. Christopher Duce arrived in the United States in 1906, and his wife Katherine came the next year. In 1907 Max Egle and George Duce came. The year after that, Max sent tickets to his brother John and Charles Duce for passage to Boston from London, where the young men had arrived as stowaways. George's wife Lena got out that year with their daughter Alice, and Max's wife Pauline came with their son John. Max's future sister-in-law, Alma Becker, was the last to arrive in the United States, in 1913. Although their immediate port of entry had been Boston, and they had quickly connected with the Latvian community in Beverly, Massachusetts, many of the Egles and Duces ended up in Nantucket.

The 1918 influenza pandemic staged a return visit to Nantucket in 1920 and carried off three members of the little Latvian community. (John Egle's own account of his family's tragedy is appended here.) Life had to go on, however, and John Egle's life went on for an exceptionally long time. As a young man he simultaneously courted the sea and his bride Alma, whom he met among the Latvian community in Beverly. Having briefly tried working for wages on a dairy farm in Vermont and doing carpentry in Nantucket, he learned that he could earn much more by shellfishing. Investing in a boat of his own and building himself a rent-free shanty on Muskeget, he soon learned the sea in all its moods as he took his quahogs and scallops in to Steamboat Wharf and sailed in the other direction to the mainland to spend time with Alma. In the autumn of 1914 she paid a visit to Nantucket to meet John's extended family, and in May of 1915 they were married. The next year Erna, the first of their children, was born. In order to spend less time on the water and more with his growing family, John had gone to work in his brother Max's shop doing engine repair for the island's fishing fleet, while augmenting his income seasonally by operating the boats belonging to Nantucket summer residents. In the summer of 1920, months after influenza took Max's life, John became captain of a new vessel built for Leeds Mitchell Sr., a wealthy summer resident of Brant Point. For the rest of Leeds Mitchell's life and afterward, John Egle was in what Leeds Mitchell Jr. described as "a symbiotic relationship" with the Mitchell family.

After fifty-seven years of marriage, Alma's death left John a widower. He had never been a man to let others do for him. He maintained and repaired his own boats. He baked his own bread. He grew his own vegetables and flowers. When he needed a house, he built one. When the walls of his house seemed bare, he painted landscapes on them. After Alma's death, he concentrated his time and attention on painting.

Over a dozen years, between the ages of 86 and 98, John Egle produced three hundred paintings, which were exhibited to local acclaim and shown in 1988 at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Even after the Nantucket Artists' Association honored him for his accomplishments at age 97, he continued on robustly until his death at 101, by then the holder of Nantucket's famous Boston Post Cane, which is awarded to the island's oldest resident.

"A True Story"
Excerpt from NHA cassette CT-50: John Egle: Miscellaneous Stories, 1978

The year 1920 was not an easy year for my family. I remember it as a really hard year. So let me start from February 9. It was an ordinary winter day. There had been a lot of snow, close to twelve, fourteen inches, and it was melting because of a warmer spell and was nothing but puddles and slush and most of the snow was gone. I had my brother; we were very close. There was really no day we didn't see each other to talk and laugh and any old way. We couldn't stay away from each other. . . . My brother had a shop, a repair shop where we repaired engines. At that time they were putt-putt engines. . . . When work was a little slack we used to go hunting. On February 9, 1920, we went out back to Hummock Pond to look for rabbits. We had a dog along, but somehow it wasn't very good weather-a lot of puddles, big bunches of drifted snow that had melted away. We didn't have much luck.

All of a sudden my brother says, "Well I feel kind of chilly." I said, "Well, Max, let's turn around. It's time to quit." Because there was a lot of sickness around then, the bad influenza that had started in town. People had it and it was very powerful, the Asian influenza. So I said, "Best thing we go down home." So we were maybe a mile out of town. Walking back, we went by the cemetery, Prospect Hill Cemetery. The road leads by there. Coming by, we kept joking and talking. And there's a valley in the cemetery, and that valley was filled up with water. And we joked and said, "Well, we wouldn't like to sleep in that kind of place, under water." But he pointed out that farther down there is a hill and a bush, and he said, "Do you know, I shot a rabbit there." "Well," I said, "Is that so?"

Anyway, we went down home. But when he got home, he got real sick and he had to go to bed. In another day he contracted double pneumonia. Everyone was sort of scared. They were afraid to go to visit. So he was sick, and on the 12th of February-it was a real cold day-my brother passed away. My brother's wife asked me to come over, so I came over and went into the room where the undertaker had picked my brother up already, and he was laying in a casket in another room. And I went and stayed with him, and somehow, when I was with him, I felt so much better. My fear sort of disappeared, and I felt like he was alive yet. I felt like he was talking, and I felt so much better. The undertaker-today we'd call him the funeral director-said in order to go to the cemetery, we had to have a lot there. He happened to have a lot where we'd fit in. Anyway, I didn't know what else to do.

I didn't know what to do about the funeral rites. I asked the undertaker, "Is it all right if I conduct the rites at the graveside myself?" He said, "Oh, it's all right if you would like to do it. It's really proper if you want to do it." So somehow I was my brother's-I guess you'd call it "keeper." At the funeral there were about five or six Latvian families, so really Latvian that they hardly spoke much English at all. And that was one reason I wanted to conduct the rites in Latvian so they would understand.

There arrived the funeral hearse drawn by black horses. A carriage brought his wife, and we came in a carriage. All gathered at the grave, and I tried with a good heart to make the rites in Latvian. And so everyone understood, because when I was a kid, my father was often called to conduct the graveside rituals in Latvia. So it sort of came into my mind that I can do it in private for my own brother, and I think nobody could put more love in it than I could do for my own brother.

As you remember, we talked, my brother and me, by the cemetery. He pointed out the bush where he'd shot the rabbit. Superstition, much superstition, but it was just two weeks later that my brother was buried in sight of that bush in the same cemetery. That really suits well the people who hold superstitions about what you shouldn't do in the cemetery-disturb anything-because you will be punished. We try to be not superstitious, but it just happened. And that you can put in a true story.

Ethnohistorian Frances Ruley Karttunen is the author of The Other Islanders, a three-part history of the non-English population of Nantucket. Look for Part III on-line soon. Fran is a frequent contributor to Historic Nantucket.

Captions:

John Egle at 100, with his 1983 painting of the Lily Pond.

John Egle at age 50 standing at the helm of a boat.