Dorothea Dix somehow slept through the worst of the storm, only waking to the booming of emergency guns. When she stumbled up on deck, the ship she was aboard was being tossed by high waves, battered by fierce wind, and was perilously close to Sable Island — the infamous “Graveyard of the Atlantic.”
Ironically, Dix had just been looking into the catastrophic loss of life caused by Sable Island, a long, slim sand dune south of Nova Scotia that had wrecked thousands of ships. In an 1853 letter, she observed that “there was neither a lighthouse for warning, nor lifeboats for rescue in the event of perilous shipwrecks.” Between 1830 and 1840 alone, she noted, the island had claimed “sixteen full-rigged ships, fourteen brigs, thirteen schooners, to say nothing of hundreds of fishing smacks.”
She found the ship’s captain and asked about the cannon fire. He explained it wasn’t coming from their vessel — the shots were echoing through the storm. Another ship was in trouble somewhere out there.
And then the guns went silent.
Dorothea Dix was no stranger to stormy seas, being from New England, but this was an exceptionally bad storm. The captain wanted to sail away, but she ordered him to wait. Once the storm died down, she announced, they would land on Sable Island to search for the wreck and save any survivors.
Dix had ulterior motives for wanting to get to Sable Island. For years, Nova Scotia’s government had sent people suffering mental health crises to isolated and empty Sable Island. Though the government claimed it had long since halted this practice, she wanted to personally see for herself.
Dorothea Dix was the most famous mental health advocate of her time. “A glorious decade it had been,” wrote her biographer Helen E. Marshall. “Eleven states had hearkened to her appeals and established hospitals. She had inspected almshouses, jails and prisons; libraries, workshops, and hospitals rose to monuments to her labors.”
It had been a long, hard road.
“I did not have a childhood,” she once told her friends. Her father, a travelling preacher named Joseph, had been an abusive alcoholic, while her mother, Mary, had been mentally incapable of caring for her children. Dorothea had to raise her two siblings herself.
She became a teacher, but certainly not a gentle one. Even by the standards of the time, she shocked parents by telling their daughters that women could never be anything but wives and mothers. Some pulled their girls out of her classes entirely.
Then, at the age of 36, her entire life changed.
She spontaneously volunteered to teach inmates at the East Cambridge Women’s Prison how to read. Inside the prison, she was horrified to find the women inmates were chained to walls in the basement, naked, sleeping in their own waste, and barely fed.
She immediately confronted the warden. He shrugged, dismissively writing the women off as “loony paupers … insane and idiots.” In other words, the women prisoners had been poor and suffering from mental health struggles.
Just after departing the prison, Dorothea Dix received a letter informing her that a grandmother she hadn’t known had died, leaving her a vast fortune. She vowed to use her newfound money to push for reforms to better the lives of people suffering from mental illnesses.
She was remarkably successful, convincing politicians to found hospitals and asylums, and launching investigations into the treatment of vulnerable people. She lobbied politicians, funded hospitals, and exposed abuses across the United States. She even convinced Congress to pass a massive mental health reform bill — only for it to be vetoed by the President.
Furious, she abandoned the United States and moved to Atlantic Canada.
She took her campaign to Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, and Newfoundland. Sometimes she would spend her own money to improve standards of care for people suffering mental health crises, other times she’d bully provincial governments into doing better.
That’s what had brought her near Sable Island. She was on her way back from St. John’s to Halifax when the storm struck.
When the seas calmed the next day, she landed. She was stunned to see just how many shipwrecks littered the shore, writing: “The whole island bristled with stark timbers and debris of wrecks.”
Somehow, she convinced one of the island’s famous wild ponies to let her ride it. She crossed the island on the wild horse’s back, searching for the wreck that had fired the emergency guns.
“Broken spars pierced the fog,” she wrote. “Bleak reminders of tragedies of the past, silent portents of storms to come.”
She found the wreck of ‘The Guide,’ a cargo ship loaded with flour, which had crashed the night before. The crew had successfully departed the ship, but she found that its captain refused to leave. He was suffering what Dr. David L. Goldman called “a brief psychotic episode.”
Dix convinced the sailors to return to the ship and remove their captain by force, binding him with a rope.
After he was ashore, she untied him and, according to Dr. Goldman, “calmed his troubled mind through kind words, persuading him to thank the sailors for saving his life.”
She didn’t stop there, though.
Dorothea Dix solicited private donations from Americans to build a lifesaving station on Sable Island. It would be a place to rescue shipwrecked sailors. The money came from Americans. She explained it was a gesture “in a spirit of neighbourly goodwill and fraternal kindness.”
She raised enough to build four lifeboats, which were displayed on Wall Street before being shipped off to Nova Scotia. Ironically, the ship carrying them was caught in a storm, and her lifeboats were lost.
Not discouraged (though certainly annoyed), Dorothea Dix once again solicited donations from Americans to buy new lifeboats. Finally, late in October 1853, her lifeboats arrived in Sable Island.
Just days later, her boats were used in their first of many rescues, their first of many successful lifesaving operations.
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