Penelope Stout was, with her husband Richard Stout, among the original settlers of Middletown, colonial New Jersey's second English settlement, in 1664. She is the central figure in a popular legend that she survived a ship stranding and deadly Lenape attack on Sandy Hook.
Legend and history Few contemporaneous sources document the life of Penelope Stout. The earliest is from Gravesend on what was then Dutch Long Island. On 12 September 1648, Penelope was questioned after she accused one neighbor of milking another's cow. She "acknowledged her fault" and apologised, satisfying "both sides."Find a transcription of the full 1648 Gravesend record in Virginie Adane's "The Penelope Stout Story: History of New Netherland Narrative" (2009), footnote 37.
Additional documents are land deeds dating to the Stouts' years in Middletown, New Jersey. One such record notes that "Richard and wife Penelope" sold a house lot and 40 acres on 26 February 1679-70. Another document dated 30 August 1690 certifies that Richard Stout, Sr., transferred title of a riverside lot and meadow to son Benjamin "for the Joynture of [his] Loving wife Penelope."
Nearly twenty different accounts of Penelope Stout's early life and arrival in the American colonies have been published since 1765.See Jill Piggott, The Penelope Stout Legend: Point-by-Point Comparison, for a review of the 7 most influential versions of the story. For full texts of accounts published 1765-1916, see The Many Stories of Penelope, ed. Jim McFarlane. They share in common the claims that she survived a ship stranding (or shipwreck) and a Lenape attack. There is no known record of her birth, emigration, marriage to anyone other than Stout,See discussion below of Clemens' undocumented and apparently fictitious claim that Penelope "Kent or Lent," widow of "Von Printzen," married Richard Stout in Gravesend more than a decade before the settlement was founded (American Marriages Before 1699, p. 134). or death. Nor is there a record of a ship stranding or wreck that plausibly fits Penelope’s presence in New Amsterdam by 1643-4, when she married Stout.The Stouts' oldest child was born in 1644-5, according to their 1675 NJ land claim (Stillwell, p. 302). See "List of 17th-Century Shipwrecks," Wikipedia.
In the absence of documentary evidence, the first two published accounts of the legend have shaped all later tellings. As historian John Stillwell notes, these two "versions have much in common, but are still so dissimilar that it is evident that their sources of origin were totally different.” Writing decades after Penelope's death, Samuel Smith included the legend in his 1765 History of New Jersey.Smith, Samuel (1877). The history of the colony of Nova-Caesaria, or New Jersey: containing, an account of its first settlement, progressive improvements, the original and present constitution, and other events, to the year 1721 First published 1765. Trenton, NJ: W.S. Sharp. p. 66–67. Morgan Edwards published a second account in 1792, quoting a letter by Rev. Oliver Hart (1723-1795), minister to third- and fourth-generation Stouts in Hopewell, New Jersey.See Andrew Harrison (2022), "Old School Baptist Church still stands as a landmark of Hopewell Borough’s beginning, 22 March 2022, centraljersey.com. Like Smith, Hart cites no records. His version of the tale appeared in Edwards’ Materials Towards a History of the Baptists in JerseyThe Smith and Hart-Edwards accounts appear in full in John Edwin Stillwell, Historical and genealogical miscellany: data relating to the settlement and settlers of New York and New Jersey, p. 296-97. and was later reproduced with minor variations by David Benedict in 1813 and John Raum in 1871. For this reason, it's sometimes identified as the "Edwards" or "Benedict" account.
In Samuel Smith’s 1765 telling, a ship carrying an unnamed Dutch couple to New Amsterdam became stranded. Smith gives the location as Sandy Hook in what’s now New Jersey. He dates the event to “about the time of the Indian war in New-England.” Thomas Streets notes the “only Indian war which occurred in New England, while the Dutch were in possession of New York, was the Pequod War, which began in 1636, and ended in 1637."
In Smith’s account, the stranded passengers safely reached shore, but “being afraid of the Indians,” they “made haste” to New Amsterdam (now New York City), leaving behind a man who’d been sick “most of the voyage” and his wife. The pair were soon attacked by Indians who “killed the man, and cut and mangled the woman,” leaving her for dead. She crawled into a hollow tree, where she lived for “several days,” eating the ”excrescences that grew from it." Two Indians discovered her there, the older preventing the younger from killing her. The old man “carried her to a place near where Middletown now stands” and “cured” her wounds. “After some time the Dutch at New-Amsterdam hearing of a white woman among the Indians, concluded who it must be, and some of them came to her relief; the old man her preserver, gave her the choice either to go or stay; she chose the first.”
Smith includes an event missing from Hart’s account. According to Smith, after the woman married “one Stout,” the couple lived in Middletown “among other Dutch inhabitants.” The old Indian was a frequent guest and on one occasion warned Mrs. Stout of an imminent attack. At great risk to himself, he hid a canoe so the family could escape. Stout, skeptical of the news, remained behind, but formed a guard with several neighbors. When the band arrived, the settlers “expostulated” with them. “Their arguments prevailed, the Indians desisted, and entered into a league of peace.”
Smith claims the thwarted attack occurred soon after the Stouts married, when “about fifty families of white people” lived in Middletown. In fact, fifty settler families “could only have been assembled in this district after the Monmouth Patent had been issued by Governor Nicholls” in 1665, when the Stouts’ oldest son was about twenty. The Middletown Township Historical Society describes the first permanent settlers as “families of English extraction,” and Stillwell reports, “There is no knowledge of any Dutch in this locality until long after the Monmouth Patent was granted.”Stillwell, Historical and Genealogical Miscellany: p. 302.
Hart’s account, published by Edwards in 1792, makes no mention of the 1648 record which gives Penelope’s surname as Prince. His account is the original published source of the tradition that Penelope’s birth surname was “Vanprincis” or "Vanprinces," as variously reprinted.Writing for the Holland Society of New York, Virginie Adane notes that, in addition to the presence of the 1648 record that gives Penelope's surname as Prince. See "The Penelope Stout Story: Evolution of a New Netherland Narrative," 2009, HAL Open Access Archive, p. 8. Hart sets the story too early for historical fact, claiming Penelope and her husband with the last name of Kent, voyaged to New Netherland in 1620, four years before the colony was founded. More accurately plces the voyage in 1640. Arthur G. Adams relies on the Hart-Edwards account for his brief retelling of Penelope's story in his 1980 The Hudson, a Guidebook to the River (State University Press of NY). He thus wrongly claims Penelope emigrated to New Netherland in 1620, four years before the colony's founding (p 31). Like Smith, he writes that passengers and crew survived a stranding, but left behind an “injured” man and his wife, who were soon attacked. Where Smith describes Penelope as “mangled,” Hart provides gory detail. Attackers stripped the pair, fractured Penelope’s skull, permanently damaged her left shoulder, and slit open her belly, forcing her to push her bowels back into her body and hold them in place.Hart as published by Edwards, qtd. Stillwell, p. 297.
Hart extends Penelope’s stay in the hollow tree to a full week and adds a detail: the approach of two Indians was preceded by a deer “with arrows sticking in it.” As in Smith’s account, an old man restrained a young man from killing Penelope, then “took her to his wigwam and cured her of her wounds.” Here the accounts diverge: where Smith says the woman remained with the Indians until settlers came looking, Hart has the old man take her to her ”countrymen” in “New York,” expecting a present in return, no doubt.” Unlike Smith, Hart doesn’t describe a continuing friendship between Penelope and the old man or his warning of imminent attack.
Descendant Nathan Stout’s 1825 manuscript was published by Stillwell in 1916. Unlike Smith and Hart, Nathan Stout places the ship stranding on the shore of what’s now Middletown and claims the ship’s crew and passengers were all “butchered and killed” in an Indian attack, save “Penelope Van Prince,” who was left for dead and hid in a hollow tree for “several days” with a “number of severe wounds to her head and back.”Nathan Stout (1825), unpublished manuscript, qtd. Stillwell, pp. 299. When the Stout manuscript was edited for publication in 1908 as The History of the Stout Family, three changes were made that brought the text more closely in line with Hart’s published account. The spelling of Penelope’s surname became “Van Princes,” her stay in the hollow tree was lengthened to seven days, and the description of her injuries newly included the claim that she was disemboweled: “She was bruised very severely about the head, and her bowels protruded from a cut across her abdomen: she kept them in with her hand.”
Nathan Stout departs from both Hart and Smith when writing that Penelope was found by a lone Indian and his dog. The man was moved by “compassion” and carried Penelope to his home “where he treated her kindly and healed her wounds.” Like Hart, Nathan Stout claims the Indian took Penelope to New Amsterdam where he “sold her to the Dutch,” and he makes no reference to a warning of an attack. Nathan Stout repeats the historical error of assuming Penelope and Richard “immediately crossed the bay” after marrying and settled Middletown in 1648 with five other white families. In fact, Middletown was founded on land purchased from the Lenape by Stout and others in the Monmouth Patent dated 8 April 1665.
Eighth-generation Stout descendant Therese Seabrook (1821-1899) also wrongly dates the settlement of Middletown to 1648. She includes the old Indian’s warning in her version of the tale. But unlike Hart, who claims the Indian hid a canoe so the Stouts could escape, Seabrook gives the starring role to her ancestor, “Penelope Van Prince,” who gathers the settlers and leads them to the bay shore, where they spend the night offshore in canoes, “it being too dark to go any place across the water.”Therese Seabrook's account is quoted by Stillwell, p. 298. Where Hart has the villagers confront their would-be attackers at midnight, Seabrook has them meet the following day.William Stockton Hornor interviewed Therese Seabrook for his 1932 This Old Monmouth of Ours, p 146-48. His account generally follows Smith's.
In their History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois (1876), John C. and Sarah A. Power describe the Stout family’s “origin in America” as “quite romantic.” Franklin Ellis cites Smith and Hart-Edwards when referencing Penelope’s survival story in his History of Monmouth County, New Jersey (1885).