Theodosia Burr Alston

Immediately following the Patriot's disappearance, rumors arose. The most enduring was that the Patriot had been captured by a pirate, and that something had occurred near Cape Hatteras, notorious for wreckers who lured ships into danger.

Aaron Burr refused to credit any of the rumors of his daughter's possible capture, believing that she had died in a shipwreck. But the rumors persisted long after his death, and after around 1850, more substantial "explanations" of the mystery surfaced, usually alleging to be from the deathbed confessions of sailors and executed criminals.[5]

• One story which was considered somewhat plausible was that the Patriot had fallen prey to the wreckers known as the Carolina "bankers," who operated near Nags Head, North Carolina and were known for pirating wrecks and murdering both passengers and crews. When the sea did not serve up wrecks for their plunder, they lured ships onto the shoals. On stormy nights the bankers would hobble a horse, tie a lantern around the animal's neck, and walk it up and down the beach. Sailors at sea could not distinguish the bobbing light they saw from that of a ship that was anchored securely. Often they steered toward shore to find shelter. Instead, they became wrecked on the banks, after which their crews and passengers were killed. In relation to this, Mr. J.A. Elliott of Norfolk, Virginia, made a statement in 1910 that in the early part of 1813, the dead body of a young woman "with every indication of refinement" had been washed ashore at Cape Charles, and had been buried on her finder's farm.[5]
• Writing in the Charleston's News and Courier, Foster Haley claimed that documents he had discovered in the State archives in Mobile, Alabama said that the Patriot had been captured by a pirate vessel captained by John Howard Payne and that every person on board had been murdered by the pirates including "a woman who was obviously a noblewoman or a lady of high birth". However, Haley never identified or cited the documents he had supposedly found.[4]^: 290
• The most romantic legend involves piracy and a Karankawa Indian chief on the Texas Gulf Coast. The earliest American settlers to the Gulf Coast testified of a Karankawa warrior wearing a gold locket inscribed "Theodosia." He had claimed that after a terrible storm, he found a ship wrecked at the mouth of the San Bernard River. Hearing a faint cry, he boarded the hulk and found a white woman, naked except for the gold locket, chained to a bulkhead by her ankle. The woman fainted on seeing the Karankawa warrior, and he managed to pull her free and carry her to the shore. When she revived, she told him that she was the daughter of a great chief of the white men, who was misunderstood by his people and had to leave his country. She gave him the locket and told him that if he ever met white men, he was to show them the locket and tell them the story, and then she died in his arms.
• Another myth traces its origin to Charles Gayarré's 1872 novel Fernando de Lemos: Truth and Fiction. Gayarré devoted one chapter to a fictional confession by the pirate Dominique Youx, admitting to having captured the Patriot after discovering it dismasted off Cape Hatteras following a storm. In Gayarré's account, Youx and his men murdered the crew, while Alston was made to walk the plank: "She stepped on it and descended into the sea with graceful composure, as if she had been alighting from a carriage," Gayarré wrote in Youx's voice. "She sank, and rising again, she, with an indescribable smile of angelic sweetness, waved her hand to me as if she meant to say: 'Farewell, and thanks again'; and then sank forever."[4]^{: 293–294} Because Gayarré billed his novel as a mixture of "truth and fiction" there was popular speculation about whether his account of Youx's confession might be real, and the story entered American folklore.[6]
• American folklorist Edward Rowe Snow later published an account in Strange Tales from Nova Scotia to Cape Hatteras incorporating the Gayarré story with later offshoots. For example, a woman named Harriet Sprague made a sworn statement before a Michigan notary on February 14, 1903, claiming to corroborate details in Gayarré's novel concerning Youx's confession. Sprague described the contents of an 1848 confession by pirate Frank Burdick, an alleged shipmate of Youx when the Patriot was attacked.[7][8] In Burdick's version, the pirates left most of Alston's clothing untouched, as well as a portrait of her. Later, "wreckers" (locals known for rifling stranded vessels in often-criminal fashion) discovered the deserted Patriot, and one of them carried the painting and clothing ashore. A legend later arose in Bald Head Island, North Carolina, that Theodosia roams the beaches searching for the painting.[9]
• A popular (though very improbable) local story in Alexandria, Virginia, suggests that Alston may have been the Mysterious Female Stranger who died at Gadsby's Tavern on October 14, 1816. She was buried in St. Paul's Cemetery with a gravestone inscription that begins: "To the memory of a / FEMALE STRANGER / whose mortal sufferings terminated / on the 14th day of October 1816 / Aged 23 years and 8 months."

"Nag's Head portrait", Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut.

• In 1869, physician William G. Pool treated Polly Manncaring, an elderly woman in Nag's Head, and noticed an unusually expensive-appearing oil painting on her wall. Manncaring gave it to him as payment and claimed that when she was young, her first husband had discovered it on a wrecked ship during the War of 1812.[7] (Details of the painting in Sprague's story appear to be derived from a separate legend that first appeared in print in 1878.)[4]^: 312 Pool became convinced the portrait was of Theodosia, and contacted members of her family, some of whom agreed, though Pool conceded that they "cannot say positively if it was her" because none of them had ever seen her.[4]^: 315 Mary Alston Pringle, who had been Alston's sister-in-law, was the only person contacted by Pool who had actually known Theodosia, and Pringle could not recognize the painting as a portrait of her.[4]^{: 315–316} The portrait is now at Yale University's Lewis Walpole Library.[10]

A less romantic analysis of the known facts has led some scholars to conclude that the Patriot was probably wrecked by a storm off Cape Hatteras. Logbooks from the blockading British fleet report a severe storm that began off the Carolina coast in the afternoon of January 2, 1813 and continued into the next day.

James L. Michie, an archaeologist from South Carolina who studied the course of the storm, concluded that the Patriot was likely just north of Cape Hatteras when the storm was at its fiercest. "If the ship managed to escape this battering, which continued until midnight," Michie said, "it then faced near hurricane-force winds in the early hours of Sunday. Given this knowledge, the Patriot probably sank between 6:00 PM Saturday [January 2] and 8:00 AM Sunday [January 3]."[4]^{: 272–274}