DATE: Thursday, October 9, 1997             TAG: 9710090035

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PAUL CLANCY, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:  114 lines

THE DESCENDANTS OF JAMES ALONE SEVERAL EASTERN SHORE FAMILIES TRACE ANCESTRY TO BOY WHO MAY HAVE SURVIVED 1802 SHIPWRECK.

NEARLY 200 years ago, the story goes, on the morning after a punishing storm, Assateague Island residents were greeted by an unforgettable sight: a dazed and frightened boy tied to what appeared to be a ship's hatch cover.

The 2- to 3-year-old had a dark complexion and spoke, when he finally was able to, a language no one understood. Yet a family took him in and raised him as their own. And they gave him a name that spoke of his coming into their lives - James Alone. Until recently, there had been nothing to support the story except family lore handed down through generations of people who go back to a brave, isolated village on a thin barrier island.

But the recent interest in the Spanish treasure ship Juno, which supposedly carried all 425 passengers to their deaths in 1802, has set afloat a new notion, that there was indeed at least one survivor.

Memory of the boy clings to the private papers of dozens of residents of nearby Chincoteague and the Eastern Shore, some direct descendants of a boy who grew up and married and lived by the sea.

If the shipwreck he survived was that of the Juno, it is a small piece of a puzzle that indicates the ship was relatively close to shore when it sank on a stormy morning in October 1802.

Quicksilver, a Virginia Beach company that has been searching for the Juno for 10 years, contends the ship went down 40 miles off Assateague.

But Ben Benson, who has a permit to search state waters closer to shore, believes the ship foundered and sank within sight of land. He is now surveying a wreck that appears to lie less than half a mile from the Assateague beach.

In either case, the story of a shipwreck survivor has taken on new life.

In soft pine woods hidden from public view on Assateague Island National Seashore, a cemetery yields clues to a village that once existed here. Most of the headstones are gone and many of the grave sites are marked by depressions in the sandy soil.

Ernestine Holston steps carefully around briars to look for the resting place of her distant relative.

``My husband used to laugh and say, `Just think, you came from James Alone off that sunken ship,' '' she says.

She believes, and records in her thick family Bible seem to support her story, that James Alone grew up in the village by the sea and that when he turned 20, he made his way to the mainland, walked to the Accomac County Courthouse and changed his name to James Lunn after the family that raised him.

Official records show that a James Lunn, who was about the age the boy would have been, married and sired generations of Lunns and others too numerous to mention. Four generations later, Holston stands beside one of the gravesites.

``I'll bet you my great-great-grandmother is buried somewhere here,'' she says, her voice muffled by the pines.

Among her family treasures is a handful of late 18th century Spanish coins that her late husband picked up along the beach. These and other coins that residents have brought forth add another piece to the puzzle of the Juno.

And her tattered, leather-covered Bible adds a couple of others.

Tucked into its pages in carefully written sentences on the stationery of J.T. Lunn & Sons, Planters and Packers of Fancy Oysters and Clams, is a notice from April 11, 1913.

It announces the shocking news that James T. Lunn, 60, fell overboard and drowned. It adds that Lunn's great-grandfather was taken off a stranded ship ``and was so young that he did not know his name and the natives gave him the name of James Lone, which subsequently was changed to James Lunn.''

The name here is slightly different and the ship was said to be French. However, there are no records of French ships going down near the island in that period.

Also tucked in the Bible is a page from an Eastern Shore travel guide that relates the story, apparently told by locals, of a baby found on the beach strapped to a plank. His rescuers ``named him James Alone because he came from the sea alone,'' the guide says.

The Juno was loaded with people - including an African battalion that guarded the ship's contents - when it put out from Veracruz, Mexico, with millions of silver pesos and other treasure and headed for Cadiz, Spain. All were said to have perished after storms forced the mastless, rudderless ship toward the Virginia coast.

Witnesses from a would-be rescue ship said they heard cries for help, but claimed, as fog lifted the next morning, that the ship had vanished from sight.

Benson's hunt for the Juno has been postponed temporarily, but he seems as intrigued by the boy's story as the ship's.

He has found marriage records at the Accomack County Courthouse that show James Lunn married twice, in 1835 and 1842. His second wife, Elizabeth, was only 14 at the time. Census records from 1850 show they had three children, Comfort, Delany and John.

Then the descendants fall through the years like coins from a barrel: Lunns, Holstons, Bowdens, Watsons, Taylors, Clarks. They're spread out on the limbs of a family tree that Ernestine Holston's husband, John, assembled on a 10-foot-long brown paper scroll.

``It's like a Who's Who of Chincoteague,'' Benson says.

Down the road near Accomac, James T. Lunn III, Ernestine Holston's cousin, owns Dreamland Homes, a large mobile home park with ``a touch of class'' near the Perdue chicken processing plant.

Lunn, who also owns a racehorse named Dreamland Jim, proudly displays a sepia-toned picture of his grandfather, James Lunn, the grandson of James Alone. He's posing with his wife who has a dark-eyed, stern expression that contrasts sharply with the dreamy look of her husband.

The present-day Lunn has the fair complexion of a landlubber, but he says members of his father's side of the family were darker. They well could have been Spanish.

Three years ago, delivering a house trailer to the National Park Service on Assateague, he found an antique, rusty iron on the beach. He believes it was from the same ship that brought his great-great-grandfather to the New World.

``I should thank these people that took him in,'' he says.

``If it wasn't for them, I probably wouldn't be here.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color staff photos by Ian Martin

James Lunn of Accomac decends from James Alone...

James Alone, who later took the name James Lunn, ...

Ernestine Holston...

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