Neil McMillan’s grave. [2017, Dunlap]
Updated on 22 August 2026 | It was on this ship that Capt. Neil McMillan (1844-1883), the father of Rear Adm. Donald Baxter MacMillan, perished when the boy was 9 years old.
Abbie H. Brown (also spelled Abby H. Brown) was a 95-ton, 79-foot-long, two-masted, billet-headed schooner built in Salisbury in 1861. E. & E. K. Cook bought the 131-ton whaler in 1862. It departed for an eight-month voyage under Capt. Benjamin Higgins, and returned with 300 barrels of oil. Higgins also commanded the 1864-1865 voyage, while Nehemiah Y. Higgins was the captain for the 1866-1867 trip. Under the agency of Thomas Hilliard, Brown was out on the high seas from 1867 to 1869.1
This distressing account, datelined Provincetown, appeared in The New York Times of 26 January 1884: “The schooner Abbie H. Brown, of Provincetown, from Boston for the Bay of Islands, Newfoundland, to load herrings, is long overdue. Great apprehension is felt here for her safety. The Brown left here on Nov. 10, the day before the gale when so many Gloucester fishermen were lost. She had a crew of six men. Capt. Neil McMillen and the mate, Kenneth McPhee, have families here.”
As it happened, Captain McMillan and his entire crew had been dead more than two months when this article was published. Brown was lost in a gale off Newfoundland on 14 November 1883. That left Sarah Gardner McMillan, whose father had been a shipbuilder, with five children to care for alone. They lived at 524 Commercial Street. Already in frail health, she died when “Donny Baxter” was 12 years old. For a time, the boy was cared for by one or two other seafaring families in town, but was finally sent to Freeport, Me., to live with an older sister who had married.
The Bay of Islands was Abbie H. Brown‘s destination.
1 Wooden Ships and Iron Men (1994), by Reginald W. Cabral and James Theriault / Municipal Collection / Provincetown History Preservation Project Page 4969; “Alphabetical List of Ship Registers, District of Barnstable, Massachusetts, 1814-1913, Compiled From Original Documents Stored in the New Bedford Custom House,” prepared by the National Archives Project, 1938, accessible through HathiTrust; and American Offshore Whaling Voyages: A Database, by Judith N. Lund, Elizabeth A. Josephson, Randall R. Reeves, and Tim D. Smith; and Mystic Seaport Museum Inc., New Bedford Whaling Museum, and Nantucket Historical Association.