“We see before us our own beloved Brewster stretching out a friendly arm toward the Narrows to bear aloft a torch for the incoming ships when night envelopes all in darkness.” —The Great Brewster Journal, July 24, 1891

In 1891, four intrepid women from Lowell sailed to a remote island in Boston Harbor for a seventeen-day escape from New England’s prim and proper society.

Calling themselves the Scribe, the Aristocrat, the Acrobat and the Autocrat, the women rusticated in a cottage on Great Brewster Island, reveling in the chance to shed their identities of wife, mother and daughter. Relive their sojourn through their remarkable journal, filled with observations, illustrations, photographs and poetry, reproduced here by the Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands.