Caswell Cemetery taken from Gazebo on bluff. Gosport Harbor in view. Lawn of Oceanic Hotel. In 1711 the first Caswells joined a hard-drinking, hard-working Shoals fishing community that was already a century old. But unlike many seasonal fishermen who commuted from Europe, the Caswells stayed. They survived the dangerous fishing trade and the brutal winters on the windswept rocks. Although patriot forces cleared the feisty Shoalers off the islands during the Revolutionary War, many Caswells came back. They grew wealthy by island standards. By 1866, a hand-drawn map of Star shows at least a third of the homes belonging to different Caswells, with others owned primarily by the Randall, Robinson, Downs, Berry, Haley, Beebe and Newton families. Like the Haley family of nearby Smuttynose, the Caswells were the royalty of Star Island. It was not much of a kingdom-- an island reeking of stale fish and covered in ramshackle huts and upturned dories. Back then, as the joke goes, there were only two types of Shoalers -- the heavy-smoking, hard drinking, fish-smelling, tobacco spitting, foul mouthed heathen type -- and their husbands. Women, Celia Thaxter tells us, did most of the labor and grew old before their time. When the men were not fishing, they were drinking or lounging upon the rocks. A bill from one Star Island fisherman shows he could polish off four gallons of rum in a single month.