It is somewhat surprising that Hollywood has never made a movie based on the life of Peter Francisco. His story would seem to have all the ingredients for box-office success–mystery, romance, and swashbuckling action. Perhaps the problem is in casting the role; it would require a swarthy, Mediterranean actor who is also the size of a house and has a light tenor singing voice.

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If such a film were made, one can imagine the opening scene: in the foreground a wooden pier juts out into a misty harbor, where the stillness is broken only by the cries of a few gulls. Gradually, the sound of splashing oars becomes audible. A longboat emerges from the fog; then, as the scene brightens, the silhouette of the merchantman from which it came appears in the distance. The boat pulls alongside the dock; sailors’ rough voices mutter unintelligibly as the form of a small person is lifted from the bobbing craft and set on the pier.

A shout is heard and the boat quickly departs. The bewildered castaway turns toward the camera. He is a young boy, no more than four or five years old, dressed in a once-fine suit that now is dirty and worn. On his shoes expensive silver buckles spell out the initials ‘P.F.

At daybreak the pier begins to come to life. Waterfront residents gather curiously around the waif, asking questions. Unable to speak their language, he simply repeats the words Pedro Francisco. Eventually a woman comes along, takes the child by the hand, and leads him away, saying I’ll take him to the poorhouse. They’ll know what to do with him.

This scenario, though a bit romanticized, is roughly what happened at City Point (now a part of Hopewell), Virginia, on June 23, 1765. The boy later grew up–and up–to become the most remarkable fighting man of the Revolutionary War, a giant of a soldier of whom General George Washington is reputed to have said: Without him we would have lost two crucial battles, perhaps the War, and with it our freedom. He was truly a One-Man Army.

Soon after young Pedro Francisco was taken to the Prince George County poorhouse, his plight came to the attention of Anthony Winston, a local judge and uncle to Virginia firebrand Patrick Henry. Winston took the lad in and taught him to speak English.

Once the boy could communicate with his new guardian, he recounted what he remembered of his past, but it wasn’t much. He had lived in a mansion near the ocean, he said. His mother spoke what he thought was French; his father spoke another language–what, he couldn’t say. One day, when Pedro and his younger sister were playing in the garden, rough men seized them. The girl fought and got away, but Pedro was bound, blindfolded, gagged, and carried to a ship. After what seemed an endless voyage, he was put ashore at the City Point dock.

Winston never learned anything more about the boy’s past, but later investigators have been more successful in piecing together what appears to be a likely, if partial, solution to the Peter Francisco mystery. In 1971, Virginia researcher John E. Manahan, reporting on studies he had carried out while teaching overseas, argued convincingly that Francisco’s original home had been at Porto Judeu, on Terceira Island in the Portuguese-held Azores, and that he was the same Pedro Francisco born there on July 9, 1760.

Why Francisco was abducted remains a mystery. Manahan theorized that the child had been kidnapped by sailors who intended to sell him in the New World as an indentured servant, but the researcher offered no explanation of why they abandoned their captive instead. An Azorean legend has it that the Francisco family, fearful of political enemies, engineered Pedro’s abduction as a means of protecting him from some grisly form of reprisal planned against his parents. While this may be true, evidence is lacking. But that Peter Francisco was a Portuguese (which he himself suspected) seems almost certain, and Portuguese-Americans have eagerly accepted him as an illustrious forebear.

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