The ship that brought Edgar Allan Poe and his foster family back to America in 1820 was the Martha.
Poe had travelled to Britain with John and Frances Allan in 1815, when he was a young child. John Allan, a Richmond merchant, went to Britain for business, and Poe attended schools in Scotland and England during the family’s stay.
The Allans and Poe left Liverpool aboard the Martha in June 1820. The ship reached New York in July, after which the family continued to Richmond, Virginia. Poe was not Allan’s formally adopted son, but the Allans raised him after the death of his mother, Eliza Poe, and gave him the middle name Allan.
The Martha is sometimes confused with the Lothair, the ship that carried the family from America to Britain in 1815. The return voyage was a significant transition in Poe’s childhood: he came back to the United States at about age eleven and soon resumed life in Richmond.