A Call to the Sea: Captain Charles Stewart of the USS Constitution (review) (original) (raw)
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America’s Unwitting Pirate: The Adventures and Misfortunes of a Continental Navy Captain
2016
This paper is a short is a biography of Gustavus Conyngham who was granted a captain’s commission in the Continental Navy during the Revolutionary War. Conyngham engaged in what we would call today “asymmetrical warfare,” raids on shipping near the British coast. He captured more vessels than any American naval officer and had a major effect on British home-front morale where he was given the name the “Dunkirk pirate.” At one point he was captured and greatly suffered at the hands of the British. When the war concluded the financial origins of his two vessels, Surprize and Revenge was questioned, as was the longevity of his naval commission. Conyngham was denied federal compensation and received little public gratitude or recognition in maritime history. This essay is a close examination of his heroic maritime service and concludes that he may have been the Revolutionary War’s unintended American pirate.
Captain Archibald Stewart (1794-1881): Kintyre Seafarer with a Knack for Survival
“Captain Archibald Stewart (1794-1881): Kintyre Seafarer with a Knack for Survival,” The Stewarts: An Historical and General Magazine, vol. 20-1 (1996), pp. 33-39., 1996
Though the lives of Scots seamen in the early 19th century were very perilous by todays standards, still the career of Captain Archibald Stewart from Kintyre had no doubt more than its fair share of shipwrecks and other dangers. One of Captain Archie's special gifts, however, seems to have been an uncanny ability to survive disasters. Survive them he did, living to enjoy a ripe old age safely on shore, and not long before his death he related to his granddaughter a number of the close calls he had experienced as a young seaman. His own good fortune contrasts sharply with the fate of his younger brother Neil (b. 1803), evidently another seaman, who according to family records, finally "drowned in Mediterranean, aged 40, in 1845," and with the fate of his own darling son and namesake, Archibald (b. ca. 1835), who on the 25th of January, 1846, was lost overboard during a storm in the Irish Channel. Archibald Stewart, later known as "Captain Archie" by his descendants, began life as one of the older sons of John Stewart (1756-1806), tacksman at Peninver and Skipness farms in Kintyre, and Marrion McGuill (d. 1838). He was born at Peninver, Campbeltown, and was baptized on the 28th of July, 1794. Like several of his brothers, including Neil and John (who was my ancestor), he 1 In the following I have followed for the most part the original typescript possessed by Mrs. M. Stewart Hafer. A few additions or corrections by Mr. Ian Macdonald are given between square brackets. His Park Stewart family is investigated in more detail in the book The Ancestry and Descendants of Alexander Stewart (1 Oct. 1857-22 Oct. 1938). Part 3 of A History of the Jackson Family, Tacoma, WA, 1997.
Some consider the 7 November 1811 Battle of Tippecanoe as the first battle of the War of 1812, but considering that American maritime states' battle cry was "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights," there is another candidate. On 22 June 1807 a ship-to-ship encounter occurred off the Virginia Capes, between the British fourth-rate warship H.M.S. Leopard and the United States frigate Chesapeake. The attack came after the Leopard's commander called on Captain James Barron to heave-to and surrender four seamen, suspected Royal Navy deserters. Barron ignored the request, as well as a British shot across the bows, upon which the Leopard poured three broadsides into the unprepared American vessel. Captain Barron had no alternative but to strike his colors in surrender, after which the Chesapeake was boarded and the men seized. One of the seamen was a white native of Britain, later hanged for his crime; the other three were black American citizens, Daniel Martin, John Strachan, and William Ware, all taken into British sea service. To Americans, the unprovoked attack on a United States' naval vessel spoke of British overreach and arrogance. 2 Crewing naval and trade shipping went hand-in-hand, the same men often serving on both at different times. During intercontinental conflicts merchant shipping suffered from blockades and predatory enemy vessels, leading to unemployed seamen who then joined fighting ships. The choice then was whether to sign with the nation's navy or with privately-financed letter-of-marque (privateer) vessels. Philadelphian Samuel Michael, a "Black man," first served ten years as a merchant seaman, from age fourteen to twenty-four. He enlisted in the British navy in 1792 and served to 1812, when, having lost his right leg, he was discharged as a Greenwich Hospital out-pensioner. Finding that twelve-pence a day was insufficient, he returned to the merchant marine, serving twenty years as a ship's cook before leaving the service. 3 During the Seven Years' War, free black New Yorker William Blue enlisted in the Royal Navy and served at the 1759 siege of Quebec, and the 1761 British capture of Belle Île, off the coast of Brittany. Supposedly Blue also served with British forces in North America during the American Revolution. In 1796 he was caught stealing sugar and in 1801 was transported aboard the ship Minorca to Australia. Enslaved men served, too. In October 1762 Vice-Admiral Alexander Colville took aboard H.M.S. Northumberland several slaves to replace "thirty of her best Seamen [dead] by a Malignant Fever." He informed the Admiralty Secretary, "These Negroe Slaves shared the same Fate with such freeborn White Men, as we could pick up at a very critical time …" Slaves belonging to ship's officers also augmented the crew; abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, who purchased his freedom in 1766, at one time belonged to British Lieutenant Michael Pascal. He was in several naval actions, and at the sieges of Louisbourg and Havana. While aboard the ship Roebuck, Equiano helped work the vessel, at sail and in combat. Jeffrey Brace, who was manumitted after service as a Continental soldier in the War of the Revolution, belonged 1 U.S.S. Constitution Captain Isaac Hull wrote admirably of his black sailors, while using an all-too-common derogatory term, "I never had any better fighters than those n-ers. They stripped to the waist & fought like devils, sir, seeming to be utterly insensible to danger & to be possessed with a determination to outfight white sailors."
2023
Close Connections John Stewart's mother Catherine Sherborne, born in 1696, belonged to a numerous family at Pembridge, Herefordshire, where her father, Nicholas, was rector of the parish, a position held within the family for three generations. One of her uncles had inherited properties in Pembridge and another was a landed gentleman in the neighbouring parish of Lyonshall. 1 They were typical of country gentry whose main concern was status