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American Prizes May 1775 |
Name of Vessel:
Catherine
Master of Vessel:
Rig of Vessel:
Schooner
Date of Capture:
11 May 1775
Place of Capture:
Skenesborough, New York
Captor:
Massachusetts soldiers
Home Port:
From What Port:
To What Port:
Cargo:
Tonnage:
40
Battery:
Crew:
Owners:
Major Philip Skene of Skenesborough, New York
Prizemaster:
Captain Eleazer Oswald
Prizecrew:
Ordered Into:
Fort Ticonderoga, New York
Into What Port:
Fort Ticonderoga, New York
Date Arrived:
12 May 1775
Date Tried:
Date Sold:
Action:
No
Recaptured:
No
Comments: On the morning of 11 May 1775, Captain Samuel Herrick’s company of soldiers arrived in Skenesborough, New York, and easily captured the place, along with Major Philip Skene’s property, family, and a 40-ton schooner (probably named the Catherine). Many of Colonel Benedict Arnold’s men were with Herrick’s party and he later enlisted in Arnold’s regiment, receiving pay from 3 May. The schooner was the most important of the fruits of the capture of Skenesborough. Captain Eleazer Oswald, a former merchant skipper and later Arnold’s military secretary, took charge of the schooner. She was renamed the Liberty, and Oswald prepared to sail her up to Fort Ticonderoga.The vessel was soon after referred to as a “snow,” or “an armed vessel, and of some consequence on the lake.” The small schooner had been built in 1774, and was forty-one feet in length on the deck, with a length on the keel of thirty-one feet, a beam of fourteen feet nine inches, and a depth in the hold of three feet one inch. She measured 40 tons. Her original name seems to have the Katherine (or Catherine). She was a rather flat-floored schooner, the shallow draft being suitable for sailing on Lake Champlain. She may have had some carvings and a figurehead. She was rigged as a ketch, fore and aft, with one square yard on the foremast and no topsail. The Liberty demonstrated rather poor sailing qualities in beating to windward. Oswald departed from Skenesborough in the Liberty on 11 May, for Fort Ticonderoga
[NDAR, I, 319, 312 and note, 327, 330, 358-359, 364-367, 367 and note, 504, 828; Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, 820; Bird, Navies in the Mountains, 132, 134; Chapelle, American Sailing Navy, 112, 113; Smith, Marines in the Revolution, 24-26]