Name of Vessel:

Musketto [Musquito, Musketo]

Master of Vessel:

Captain John Harris

Rig of Vessel:

Brig

Date of Capture:

4 June 1777

Place of Capture:

30 miles east of Barbados, British West Indies

Captor:

HM Frigate Ariadne

Home Port:

Virginia

From What Port:

Martinique, French West Indies

To What Port:

Cargo:

Tonnage:

98

Battery:

14x4

Crew:

71 [total]

Owners:

Prize master:

Mate

Prize crew:

14 [total]

Ordered Into:

Barbados, British West Indies

Into What Port:

Barbados, British West Indies

Date Arrived:

6 June 1777

Date Tried:

10 July 1777

Date Sold:

Action:

No

Recaptured:

No

Comments: About the first of June 1777 Virginia Navy Brig  Musquetto (Captain John Harris) sailed from Guadeloupe, French West Indies, to seek British ships inward bound to the West Indies. She was thirty miles east of Barbados on 4 June 1777, when she was sighted by HM Frigate Ariadne (Captain Thomas Pringle), which promptly gave chase. After a long chase the Ariadne began to close on the Musquetto, and Harris threw over his guns to lighten the brig. Ariadne opened fire with bow chasers, and, closing in, added several vollies of small arms fire before Harris gave up at 2200. A prize crew of a mate, midshipman, and twelve sailors went over to Musquetto and the prisoners were removed. The next day the prize was brought into Carlisle Bay, Barbadoes. Fifty-six of the prisoners were landed on the 6 June and placed in close confinement in the jail, pending orders from England on their disposition. A report on 12 June listed the prisoner total as seventy-one men.

The prize was a fine brig. She was tried and condemned on 10 July 1777, and taken into the Royal Navy as HM Sloop Endeavour before 23 July 1777. She was valued at £1600 on her survey (1 August 1777). In a report to the Admiralty on 20 July 1778, Vice Admiral Young reported her as a  98-ton brig, with sixteen guns and a crew of seventy-four men at capture.

On 19 June, James Smith, an agent at St. Eustatius, reported the loss, noting the Musquetto was captured to the windward of Barbados. Harris and his crew were sent “home” (to England) with a number of other prisoners in the convoy that sailed from St. Kitts on 16 June. On 25 June Van Bibber and Harrison reported the brig’s capture and added “The Sailors we are told are all in Gaol at Barbadoes but the Capt & other officers are carried to Antigua, from wherever they will be transported to England. It seems prisons are thus fitted up for the reception of all Americans who have the ill fortune to fall into their hands (no matter where) but more particularly those taken in armed vessels.” John Ball reported the capture on 10 July 1777. He said the Musquetto was taken into St. Johns, Antigua, noting that the Ariadne was much faster than the Musquetto, and that the prisoners had been sent to England in the “June fleet.”

Harris and his fellow officers were indeed “transported” to England. They were committed to Forton Prison on 8 August 1777. Forton Gaol was formerly Queen Anne’s Hospital, located at Portsea, a suburb of Portsmouth. When the building had become too run down and old for use as a hospital it was converted to a prison. The place was a damp, dirty, four stoty masonry structure. The prisoners were considered rebels and placed on an allowance of food that was only two thirds of that formerly allowed prisoners of war.

A prisoner there recorded the reception Harris and his officers faced: “Aug 9 this day came on shore forty nine American prisoners. Among them were three captains of armed vessels, viz. Captain Courter of the ‘Oliver Cromwell,’ Captain Harris of the ‘Miscator’ and Captain Hill of the ‘Montgomery.’ The Agent made it his business to make them deliver up their money by the point of the bayonet. There is no such thing as refusing.”

The chief occupation was plotting to escape. The penalty was to be placed in the “black hole, a dungeon for 40 days and nights . . . put on bread and water.” This stopped no one from trying to get out. The first Virginia Navy officer out was Captain of Marines Dick. A fellow prisoner says: “The pavements of the lower floors were all laid with bricks. Some managed to take up the bricks, and dig down until they got below the wall, then dig outside the pickets. This was all done by concealing the dirt in some parts of the prison . . . At this time ten men . . . all officers, made their escape, to wit: Second Lieutenant Benjamin Chew, Jess Harding, Robert Ewart, Benjamin Whalen . . . Captain Meredith of Hampton, Captain Dick, a Mr. Moore, a Mr. Martin, Colonel Webber and Colonel Bibbitrong.” Dr. McNickel got out about the same time. Dick was certainly back in Virginia by 22 November 1779 when he presented the Virginia House of Delegates a petition requesting payment of a debt of 1650 guineas contracted through his imprisonment and subsequent escape; he also appealed for an advancement in rank. The Mr. Moore listed above was Midshipman Alexander Moore of the Musketo.

The details of the escape of Lieutenants Byrd Chamberlayne and George Chamberlaine are not chronicled. George Chamberlaine escaped on 12 October 1777 and was recaptured and sent to the Black Hole. Both men were, however, back in Virginia by the middle of 1778, as on the 25th of June they were both granted a leave of absence from duty for a fortnight. On the following day the Naval Board renewed Byrd Chamberlayne*s commission, “his former one being lost during his captivity in England.”

It was on Friday, July 2, 1779, after twenty-three months of imprisonment, that Captain Harris and a number of his fellow pris­oners were exchanged. John Kilby, a seaman from the privateer Sturdy Beggar, described the exchange: “At last the day and hour of exchange were announced to us . . . The agent appointed for that purpose, A Mr. Hurum, called all of our names, and then read to us these words, to wit: ‘You all now have received His Majesty’s most gracious pardon.’ At that time there was a loud cry from many of our men: ‘Damn his Majesty and his pardon too.’ The gates were opened and one hundred of us . . . were marched out under a guard. There were one hundred of us with Captain John Harris at our head. We were accompanied by fine music. Some of our boys cried out ‘Give us Yankee Doodle’ and they certainly did play it for us all the way down through the town . . .”

The exchanged prisoners were transported to Nantes, France, where many of them, including John Kilby, shipped on the Bon Homme Richard, Captain John Paul Jones. Captain Harris returned to Virginia late in 1779 to find his wife had died in his absence.

Lieutenant of Marines Catlett returned in the spring of 1781, “with feelings so violent from the treatment he had received that he would never have left the service as long as there was a chance of fighting,” as a fellow prisoner put it. The fellow prisoner added that these feelings were shared in by all.

Sailing Master Charles de Kay was in jail until the close of the war. On 5 August 1778 the Virginia Assembly voted to reimburse him $46 in specie to repay a loan from Captain Harman Courter.

The crew were split up and variously treated, but most were badly treated. Moses Stanley reported that he and others were thrown into a Bridgetown prison and kept there for seven months and fifteen days before they were transported, in the Antelope, to Forton Prison. From the Barbados prison Francis Pickett, Reuben Brooks and William Chandler were sent to enforced service on a British ship. The two latter men were seized with a fever and died from lack of necessary items. Ralph Horn was kept seven months in Barbados and then was sent aboard the Antelope, en route to Brazil. On 17 June 1778 some of the men, according to Horn, were distributed aboard a fleet of ships bound for Jamaica. There they were removed to a British warship and placed on two thirds rations. Two attempts to escape met with failure. On the ship Prince George several captives were ill used because they refused to enlist. Horn failed in another attempt to escape, was charged with treason and kept six days in confinement, then brought to the gang-way for punishment. Three years later he was sent to the Romulus and taken to England, where he was kept three more years. He was released and reached New Castle on 19 September 1783. Horn was one stubborn Marine.

A Dr. Iveson, of the Musquetto, arrived in St. Pierre, reported Harrison on 27 December 1777, with the news that the prisoners at Barbados would soon be released. “Harris’ people much in want of cloaths,” and were supplied by Harrison, through a friend, to the amount of 20 lois. The prisoners were not released. Shortly after they were taken to England and committed to Forton Prison.

But some sailors escaped from Barbados. These reached M. Soubies of Guadeloupe, of all people, who assisted them with clothing. William Dishman was kept at Bridgetown until the June 1778 distribution to the Jamaica fleet. He and his two brothers sailed in the same ship. Arriving there they were given permission to work their way to Philadelphia, but managed to get to Baltimore instead. They arrived the night the town was celebrating the recent alliance with France.

Nor were the Forton prisoners without hope or action. William Mitchell and fifteen other privates (sailors) succeeded in undermining the jail, made straight for the harbor, seized a small vessel, and escaped to France. At least two members of the crew died at Forton Prison.

[NDAR, IX, 19-20, 46 and note, 104, 322-324, 696-697; XI, 124-130 and 130 note; 284-285 and 285 note, 888-891 and 891 note, 891-893 and 893 note; Jamieson, Alan G., “American Privateers in the Leeward Islands, 1776-1778,” in The American Neptune, [volume unknown], reprinting a list of Admiral Young’s in ADM 1/310; Stewart, Virginia’s Navy of the Revolution, 37-42; Cross, A Navy for Virginia, 41, 42, 43]