Name of Vessel:

Aurora

Master of Vessel:

Commander Woolman Sutton

Rig of Vessel:

Ship

Date of Capture:

26 May 1780

Place of Capture:

Near Cape Henlopen, Delaware, Delaware Bay

Captor:

HM Frigate Iris

Home Port:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

From What Port:

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

To What Port:

St. Eustatius, Netherlands West Indies

Cargo:

Tobacco

Tonnage:

Battery:

20x6 [19x4, 1x9]

Crew:

75 [estimated]

Owners:

Prize master:

Squires

Prize crew:

Ordered Into:

New York, New York

Into What Port:

New York, New York

Date Arrived:

29 May 1780

Date Tried:

[June] 1780

Date Sold:

[June] 1780

Action:

Yes

Recaptured:

No

Comments: The Pennsylvania Privateer Ship Aurora (Commander Woolman Sutton) was owned in Philadelphia. Aurora was apparently newly-built and was preparing for sea in May 1780, outward bound to St. Eustatius in the Netherlands West Indies with a cargo of tobacco. Aurora was armed with twenty 6-pounders, or with a mixed battery of 4-pounders and one 9-pounder. Aboard as a passenger was the American poet, Philip Morin Freneau, who has left two vivid accounts of the subsequent events.

Aurora sailed from Philadelphia about 24 May. The next day she was beating down Delaware Bay, making for the entrance, when she encountered a small sloop with a cargo of corn, which had been captured by Loyalist “refugees.” The sloop was recaptured. Early in the morning on 26 May the pilot was put on the sloop, along with the handcuffed prisoners, and it was sent off to Cape May, New Jersey. Aurora then stood out to sea steering ESE on a hazy day with light winds.

About 1500 three sail were sighted from the masthead, bearing ENE and distant about fifteen miles. They were visible from the quarterdeck, and were thought to be a ship and two brigs. The ship and brigs were soon seen to be in chase. Sutton immediately tacked, raised all possible sail, and steered back toward the Delaware Capes. The three vessels were HM Frigate Iris (Captain James Hawker) and two prize brigs: Pennsylvania Privateer Brig Active (Commander Thomas Misnard) and the brig General Lincoln, from the Saint-Domingue, French West Indies, bound to its home port of Salem, Massachusetts (or to Boston). Iris had picked them up en route from Charleston, South Carolina to New York, New York, with news of Charleston’s fall to the British.

About half an hour before sunset Cape Henlopen, Delaware was in sight from the Aurora, but the Iris had gained substantially on her chase. Freneau recounts what happened next:

We were abreast of the cape, close in, when the wind took us aback, and immediately after we were becalmed ; the ebb of tide at the same time setting very strong out of the bay so that we rather drifted out. Our design was, if possible, to get within the road around the point, and there run the ship on shore, but want of wind and the tide being against us, hindered from putting this into execution. We were now within three hundred yards of the shore. The frigate in the mean time ran in the bay to leeward of us about one-quarter of a mile (her distance from the cape hindering it from becalming her as it did us), and began to bring her cannon to bear on us.

The prizes followed Iris in and hove to, and the frigate opened fire on the Aurora at a range of 300 yards. The Americans

“Vext at our fate, we prim'd a piece, and then

Return'd the shot, to shew them we were men.”

Freneau continues his account of the early action:

The frigate hulled us several times. One shot went betwixt wind and water, which made the ship leak amazingly, making twenty-four inches in thirty minutes. We found our four-pounders but were trifles against the frigate, so we got our nine-pounder, the only one we had, pointed from the cabin windows, with which we played upon the frigate for about half an hour. At last a twelve-pound shot came from the frigate and, striking a parcel of oars lashed upon the starboard quarter, broke them all in two, and continuing its destructive course struck Captain Laboyteaux in the right thigh, which it smashed to atoms, tearing part of his belly open at the same time with the splinters from the oars; he fell from the quarter deck close by me and for some time seemed very busily engaged in setting his leg to rights.

This Laboyteaux was John Labarteaux, a refugee from New York and the Captain of Marines on the Aurora. He was killed by Iris’s second shot. In the poem, Freneau says:

A bullet struck our captain of marines;

Fierce, though he bid defiance to the foe

He felt his death and ruin in the blow,

Headlong he fell, distracted with the wound,

The deck distain'd, and heart blood streaming round.

It was probably about this time that “six or seven of our people hoisted out the yawl and made their escape to the shore, though at the most imminent hazard of their lives, as we afterward learned that they pointed a twelve-pounder at her from the frigate and were unanimously for sinking her except Captain Hawkes, whose humanity would not suffer the piece to be fired, which was loaded with round grape shot.”

Both in the poem and in the prose, Freneau gives a vivid picture of the action. In the poem he emphasizes the disparity of the two ships in force:

Alternate fires dispell'd the shades of night —

But how unequal was this daring fight!

Our stoutest guns threw but a six-pound ball,

Twelve pounders from the foe our sides did maul . . .

Another blast, as fatal in its aim

Wing'd by destruction, through our rigging came,

And aim'd aloft, to cripple in the fray,

Shrouds, stays, and braces tore at once away,

Sails, blocks, and oars in scatter'd fragments fly —

In the prose Freneau says “Every shot seemed now to bring ruin with it. A lad named Steel had his arm broken and some others complained of slight wounds; whereupon, finding the frigate ready and in a position to give us a broadside, we struck, after having held a very unequal contest with her for about an hour.”

An officer named Squires came aboard the Aurora, with some midshipmen and six sailors. The prisoners were removed to the Iris and confined below decks, the common sailors being handcuffed two by two. Laboyteaux died during the night and was buried at sea the next day. Iris, Aurora, and the other prizes sailed for New York and anchored in the North River on 29 May at 1200. The prisoners were sent to the prison ships on 31 May.

Aurora had been tried and condemned by 1 July 1780, when an advertisement in the New-York Gazette calls on the crew of the Iris to receive their prize money. The Aurora, commanded by Woolman Sutton, was listed as being tried and condemned in 1781 by the High Court of Admiralty. She is listed there as a merchant vessel.

[Freneau, Philip, Some Account of the Capture of the Ship “Aurora,” M.F. Mansfield and A. Wessels, New York: 1899, 15; Freneau, The British Prison-Ship, 1780; HCA 32/275/1/1-32; Claghorn, Naval Officers of the American Revolution, 107; The New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, Monday, June 5, 1780 and Monday, July 1, 1780]