Sir George Collier and the Digital N.D.A.R.
In the late nineteenth century the Dictionary of National Biography published an entry on Collier that said:
In 1775 he seems to have been sent to North America on some special service, the circumstances of which have not been chronicled, but which obtained for him the honour of knighthood.That’s intriguing! Of course I want to know what Collier’s special mission was.
More Than Nelson states that King George III knighted Collier on 27 January, indicating he’d sailed to North America in 1774. But still no clue about why.
I held out hope that the Naval Documents of the American Revolution project, launched in 1964, dredged up the answer. The first volume even starts in 1774. But alas, Collier doesn’t come on board until December 1775 when the Admiralty gave him command of H.M.S. Rainbow.
But some good news: Looking for that source led me to the Naval Documents of the American Revolution Digital Edition, which offers fully searchable files of the existing thirteen volumes. (In addition, the Naval History and Heritage Command Center offers P.D.F. files of those same volumes.) This is an excellent resource for researchers.
And now for the bad news: Volume 13 of the N.D.A.R., published in 2019, leaves off on 15 Aug 1778. The French fleet has barely entered the fray, and the Spanish are yet to appear.
The process of assembling, transcribing, annotating, and editing sources related to the war at sea continues. The first five volumes of the N.D.A.R. were published over a span of seven years (1964-1970) while the last five took forty-two years (1977-2019). Since information technology improved tremendously in those same decades, the volumes could be coming out more quickly if the project had the same level of staffing as in its earliest years. And that’s a matter of the federal budget.
There are still five years of the Revolutionary War to get through. Indeed, the last phases of the war after Yorktown were primarily fought at sea between the navies of the European great powers. Would it be possible for the N.D.A.R. volume covering the Battle of the Saintes to appear by the Sestercentennial of that event in 2032?
2 comments:
It's unlikely that you will ever discover the nature of Collier's actions that led to his knighthood. The Naval Chronicle for 1814, Volume 32, has a very detailed biography of Collier, to include input from his family, but only mentions that he performed services to obtain the knighthood. It does state that, as far as can be determined, he was not in command of a ship when he performed them. The only thoughts that come to my mind are that the Quebec Act was passed in 1774 and that the British Navy's North American Station also included the West Indies (minus Jamaica) and he could have been on a Crown mission there.
Yes, I looked at that article with hope for some hint, but it had nothing. I read elsewhere that the author was Collier’s secretary later in life, so he didn’t have firsthand knowledge of the pre-Revolutionary mission, and Collier apparently didn’t talk.
Indeed, Collier’s assignment may not have had anything to do with the British colonies that became the U.S. of A. It may not have had anything to do with large issues like the imperial crisis; for all we know, it could have been a discreet private favor for an influential individual.
I found one secondary source stating Collier was knighted for his work transporting troops in the previous war, but wasn’t convinced. First, that doesn’t seem like a “special service.” Second, it was more than ten years earlier. Third, that reference book about the Royal Navy also seemed to misstate Collier’s rank at the time, so I didn’t trust it on the details.
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