The Last Glimpses of Lt. Ragg

Yesterday’s posting took Lt. John Ragg of the British marines to Middletown, Connecticut, as a prisoner of war along with his servant, Pvt. Benjamin Jones, in September 1776.

I’ve looked for records of what happened next, without success. I assume there must be some paperwork at the Continental or local level, but not published.

It appears that the lieutenant was exchanged for an American officer taken prisoner that fall, and there were a lot of those.

The next sign of Lt. Ragg is in the 12 May 1777 issue of the New-York Gazette and Weekly Mercury, printed by Hugh Gaine inside the Crown-held city. An advertisement for Maj. Robert Donkin’s Military Collections and Remarks, to be printed by Gaine later that year, listed “Marines, Lieut. Ragg” among the subscribers.

Then the man drops out of my sight again until toward the end of the war.

Lt. Ragg had a brother named Andrew, who became the Customs service controller of Customs on the Pocomoke River in southern Maryland in May 1766. When the war broke out the local authorities detained him, then let him out as long as he didn’t cause trouble and paid heavy taxes.

On 5 Feb 1779, Andrew Ragg asked the Maryland government to allow him and his young daughter Anne to return to Britain. On 31 March, Ragg filed a deposition promising not to give intelligence to the enemy, and that same day the state Council granted permission to travel to New York.

Evidently the Raggs didn’t go to New York until 1780. Anne was then nine years old. To the British authorities they characterized their journey as an “escape.”

The little family got on board a ship to Britain, but during the voyage Andrew Ragg fell overboard and was drowned. John Ragg, by then a captain in the marines, petitioned the government to support his niece on 24 Apr 1781.

The last sign I’ve found of John Ragg is that “Captain Ragg, of the marines,” was listed as wounded while serving on H.M.S. Magnificent in the Battle of the Saintes in April 1782.

After the war, Ragg might have gone home to Aberdeen, Scotland. He was living in that city in February 1767 when he was listed as a witness in a court case recorded in the city’s Enactment Book (notes in P.D.F. form here).

That book also lists “Andrew Ragg, late apprentice to William Brebner, merchant,” among the genteel young men accused of a breach of the peace in April 1763. Was this the future Customs officer? Those men “bound and enacted themselves that they shall behave themselves regularly, soberly and discreetly” and got off.

In any event, that’s all I’ve been able to uncover about Lt. John Ragg, remembered in the Shaw family lore as the lieutenant named Wragg who so angered young Samuel Shaw.

(The painting above shows H.M.S. Magnificent among the Royal Navy warships capturing two French vessels at the Battle of the Saintes.)

Sir George Collier and the Digital N.D.A.R.

Last month I wrote about a Royal Navy commander named George Collier and his capture of the U.S.S. Hancock.

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?