Miscellaneous Observations from Dr. Ephraim Eliot

Toward the end of the 1821 Two Discourses pamphlet I’ve been quoting, the Rev. Henry Ware (shown here) started to add miscellaneous notes. Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s marginal notes in the copy at Harvard University therefore also got a bit miscellaneous, but the result is some more intriguing clues about life in eighteenth-century Boston.

On page 58 the pamphlet says:

The British troops, during the blockade of Boston, treated the churches with particular disrespect. The steeple of the West Church they destroyed, because they supposed it had been used as a signal staff…

Eliot, whose father had stayed in Boston through the siege, commented: “direction for bombardment” and “Christ church was frequently used for signals”. That suggests that locals did indeed use the West Meeting-House steeple and possibly that of Christ Church (now Old North Church) to signal Continental artillerists outside the town where their mortars were landing.

The West Meeting-House had the spire closest to the British army positions on the Common and the Continental Army positions in Cambridge. By the time Ware wrote, the use of the North Church spire by Paul Revere’s confederates on 18 Apr 1775 had already been revealed, but Eliot didn’t mention it in his note.

On the same page the pamphlet reprints an item from the church records:

“October 7, 1762. Voted, that the singers sound the base at the end of the lines, whenever they think proper.” I copy this vote simply because I do not know what it means.

Eliot added this explanation:

The meaning is, that the singers paused a few beats between every line, the bass in the most solemn tones [?] used to continue the sound of the last note in the three first lines of a verse, till the tenor sounded the first note of the next line. There was always a complete pause between the verses, bass & all.

Clearly there had been such a big change in church singing between 1762 and 1821 that even the Rev. Mr. Ware, first president of the Harvard Musical Association, didn’t know the old style.

Finally, on page 59:

In 1781 I find record of a baptism by immersion of a child about ten years old, at the particular request of his mother, “a bathing tub being prepared for that purpose in the meeting-house.“

Eliot added:

It was the tub of the old North [fire] engine then the largest in Boston.

This information was eventually repeated in A History of the Second Church, or Old North [Meeting], in Boston, by Chandler Robbins, published in 1852. However, I’ve been unable to identify the family involved.

Baptism by immersion wasn’t just fashion; it was a theological dividing-line between Boston’s Congregationalists and Baptists. In 1780 and 1781 ministers from Wells and Ipswich advertised pamphlets about the validity of sprinkling water on babies rather than fully immersing older people. But apparently the Rev. John Lathrop, though a Congregationalist, was willing to provide immersion at a mother’s insistence.

Dr. Eliot’s Gossip about Boston’s Ministers

Yesterday I started quoting from Dr. Ephraim Eliot’s notes inside a copy of an 1821 pamphlet in the Harvard library. That pamphlet is a sermon about the split of the New North Meeting-House’s congregation in 1719, a major event in Boston.

Eliot was the youngest son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot (1718-1778), a later minister of the New North Meeting. And the family clearly put some of the blame for the split on one of the ministers at the Old North Meeting:

The difficulties at the new north [meeting-house] were more owing to Cotton Mather & his influence than to any others. Increase [Mather] was in his dotage. He [Cotton] was afraid of [Rev. Peter] Thachers popular talents, joined & directed the opposition & thought to get them into his parish. if he had thought of their building another meeting house, he would have been quiet.

Instead, the group that split off from the New North formed a new congregation and built the New Brick Meeting-House, attracting some members from the Mathers’ church.

Eliot had other critical things to say about Cotton Mather in his marginal notes. On page 18 he wrote:

No greater enemy to the quakers existed. In his account of the witchcraft of John Goodman’s children, He says, that shewing them a bible or carrying them into his study, would instantly bring them out of their fits, the sight of a book of quakerism or the [Anglican] book of common prayer would throw them into horrid convulsions.

An Irish woman was hanged in Boston in 1688 on the testimony of the Goodman children.

Eliot recorded even juicier gossip about some of Boston’s other pre-Revolutionary ministers which I don’t recall seeing elsewhere. On page 23 and then page 41 he wrote about what the Rev. Samuel Checkley (1695-1769) of the New South Meeting was known for:

for eating; he was the largest man in Boston, & his mouth was always full, & his jaw going when not preaching. My father used to say, he hated to preach after Checkley, on acct of the cracking of raisin seeds under his feet with which the floor of the pulpit was always covered. While the people were singing, he was chomping plumbs. . . .

Checkley lost his popularity more from his gourmandising disposition than any other way. he laid out all his money in tidbits, cakes, Raisins, oysters, &c. & ran in debt for other things. To such a degree that his parish chose a committee to get from him a schedule of his debts, which they paid. But he was ashamed to note the debt he owed in small shops for gingerbread &c. Those creditors became noisy, & another committee was chosen to receive & pay all such claims.

Checkley’s daughter Elizabeth became the first wife of Samuel Adams.

And about the Rev. Ebenezer Pemberton (1705-1777), minister of the New Brick Church starting in 1754:

So high did his vanity carry him that when asked by Mr. Eliot to exchange, he observed that his people would consent to hear no other parson. His popularity burned out. But the parish dwindled more from his being a violent Tory, & the Bosom friend of Gov [Thomas] Hutchinson, who was one of his parish. Many people would not worship at the New Brick because of that circumstance.

Thus, in 1777 the shrinking New Brick Meeting had a building but no pastor while the Old North Meeting had no building but a popular pastor—the Rev. John Lathrop (1740-1816). They worked out the obvious solution, thus starting to reverse the splits of the early decades.

TOMORROW: A few more tidbits from Dr. Eliot’s notes.

[The photograph above, courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Flickr stream, shows the house in the North End where Dr. Ephraim Eliot grew up. It was originally built by the Rev. Increase Mather after the fire mentioned yesterday.]

Someone’s Been Writing in Two Discourses

I stumbled across this Google Books file of Henry Ware’s Two Discourses Containing the History of the Old North and New Brick Churches, United as the Second Church of Boston, published in 1821, and noticed someone had written in it. These scans come from a copy owned by Harvard University.

The title page is signed by John F. Eliot, but the note on page 7 is signed “EE,” which indicates the notes come from that man’s father, Dr. Ephraim Eliot (1761-1827). Ephraim was a son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot and brother of the Rev. John Eliot. He left several detailed essays about the history of Boston, including a wonderful profile of Dr. Amos Windship.

Ephraim Eliot evidently went through this pamphlet and added his own recollections and family lore. Thus, after a description of the galleries built in the Old North Meeting-House in the 1680s, his handwritten footnote describes their shape (“altogether formed an octagon”), name (“they were called Hanging Galleries”), and fate:

upon a general repair of the house [they] were removed, when I was a small boy. The society had become very small, & they were for a long time useless. I remember the talk about taking away the hanging galleries, but never saw them.

And then that meetinghouse was torn down during the siege of Boston and turned into firewood.

On page 6 Eliot wrote this interesting note:

My good old grandmother was brought up in the belief, that Increase [Mather (1639-1723), shown above] was endowed with the gift of prophecy. as one instance of it, she used to tell, that on concluding his last sermon before the fire, he exclaimed, there must be an instant reformation, or there will be a [phrase ending “tation,” unreadable in the scan because of ink bleeding from the other side of the paper]. Before the next morning, the meeting house was in ashes, with many other buildings.

Enoch Pond’s 1870 biography of Mather suggests that Eliot’s grandmother wasn’t the only one who’d noticed that sequence of events:

In the year 1676,…Boston was visited with a distressing fire. In some unaccountable way, Mr. Mather had a presentiment of the approach of this calamity, and warned his people of it, two Sabbaths in succession. The very night of the second Sabbath, the fire broke out in his immediate neighborhood, his meeting-house and dwelling-house were both consumed, and whole streets were laid in ashes.

TOMORROW: Unabashed gossip about Boston’s ministers.

“The wrong coffin was delivered”?

The quotations I shared yesterday show how in the first decade of the 1800s people on both sides of the Atlantic understood that Dr. Amos Windship had sent the body of Maj. John Pitcairn from the basement of Christ Church in Boston’s North End to his family in London.

However, some folks in Boston suspected otherwise. Sometime between 1816 and 1827, Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote the gossipy profile of Windship that I’ve been quoting from, and in it he said:

But the probability was that the bones were those of a Lieutenant of the Major’s battalion, who was much like the Major in size & shape. He died of an inflammation of the brain, this is probable from the circumstance of a large Blister plaster upon the head which was in this coffin, & was removed by a friend of the writer. . . . .

Now, I really do not think that he [Windship] had any idea that the wrong coffin was delivered to him, but am fully of opinion that the sexton imposed upon him, as he was as great a villain as ever went unhung.

Eliot’s manuscript wasn’t published until 1924, when it appeared in volume 25 of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts’s Transactions/Publications series. I’ve picked out only about half of its stories about Dr. Windship, so folks interested in the man should definitely read the rest. (And there may be still more to find out; here’s an article on his years in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which I don’t think Eliot mentioned.)

Despite remaining unpublished, the stories Eliot told about Windship circulated in Boston in the early nineteenth century. In 1848 Nathanial Dearborn published a version of the tale in Boston Notions:

when the body was taken from the vault, there was a blistering plaster on the top of its head which indicated that it could not be the body of the Major, and a certain gentleman removed the plaster, and the box was delivered into the hands of the Pitcairn family in London: a Lieut. Shea, belonging to the Major’s Regiment was a large portly man, very much the size and shape of Major Pitcairn, and he died of an inflammation of the brain, for which the aforesaid plaster was applied; but the sexton had often showed these remains to gratify the curiosity of individual friendship, as those of the Major; for the sexton was an unprincipled, low fellow.

There was a Lt. Richard Shea in the Marines’ first company in 1775. But he is listed among the British officers killed at Bunker Hill, always as dead rather than wounded or “wounded, since dead.” Gen. William Howe’s orderly book says that his and another officer’s effects were sold on 14 July. Does that match the story of a brain inflammation?

Samuel A. Drake repeated Dearborn’s tale in Old Landmarks and Historic Personages of Boston (1873), and Charles Hudson did the same in an 1880 paper on Pitcairn for the Massachusetts Historical Society. Hudson added the mistaken detail that the Pitcairn family had re-interred the corpse in Westminster Abbey, and that resurfaced in Edwin M. Bacon’s Historic Pilgrimages in New England (1898) and Rambles Around Old Boston (1914). All those accounts lay the blame on the sexton, though later authors characterized him as “perplexed” rather than duplicitous.

And then the Colonial Society published Eliot’s manuscript. It offers lots of other stories about Windship’s complete lack of reliability. Even when the doctor did his best, his plans had a tendency to collapse around him—and he didn’t always do his best.

So these days, writers suggest that Windship himself was primarily responsible for sending the wrong body to England, either by mistake or not caring if the corpse was actually Pitcairn’s. This Pitcairns website calls Windship “a notorious conman and crook,” and this one says he was a “thief, fraudster and attempted bigamist.” (I told you there was more gossip about him.)

I don’t think Dr. Windship deserves all the blame. There was a trail of lost information. The confusion started when a Christ Church sexton—probably Robert Newman—showed visitors the Marine officers’ corpses, not taking much trouble about who was who. Around 1789 Windship apparently fired Newman, so it’s possible that no one left at the church had direct knowledge of which bodies were laid where in 1775.

Then one of Eliot’s friends removed the only detail that distinguished the corpses of two big Marine officers: the “Blister plaster” that had come off one skull. Eliot didn’t specify when his friend took that bandage, or why. If the man did so before Windship and the new sexton went down to move the body, then they would have only a fifty-fifty chance of picking out Pitcairn.

Dearborn’s later account differs somewhat from Eliot’s. It says the “certain gentleman” took the plaster right off the skull, not from inside the coffin, and did so as the body was being packed to go to London. Those details would suggest that the men were definitely not moving Pitcairn’s corpse, and were hiding evidence of that fact. But the story might have improved by the time Dearborn recorded it.

In any event, Pitcairn’s widow, relations, and friends in London never heard anything about the whispers back in Boston. They could feel satisfied at having the remains of the man they loved back with his family. In gratitude, Mrs. Pitcairn gave Dr. Windship her late husband’s watch, and later a small seal engraved with the words “Je blesse en secret.” According to Eliot, Dr. Amos Windship “fancied it to be a motto taken from Virgil.”

(The photo above comes from Sara L. Brooks’s Flickr set under a Creative Commons license.)

Dr. Amos Windship and the Christ Church Pew

Boston’s Anglican churches were rebuilding themselves in the 1780s. Not physically—they weren’t dismantled in whole or in part like some of the Congregationalist meeting-houses. But the war had made some of their richest members leave town, and they had to redefine their relationship with the king and Church of England.

That created openings for men like Dr. Amos Windship, who joined the congregation of Christ Church (now called Old North) in Boston’s North End. He was a warden starting on 28 May 1787, and a vestryman from 21 Dec 1789, deeply involved in church business.

Since 1777, William Montague had read in the Christ Church pulpit. Dr. Ephraim Eliot called him “a low bred man, of much cunning but mean literary abilities. He was a favorite among the lower class of the people.” Montague visited England in 1789, returning in August 1790 with the musket ball that supposedly killed Dr. Joseph Warren.

Some of the wealthier congregants took advantage of Montague’s absence to go to Halifax in 1790 and invite the Rev. Dr. William Walter (1737-1800) to become their minister. He had been rector at Trinity Church before the war, leaving Boston with the British military in 1776.

When Montague returned, he found himself in the position of assistant. He still preached a lot since Walter had also agreed to be minister at the Episcopal church in Cambridge. But there was soon conflict between the two men and their followers.

In March 1792 Montague asked to resign, citing “those who call themselves the Doctor’s [i.e., Walter’s] friends” and “the unchristian and abusive conduct of some towards me,—their constant endeavor to injure my Character and good name.” He went out to the Episcopal church in Dedham, where he spent a lot of his ministerial time on real-estate deals. Decades later, the congregation there asked him to step down.

During his trip to England, Montague had gotten into some sort of embarrassment. Eliot wrote that the man became

acquainted with some buckish English clergymen, who wishing to put a trick upon their raw Yankee brother, had introduced him into bad company.

And then the editor of Eliot’s manuscript for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts chose to omit a few lines. Just when it was getting good! Whatever happened, Dr. Windship had heard about it, and told other people in Boston.

By that time, Dr. Windship himself had been gotten in trouble with Christ Church. In 1791 he borrowed the Treasurer’s Ledger, and when he gave it back it now assigned pew number 30, in the back of the church, to him. Senior warden James Sherman wrote an angry note in the book:

this May Certifie all Whom it may Concern That the above Pew No. 30 was from the first settlement of Christ Church in Boston devoted wholy to the use of His Excelence the Governor and other Gentlemen and so continued untill August 1791 at which time this Ledger was in the Possession of Doctor Amos Windship who had borrowed it of James Sherman Senr Warden of said Church in order to settle his account with the Revd. Mr. Montague

he the sd. Windship kept it near a month and when returned “Governors Seat” as it stood above and as it was before was erased and “Dr. Amos Windship” as it now stands was wrote in its Stead with the account under it which account was brought from folio 91 which was erased about the middle of the lead, for which I the Subscriber as Warden and for the Honor of said Said was obliged to Lay the Same before the Attny. General and what followed may be seen by turning to a Meeting of the Proprietors of said Church Monday September 26th. 1791.

The two pages in question had apparently been treated with “some form of acid.” Attorney General James Sullivan advised the church to bring Windship to court, but in October the doctor admitted he had altered the ledger, saying it “was an error in judgement (and for which, I am very sorry).”

Dr. Windship started attending the Rev. Dr. John Lathrop’s New Brick Meeting. But he’d been involved with Christ Church long enough to move Maj. John Pitcairn’s body.

TOMORROW: At last! Mucking about with Maj. Pitcairn’s body!

Dr. Amos Windship’s “Description of a Dissection”

What did Dr. Amos Windship do after leaving the Continental Navy? I actually told the next chapter of his saga back here.

That trading voyage to London wasn’t a total loss for the doctor. While he was in London, he made the acquaintance of a leading British physician, Dr. John Coakley Lettsom (1744-1815, shown here courtesy of the Medical Society of London).

Windship returned to America with some medications, which he ended up never paying for (apparently because Bell’s creditors were seizing any money they could). The doctor kept up a correspondence with Lettsom, who offered to make him a corresponding member of the London Medical Society.

Of course that too led to trouble. Dr. Ephraim Eliot later explained:

Doctor Letsom now found that he had gone too fast in regard to our Doctors election, as the requisite qualification was, that the candidate must be a Batchelor or Doctor of Physic, to neither of wch. had he been admitted.

To save himself his friend Letsom advised that he should immediately go thro’ the courses of Lectures, requisite to obtain one of them, & if the expence should be more than he could spare, he gave him authority to draw upon him for it thro’ Mr. Crawley of London to the amount of fifty pounds sterling, after the object should be obtained.

He [Windship] complied. & when a diploma was taken out, he forwarded it to Letsom, together with the description of a dissection which he pretended he had made of a subject in which there were some uncommon appearances & some facts discovered which were not usual.

Doct Letsom supposing the communication to be designed for the society, presented it, & it was printed in their transactions.

Lettsom read the report from Windship at a meeting on 31 Mar 1788. The volume recording that event made its way to America, and Dr. Abijah Cheever (1760-1843) recognized the patient as one he had treated in 1786, and described in a paper for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on 31 Jan 1787. Eliot said of Windship, “probably he had no idea of its being published” in London.

Dr. Windship nevertheless made another voyage to London about 1790, and renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Lettsom. And on that trip Lettsom introduced the American doctor to the family of the late Maj. John Pitcairn.

TOMORROW: Meanwhile, back at Christ Church…

Dr. Windship Assures Gen. Washington

Yesterday we left Dr. Amos Windship stuck in Boston at the start of the Revolutionary War. According to Dr. Ephraim Eliot, recording stories he’d heard from and about the man:

In the disguise of a sailor, with his head shaved & covered with a milled cap, he escaped from the town

That was in July 1775, and Windship, with a drive for social climbing, appears to have gone right to the top. On 21 July, Gen. George Washington reported to John Hancock, chairman of the Continental Congress:

I have also received a more authentick account of the loss of the enemy in the late battle [Bunker Hill], than any yet received. Doctor Winship, who lodged in the same house with an Officer of the Marines, assures me they had exactly one thousand and forty-three killed and wounded, of whom three hundred fell on the field, or died within a few hours; many of the wounded are since dead.

That was a fairly accurate count; Windship might even have helped in treating the British wounded, as some Whiggish physicians did from a sense of professional responsibility.

Washington’s report is interesting in a couple of other ways. It suggests that Windship had heard the memorable stories of Maj. John Pitcairn’s death from the Marine officer. And in an ironic twist nobody could have foreseen, Washington’s headquarters, where the doctor probably went to make his report (shown above, courtesy of the National Park Service), would after the war become the home of Nathaniel Tracy, who had gotten Windship booted out of Harvard.

During the siege, according to Eliot, Windship

got employment as a surgeon in the military hospital at Cambridge, where he continued several months, was every intimate with the Director general Doctor [Benjamin] Church, who being charged with holding a treasonable correspondence with the Enemy, our Doctor was suspected of having concern with him, but the suspicion soon died away, and he was never called to an account.

No evidence has ever surfaced that Windship was involved in Dr. Church’s espionage. This was probably just an example of his knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time just when he thought he was doing well.

TOMORROW: I know this series is supposed to be about Maj. Pitcairn’s body, but I have to share an anecdote about Dr. Windship and Abigail Adams.

Dr. Amos Windship and Nathaniel Tracy’s Four Guineas

Tracking Maj. John Pitcairn’s body means getting a handle on that Christ Church warden who reprimanded sexton Robert Newman in 1788, as I mentioned yesterday.

Dr. Amos Windship (1745-1813) was a man of energy and ambition who repeatedly plunged himself into awkward situations, but never stopped striving. He seems to have been both pushy and pathetic, and after his death Dr. Ephraim Eliot wrote down a lot of juicy stories about him; I’m going to get to only a fraction of those.

Windship was born in Holliston to a middling farm family, and his father died when he was eight. He was raised by relatives and guardians as a farm boy. In 1767, he got into Harvard. At twenty-two he was older than almost all the other undergraduates, and almost certainly poorer, but he’d managed to educate himself enough to qualify.

Alas, Windship left after eight months under shadowy circumstances. According to Eliot, the young man:

was freshman [i.e., designated gofer] to N[athaniel]. T[racy]. of Newburyport who was a monied Lad. Frequently missing money from his desk, suspicions were excited against our friend.

One day in order to ascertain who was the pilferer if possible, he [Tracy] pretended to be obliged to leave Cambridge a few days, his chambermate being also absent. It was customary for freshmen to study in their senior’s rooms, and he left the care of his room to Windship.

Returning after a few hours, he enquired if any one had been there? was assured that no one had, & that he himself had not been out of the room, not even to prayers. On examining his desk, he missed four guineas, and directly charged his freshman with the theft.

It was strenuously denied, but symptoms of guilt appearing in his countenance, he was searched and no money found. But T[racy]. insisted upon his leaving College at once or he would prosecute him, he wisely followed his directions, and ran away without taking up his bond, & did not finish his education there, or at any other seminary.

After a few days the sweeper on removing the bedstead in T[racy]’s room, found a guinea under each Bed post.

Eliot seems to imply that Windship hoped to return to Tracy’s room to retrieve those hidden coins. But if he didn’t expect Tracy back that afternoon, why didn’t he just take the money? Are there circumstances Eliot didn’t record? Was it all a set-up? In any event, Windship was gone from Harvard after July 1768.

He then studied medicine with Dr. Bela Lincoln of Hingham, brother of the later general Benjamin Lincoln, and possibly with other rural physicians. Windship set up a practice at Wellfleet for a few years. He moved to Boston in 1774, when other men were moving out because of the Port Bill, and was stuck there when the war began.

TOMORROW: Dr. Windship’s intelligence for Gen. Washington.

“Used to shew a set of human bones in a very large coffin”

Boston 1775 has already discussed when Maj. John Pitcairn of the British Marines was shot (in the middle of the Battle of Bunker Hill, not at the climax), who shot him (probably no one knows, but Pitcairn’s notoriety after Lexington meant many people wanted to claim the shot), and where he died (in a house in the North End, but it’s not clear which one).

Now this CSI: Colonial Boston series offers a chance to address the next important question: What happened to the major’s body?

All sources agree that after the battle Pitcairn and some other British military officers were placed in a crypt under Christ Church in Boston’s North End. Within fifteen years—probably within ten—those bodies had become a public attraction.

This information comes to us through Dr. Ephraim Eliot (1761-1827), son of the Rev. Andrew Eliot and brother of the Rev. John Eliot. The doctor left a number of gossipy manuscript reminiscences of Boston written in the early 1800s. He wrote, probably from personal experience:

The Major was a very large & stout man, was well known to the inhabitants of Boston & notwithstand[ing] the errand he was sent here upon, such was his gentlemanlike deportment, he had their respect.

The sexton of the church taking advantage of this disposition in the people used to shew a set of human bones in a very large coffin as those of the Major.

But Pitcairn wasn’t the only British officer in that cellar. Eliot said that it also contained the remains of

a Lieutenant of the Major’s battalion, who was much like the Major in size & shape. He died of an inflammation of the brain, this is probable from the circumstance of a large Blister plaster upon the head which was in this coffin, & was removed by a friend of the writer.

Who was that sexton, who was undoubtedly pocketing tips from people who viewed these bodies? Eliot called him “as great a villain as ever went unhung,” but didn’t record his name.

The evidence points to that man being Robert Newman, the same Christ Church sexton who on 18 Apr 1775 had helped hang lanterns in the church steeple for Paul Revere. In December 1788 Newman received a severe reprimand, a few months before being replaced, from a church warden who determined to send Pitcairn’s remains to Britain.

TOMORROW: The church warden and the skeleton.

(The photo above comes from Sara L. Brooks’s Flickr set under a Creative Commons license. It shows the Maj. Pitcairn’s name engraved on a sign in the cellar of Old North Church today. His resting-place is still attracting visitors. But is he still there?)

“The Happy Peace Taking Place So Suddenly”

According to an reminiscence by Dr. Ephraim Eliot, the Boston merchant Daniel Bell (1752-1791) and his brother-in-law, Dr. Amos Windship (1745-1813), conceived of a novel business venture early in 1783. Nantucket had oil from whaling. Britain had a good market for that oil. So why not send a shipload to England?

Because, technically, Britain and America were still at war. Windship had even served in the medical departments of both the Continental Army and the Continental Navy, so he was well aware of that situation. But that didn’t deter him from signing onto this voyage as supercargo (a job that sounds a lot more exciting than it actually is).

Windship first went to New York, still held tight by the British military, and “obtained a private licence” for the trip. Somehow the partners arranged a deal with an American merchant in Amsterdam to extend credit for the venture, and with merchants in London to buy the oil.

But not “buy” in the usual way. According to Eliot’s account:

The ship with the Doctor on board, was to hover on the coast of England; to be taken by a british privateer & then claimed by the London partners. The Admirals protection [obtained in New York] was to screen him from all other captures.

Unfortunately for the adventurers peace took place while he was on the ocean.

The Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War in September 1783. British privateers returned to port, their licenses to take enemy shipping no longer valid. Which left Dr. Windship on his ship off the English coast, waiting for a capture that never came.

Windship decided that the best way to make a profit was “going immediately into the Thames & selling the oil,” perhaps for even more than originally planned. He didn’t consider that once Great Britain recognized the U.S. of A. as an independent country, American goods were subject to the same stiff Customs duties as other cargoes arriving in London from elsewhere outside the British Empire. And of course the local merchants who had made the previous, surreptitious deal weren’t going to expose that to the authorities.

The tariffs on the Nantucket oil “amounted to more than it was worth,” so the cargo and ship were seized and sold. But Bell still had to pay off that Dutch loan. He eventually applied for legal protection from creditors, pleading the unfortunate fact of “the happy Peace taking place so suddenly and unexpectedly.”

And this brings to an end “No Relation” Week at Boston 1775. So far I know, I’m not related to printer Robert Bell, deputy sheriff John Shubael Bell, any Sgt. Maj. Bell, bricklayer William Bell, or merchant Daniel Bell. And in some cases, that might be a very good thing.