“This Hawkshaw drew his sword upon us”?

Last week I wrote about some letters entrusted to Dr. Benjamin Church on 21–22 Apr 1775 which ended up in the files of Gen. Thomas Gage.

We have evidence that Gage or his staff actually read those letters for the intelligence they contained—because they got someone in trouble.

Thomas Hawkshaw was a lieutenant in the 5th Regiment of Foot, having served at that rank since 1771. He was involved in or witness to several conflicts in the first months of 1775.

In late January, Don Hagist reminded me, Lt. Col. George Maddison presided over an army court of inquiry into the actions of Lt. William Myers of the 38th. Myers testified that on 20 January two local men had baited him by calling, “The General was a Rascal” and even “The King was a Rascal.” After Myers “knocked down the man who had spoke in this manner,” the town watch showed up, bringing on a bigger confrontation.

Lt. Hawkshaw was among the witnesses in that inquiry. So, however, were more than twenty other army officers, a former army officer, seven enlisted men, two watchmen, and two civilians. That inquiry ended without apparent action on 28 January.

Four days later, on 1 February, Benjamin Alline and Philip Bass filed a complaint to Lt. Col. William Walcott of the 5th about Lt. Hawkshaw. According to Bass, he was escorting a young woman south of Liberty Tree about 9:30 P.M. the previous night, and Hawkshaw and another officer accosted them. After that confrontation, Bass went to an apothecary for a cut on his arm.

Lt. John Barker wrote in his diary for that day: “Lieut. H–ks–w of the 5th put under Arrest for having been concerned in a Riot yesterday evening, in which an Inhabitant was much wounded by him; it is supposed He will be brought to a Court Martial.”

Hawkshaw insisted, however, that he’d been in bed by 9:00 P.M. There’s no record of a formal army inquiry, so perhaps he found witnesses to confirm that and the locals had to let the matter drop.

Years back Prof. Gene Tucker of Temple University sent me transcriptions from the reminiscences of a Revolutionary War veteran named Samuel Cooper (1757-1840). He recounted several anecdotes about conflicts in Boston, but the details don’t match contemporaneous accounts, suggesting that Cooper was working with secondhand knowledge and faulty memory.

One incident stands out because Cooper said he was personally involved in it:

A party of young men, consisting of Benj. Eustis, his brother Geo[rge]., Jno. Cathcart, Ben Hazzard, Tim Green, Jim Otis, & myself had assembled about 9 o[’]cl[oc]k in the even[in]g at the corner of one of the streets, when we were approached by several officers, among them was a Lt. Hawkshaw of the 5th. We were comm[an]d[ed]. to disperse & go home & on our declining to do so this Hawkshaw drew his sword upon us but he had hardly time to raise it before he was disarmed by some of our party & the sword broken over his head; the rest of his associates withdrew.

Cooper didn’t specify when this happened, and frankly I doubted it happened as he described. In some of these fights an officer might lose his sword, as Ens. Henry King did in the January fracas. But this quick Yankee triumph sounds too good to be true, and no other report matches it.

Lt. Hawkshaw seems to have been very visible during those months in Boston. People complained about him by name while not identifying other officers who were with him. Or possibly Hawkshaw had become unpopular with the locals because of his testimony in the Myers inquiry, so people were eager to cast blame on him. But he was never brought to a court-martial.

In early April the lieutenant testified in the army inquiry about the dispute between his regimental commander, Lt. Col. Walcott, and Ens. Robert Patrick, discussed here.

And then came the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

TOMORROW: Shot in the face.

Capt. Dobel at Home and on the Far Side of the World

Except for several months as a Continental Navy lieutenant under Capt. John Manley, which ended badly, Joseph Dobel appears to have spent the Revolutionary War ashore in Boston. Certainly when he was in charge of confining suspected enemies of the state he was at home.

After peace came, Dobel resumed work as a merchant captain, commanding a three-masted ship called the Commerce in 1789. Newspapers indicate he made regular trips to Liverpool and also sailed to Cadiz, Spain.

In December 1790, Dobel’s first wife, Mary, died at age fifty-five. I haven’t found mention of any children from this marriage. A little less than three months later, Capt. Dobel married “Mrs. Susanna Joy,” who was about forty years old.

In the early 1790s, the Boston town meeting started to elect Capt. Dobel as a culler of fish (or dry fish). That was one of several minor offices tasked with making sure that particular goods sold in town met quality standards. Dobel’s election shows what his neighbors felt he was expert in. With his colleagues he periodically advertised in the newspapers warning against unofficial fish-culling.

In 1793 Capt. Dobel was living “in Bennet-Street, opposite the North-School.” Early in that year he dissolved a business partnership with Thomas Jackson. I can’t find any earlier advertisements from this firm, so I have no idea what they dealt in.

In those years, American merchants and captains were seeking new business outside the British Empire—beginning the new nation’s “China Trade” and “East India Trade.” One distant destination was the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, then called “Isle-of-France.” In March 1792, after a full year away from Boston, Capt. John Cathcart brought in the Three Brothers from Mauritius “with a cargo of Sugars” for the merchant Thomas Russell. In May 1795 the Massachusetts Mercury ran a report that Cathcart was back at Mauritius.

Cathcart returned to Massachusetts again that year and oversaw the construction of a new ship, the Three Sisters, in Charlestown. It was about 340 tons burden, “Copper Bolted and sheathed.” Soon he took it out on its maiden voyage to Asia.

And then in May 1796 the Boston newspapers reported that Capt. Cathcart had died “two days sail from St. Jago”—Santiago, the largest island in the country of Cape Verde. The merchants who invested in that cruise and the families of all the crew must have worried about what would happen next. But all they could do was collect snatches of news brought back by other ships’ captains.

As of August, the first report to reach the newspapers said, the Three Sisters was at Mauritius, its next stop uncertain. Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser stated that in February 1797 it was at Bengal. In May the Boston Price-Current said that the ship was at Manila. By this time the principal investor, Russell, had died.

I mention all that because Joseph Dobel had signed on as Cathcart’s next-in-command. He had the responsibility of completing the voyage. Most of those dispatches listed Cathcart as the Three Sisters’ captain, adding that he was dead, while a couple gave Dobel’s name. Meanwhile, the ship was still lingering on the far side of the world. The Massachusetts Mercury reported that “The Three Sisters, Doble, of Boston, sailed from Calcutta for N. York Sept. 19 [1797], sprung a leak, and returned.”

It wasn’t until that spring of 1798 that the Three Sisters was back in the north Atlantic. In late March there were two reports of it being spotted in or near Delaware Bay. Finally, on 27 June, Capt. Dobel brought the ship into New York harbor. That was more than two years after the news that Cathcart had died.

On 31 July a notice in the New-York Gazette announced that the Three Sisters “will be sold reasonable, with all her stores as she came from Calcutta, and the terms of payment made convenient.” Another advertisement, noting that the ship was built “under the superintendence of the late Capt. JOHN CATHCART,” appeared in Russell’s Gazette in Boston the next month.

Those ads promised that the Three Sisters was “a remarkable fast sailer” and only two and a half years old. But the expense of the extraordinarily long voyage meant the ship’s owners needed cash fast.

TOMORROW: Capt. Dobel and the U.S.S. Constitution.