Consider Howland, Privateer Captain

Yesterday I wrote that I don’t know what American prisoner the British gave up for the young midshipman John Loring. But I know it wasn’t privateer captain Consider Howland, even though that man was originally supposed to be part of the deal.

Howland, born in Plymouth in 1745 and given an old family name, was master of the Washington, which sailed out on 2 Dec 1775. And was captured the very next day, as the Pilgrim Hall Museum explains.

Howland and his fellow prisoners were sent to Britain on board the same ship as Ethan Allen and other Americans captured while invading Canada. Many of them died of disease during the voyage, and others got pressed into service in the Royal Navy. Most of the rest were then sent back across the Atlantic to Halifax to be ready for a prisoner exchange.

Howland and some comrades escaped from jail there, but the British authorities recaptured him. In September 1776, when John Loring was probably annoying neighbors in Framingham, Howland, Allen, and some prisoners from the Battle of Bunker Hill were all locked in one chamber of the Halifax jail.

After the British military took the city of New York in a series of battles that fall, the Commissary of Prisoners had Howland and other captives brought south and incarcerated on ships moored off Brooklyn. At that time those ships were probably no worse than the other places they had been held—in later years the New York prison ships would become infamous.

Royal officials let Howland go on 25 Dec 1776, after slightly more than a year in custody. They ordered him to travel to Boston to be exchanged for Midshipman Loring—who was, oddly enough, the little brother of the British Commissary of Prisoners, Joshua Loring, Jr. (His wife, Elizabeth Loring, was becoming notorious as the mistress of Gen. Sir William Howe.)

However, when Howland arrived in Massachusetts, he discovered that the young midshipman had already been exchanged for someone else. In a letter dated 1 Feb 1777, the Commissary of Prisoners told Howland that he should still consider himself as on parole, bound by oath not to take part in the war. He wouldn’t be legally free until he was traded for a prisoner to be named later. After seven months Howland was exchanged for Capt. Gideon White, another Plymouth man who was loyal to the British.

In July 1780 Capt. Consider Howland received the command of the privateer Phoenix, a schooner that carried “2 carriage guns, 6 swivel guns & 12 men.” It was lost at sea that fall. His brother’s headstone in Plymouth contains the additional notice:

In memory of Consider Howland who was lost at sea Octr 1780 aged 35 years.

The Ransom of John Loring

As I’ve been relating, Jamaica Plain native John Loring was a midshipman in the Royal Navy, fourteen or fifteen years old, when he was captured by Massachusetts militiamen off Martha’s Vineyard in April 1776. The Massachusetts Council ordered him and his superior officer confined in the jail at Concord.

However, Midshipman Loring was from an old Massachusetts family with connections on both sides of the conflict. Among his mother’s brothers was Obadiah Curtis (1724-1811), a Boston merchant. Curtis’s descendants later said that he was active in the Patriot movement, but I’ve been able to find only one piece of evidence to support that: he volunteered to patrol the docks during the tea crisis of 1773.

In any event, Curtis convinced the authorities to take pity on his young nephew and let him out of jail. John Loring was instead sent to the farm of Curtis’s father-in-law, Joseph Buckminster (1697-1780) of Framingham, to wait until a prisoner exchange was arranged or some other disposition.

So in his late seventies Buckminster became responsible for a teen-aged boy who had grown up in privilege and then spent several months in His Majesty’s navy, living without parental supervision among people he viewed as political enemies. This did not make for a peaceful situation. According to an 1869 history of the Curtis family:

the boy was so insolent to the neighbors, calling them “rascally rebels,” and other bad names, that his kind host was in danger of having his house pulled down, though himself a good patriot.

Indeed, Buckminster was among Framingham’s most prominent and respected men: militia colonel, selectman for a quarter-century, town clerk for three decades, General Court representative for nineteen years, charter member of the town’s Committee of Correspondence. But John was obnoxious enough to overcome that record.

No doubt Buckminster and his neighbors were pleased to see John Loring exchanged late in 1776 for a prisoner held by the British—I haven’t found out who. John became a lieutenant in the Royal Navy before the end of the Revolutionary War, a captain in Britain’s wars with revolutionary France, and a commodore in the wars against Napoleon. (His nephew John Wentworth Loring, son of the Commissary of Prisoners, eventually became an admiral.) John Loring died on his estate in Fareham, Hampshire County, Britain, in 1808.

John Loring, Prisoner of War

In April 1776, fourteen- or fifteen-year-old midshipman John Loring was headed back to Boston on board the Valent, a merchant schooner that H.M.S. Scarborough had captured earlier in the year. The schooner was under the command of Edward Marsh, a Royal Navy mate working as prize-master. His mission was to bring food to the besieged British troops in Boston.

Unfortunately, by that time there were no besieged British troops in Boston. They had all left on 17 March. According to the 26 Apr 1776 Essex Journal:

The schooner...on last Friday se’nnight (not knowing the ministerial fleet and army had evacuated the town) meeting with a heavy gale of wind, she put into the Vineyard, where she was properly taken care of by some boats from thence.

In other words, provincial militiamen from Martha’s Vineyard recaptured the Valent, and took the British naval officers commanding her as their prisoners.

On 16 April, Maj. Barachiah Bassett of the Vineyard wrote to the commanding officer at Boston:

I have sent you, under the care of a Sergeant, four prisoners, taken aboard the Schooner Valent, at Martha’s Vineyard, bound for Boston, viz: Edward Marsh, Master; the Mate, and two passengers in the employment of the Ministerial Forces.

The sergeant was named Samuell Bassett, and the Massachusetts Council reimbursed him for bringing those men to their meeting-place in Watertown, at the Edmund Fowle House (shown above).

On the 20th, the Council examined the four prisoners and issued these orders:

That they be sent to Concord Jail; Edward Marsh and John Loring, two of said Prisoners, not to have the privilege of pen, ink, or paper, nor any person to be suffered to speak to them, but in the presence of the Keeper of said Jail.

The other two persons, viz: Basil Cooper and David Lang, to have the liberty of that part of the Jail yard that is enclosed, during their good behaviour, and giving their parole in writing not to depart without the limits of the same, in failure of which, they are to be committed to close prison; and that a mittimus go out accordingly.

So off the prisoners went to Concord. But it turned out young Loring still had influential friends.

TOMORROW: John Loring gets out of jail, and gets into trouble.

John Loring, Midshipman

John Loring was born in 1761, one of the younger sons of Commodore Joshua Loring and his wife Mary. He and his twin brother Thomas may well have been the first children born in the Loring-Greenough House, built in 1760 and still standing today in Jamaica Plain. Thomas died at age seven.

Commodore Loring got his naval title from service to the Crown on Lake Ontario during the French and Indian War. His oldest son, also named Joshua, was a lieutenant in the army’s 15th Regiment during that same conflict. When the next war came around, young John decided to enter the British military as well, but he chose the saltwater navy.

John Loring was commissioned as a midshipman at age fourteen in 1775. I’m not sure what month he entered the Royal Navy, but his first assignment was apparently on the man-of-war Scarborough, commanded by Capt. Andrew Barkley, and that ship wasn’t in Boston for the first seven months of the year. It was patrolling the harbor of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, disabling the defenses at Fort William and Mary and seizing ships with any sort of food. In August the Scarborough returned to Boston, bringing along royal governor John Wentworth and his family. Presumably Midshipman Loring went on after that.

In early January 1776, the Scarborough captured a schooner named Valent that was said to be heading from Salem to Winyaw, North Carolina. (Winyah Bay is actually in South Carolina, so I can’t explain that.) Barkley apparently made that schooner part of a little fleet he took down to Georgia.

There Capt. Barkley rescued another royal governor, James Wright. In March 1776, the Royal Navy and the local Patriots fought over some rice ships on the Savannah River. Barkley’s forces seized a lot of supplies, but the Georgians burned other vessels to keep them out of royal hands and felt that they had won a great victory.

Barkley sent the Valent back to Boston with a cargo of “rum, sugar, &c.” from Georgia. According to the usual procedures for capturing a ship, he had replaced its captain, who was named Cleveland, with some of his own officers. The two “prize masters” on the schooner were mate Edward Marsh, and young John Loring.

TOMORROW: Midshipman Loring returns home.