Ebenezer Fox on the Sea Serpent?

We have one more detailed memoir of life aboard the Protector, the Massachusetts navy vessel that, three of its officers later reported, encountered a sea serpent in May 1780. That memoir was written by Ebenezer Fox of Roxbury, shown here.

Fox recalled the ship’s first lieutenant, George Little. He said Lt. Little had “a powerful speaking voice,” and described him several times using a spyglass to peer at potential enemy ships.

Fox also recalled the ship’s third lieutenant, Luther Little. He described how this Lt. Little was wounded by “a charge of grapeshot [that] came in at one of our port-holes” during the ship’s fatal fight with the Admiral Duff. In an appendix he described visiting Luther Little again in Marshfield in August 1838.

Fox did not, however, mention Midn. Edward Preble, despite his later fame. It’s possible Preble just didn’t stand out. However, later biographers agree that he had a bad temper all his life. (“With advancing years, Edward Preble’s childhood temper tantrums matured into fits of uncontrolled rage…” —Christopher McKee, Edward Preble: A Naval Biography, 1761-1807.) I therefore suspect the young midshipman was simply unpopular.

In his memoir Fox clearly described how the Protector went into the harbor at Broad Bay, Maine, to leave some sick men in the care of a farmer there, just as in Luther Little’s recollections. Both the younger Little and Fox told the same anecdote about a certain sailor trying to steal a calf from that farmer, getting caught by the first lieutenant, and being severely punished.

Yet Fox’s memoir says nothing about a sea serpent. He described encountering a giant snake later on the island of Jamaica. But he didn’t discuss the giant snake that dozens of the Protector’s men saw in the water off Maine, even though it must have been the talk of the ship for days.

Why? I think two factors played into Fox’s decision. First, he shaped his manuscript for publication. In contrast, George Little put his account of the sea serpent into a private letter to a scholar. Luther Little left his story with a relative. Edward Preble told the tale to friends, apparently with care; James Fenimore Cooper wrote that he “probably saw that he was relating a fact that most persons would be disposed to doubt, and self-respect prevented his making frequent allusions to it.” None of those stories were put into print until after the men telling them had died.

Second, unlike those other three men, Fox hadn’t been an officer on the Protector; he was an ordinary seaman. The Littles and Preble all became naval captains, two of them celebrated. Fox became a grocer and town postmaster. As respectable as he was, Fox was never as solid a gentleman as the others. If the three captains were wary of writing publicly about a sea serpent, Fox probably felt even less secure and more vulnerable to ridicule. So he didn’t leave us one word about that creature in the water.

Midshipman Preble Chases a Sea Serpent

Yesterday I quoted the memories of George and Luther Little of the day in May 1780 when their Massachusetts frigate chased a sea serpent off the coast of Maine. But did anyone besides the Little lieutenants leave a record of that giant fish that got away?

One of the youngest officers aboard that ship, the Protector, was Midshipman Edward Preble (1761-1807), later a celebrated U.S. Navy captain. James Fenimore Cooper’s profile of Preble for Graham’s Illustrated Magazine in 1845, republished in Naval Biographies, included his version of the chase:

Preble related the affair substantially as follows: The Protector was lying in one of the bays on the eastern coast, which, has been forgotten, waiting the slow movements of the squadron. The day was clear and calm, when a large serpent was discovered outside the ship. The animal was lying on the water quite motionless. After inspecting it with the glasses for some time, Capt. [John Foster] Williams ordered Preble to man and arm a large boat, and endeavor to destroy the creature; or at least, to go as near to it as he could. The selection of Preble for such a service, proves the standing he occupied among the hardy and daring. The boat thus employed pulled twelve oars, and carried a swivel in its bows, besides having its crew armed as boarders.

Preble shoved off, and pulled directly towards the monster. As the boat neared it, the serpent raised its head about ten feet above the surface of the water, looking about it. It then began to move slowly away from the boat. Preble pushed on, his men pulling with all their force, and the animal being at no great distance, the swivel was discharged loaded with bullets. The discharge produced no other effect than to quicken the speed of the serpent, which soon ran the boat out of sight.

There is no question that in after life, Preble occasionally mentioned this circumstance, to a few of his intimates. He was not loquacious, and probably saw that he was relating a fact that most persons would be disposed to doubt, and self-respect prevented his making frequent allusions to it. . . . Preble stated it as his opinion, that the serpent he saw was from one hundred, to one hundred and fifty feet long, and larger than a barrel.

Preble’s anecdote, filtered through Cooper’s novelistic imagination, left out Lt. George Little as the officer in charge of the boat, putting Preble in his place. Preble’s serpent was three times as long as the Littles’.

In fact, there were such differences between the Little and Preble accounts that some later sea serpent scholars treated them as separate incidents. But Preble was probably just a junior officer who went out in the boat under George Little. His anecdotes of that event, passed along orally to Cooper, offer another, less reliable look of the mysterious creature.

TOMORROW: One more memoir from the Protector.

Lieutenant Little Chases a Sea Serpent

George and Luther Little were two brothers from Marshfield who both served as officers aboard the Massachusetts navy vessel Protector under Capt. John Foster Williams from 1779 to 1781.

Luther, the younger by two years, was badly wounded during a sea battle. Later George was captured, held briefly on the Jersey prison ship, and sent to the Mill Prison in England. He and other officers bribed a guard and escaped to France.

In 1804, George wrote a letter to Alden Bradford about another of his adventures during the war. In 1820 that letter was published in the American Journal of Science as follows:

Marshfield, 13th March, 1804.

Sir,
In answer to yours of the 30th of January last, I observe, that in May, 1780, I was lying in Round Pond, in Broad Bay [off Waldoboro, Maine], in a public armed ship. At sunrise, I discovered a large Serpent, or monster, coming down the bay, on the surface of the water. The Cutter was manned and armed. I went myself in the boat, and proceeded after the Serpent. When within a hundred feet, the marines were ordered to fire on him, but before they could make ready, the Serpent dove. He was not less than from 45 to 50 feet in length; the largest diameter of his body, I should judge, 15 inches; his head nearly of the size of that of a man, which he carried four or five feet above the water. He wore every appearance of a common black snake. When he dove he came up near Muscongus Island—we pursued him, but never came up within a quarter of a mile of him again.

A monster of the above description was seen in the same place, by Joseph Kent, of Marshfield, 1751. Kent said he was longer and larger than the main boom of his sloop, which was 85 tons. He had a fair opportunity of viewing him, as he was within ten or twelve yards of his sloop.

I have the honor to be, sir, Your friend and humble servant,
GEO. LITTLE.

A couple of decades later, Luther Little dictated his memoirs, eventually published in the Journal of American History. Luther corroborated his older brother’s experience:

The Capt. thought it necessary to put into an eastern port for wood and water;—we sail’d for Broad Bay, and arrived at the mouth and anchored in a cove near the shore, called Muscongus. The Capt. made arrangements with a farmer at this place to land our sick, at an out building leaving the surgeons mate to take care of them, making a sort of hospital. I was then sufficiently recovered [from my wound] to be able to walk the deck. The next day, at four in the afternoon, we discovered a large black snake coming down from out the bushes abreast the ship; he took the water and swam by us; we judged him to be 40 feet long, and his middle the size of a man’s body; he carried his head six feet above water. We manned a barge, and went in chase of him; when fired at, he would dive like a sea-fowl. They chased him a mile and a half firing continually. The snake landed at Lowd’s Island, and disappeared in the woods. The barge returned to the ship.

Luther’s account suggests he saw the serpent from the deck of the Protector but didn’t join George in the boat that chased it.

Did anyone outside the Little family tell this odd story?

TOMORROW: Tales from a midshipman.

(The Protector was a 26-gun frigate launched in 1779. The picture above shows H.M.S. Cleopatra, a 32-gun frigate launched the same year; that’s the closest I could find.)

Luther Little’s Low Point

Luther Little (1756-1842) was an American naval officer during the War for Independence. He was a lieutenant on the Protector, a Massachusetts ship that was captured by the Royal Navy in 1781.

Little escaped captivity, however, because he’d been assigned to command a vessel the Protector had captured previously on its voyage into a friendly port.

On a later voyage, however, Capt. Little’s ship was wrecked in a storm and he broke his leg. But eventually he made it back to his home town of Marshfield.

In 1841 Little dictated a memoir of his life to a relative, and in the 1910s the Journal of American History published that manuscript. This is the incident he started with:

At the age of ten years, 1766, I recollect going to swim in the North River, a stream that runs between Scituate and Marshfield, accompanied by several boys in the neighbourhood. While we were thus amusing ourselves the tide rose and took off my clothes. Aided by the boys, I chose the least conspicuous path home, two miles and a half; got into a chamber window, and instead of the fig leaves chosen by Adam and Eve for a similar purpose, I took to my bed and feigned myself sick. I lay there quietly until my mother came up, who, hearing my story, gave me herb-tea, &c, and by this means I escaped a good whipping.

The following sketch of my life will show that I have been exposed to danger, and eminently so, both by sea and land, but never have I felt any depression of spirits so sensibly as at the loss of this suit of clothes.

The Jersey Prison Ship Records on Ebenezer Fox

As I wrote yesterday, on 5 May 1781 two Royal Navy ships captured the pride of the Massachusetts navy, the Protector, and its crew, including young Ebenezer Fox of Roxbury. (The picture here shows him over fifty years later.)

The National Archives in London holds three volumes of bound muster rolls from the Jersey prison ship, then in New York harbor, and those confirm that men from the Protector began arriving on that hulk on 8 May. Even more were listed on 9 May. Those prisoners were credited to the two vessels that had captured the Massachusetts ship, H.M.S. Roebuck and Medea (which Fox recalled in his memoir as the Mayday).

In all, the Jersey rolls list 127 prisoners from the Protector. Only Capt. John Foster Williams is identified by rank. Junior officers like Lt. George Little and Midn. Edward Preble don’t have any special designation; they appear in the midst of the ordinary seamen—including Ebenezer Fox, signed in on 8 May.

And almost immediately those muster rolls show the Protector’s men being transferred off the prison ship, and thus off its books. The first to go were two sailors discharged to the Falmouth on 11 May, possibly having enlisted in the Royal Navy.

Williams and Little were put aboard the Rainbow on 9 June, prisoners bound for England. It’s not clear how many other men listed as discharged to the Rainbow were prisoners and how many had been drafted or enlisted as sailors. In early 1782, Williams was exchanged from the Mill Prison in Britain.

In all, men from the Protector were discharged to eight different British vessels, mostly in small numbers. In addition, one was identified as a British deserter and sent back to his army regiment, and four are listed as, I believe, “Esc[aped].” (At first I’d wondered if that notation might be “Ex[changed],” but Fox’s mention of men disappearing in the night confirms there were escapes.) By the end of June 1781, only 27 of the original 127 were still listed as receiving rations aboard the Jersey.

Ebenezer Fox was not one of those remaining names. On 30 June, the Jersey’s commander had discharged him to the 88th Regiment of the British army. Two other men enlisted in that regiment the same day; five others had already signed up, the earliest on 28 May.

Thus, Fox’s experience of the Jersey prison ship, which took up almost a quarter of his 1838 memoir of the war, lasted less than two months. To be sure, he was on that ship for more days than most of his comrades from the Protector, but he didn’t hold out for a very long time. Furthermore, while he dwelled on the unhealthy conditions in that prison, during those two months none of the Protector men is listed as dying.

Clearly Fox played up the horrors of the Jersey to justify his eventual decision to join the enemy army. In Forgotten Patriots, Edwin G. Burrows showed that some of the anecdotes Fox told in those chapters occurred after he had left the ship and must have been borrowed from other men’s memoirs.

Thus, while the Jersey’s muster rolls confirm that Ebenezer Fox was held captive aboard that notorious ship before enlisting in the 88th Regiment and heading for Jamaica, they also reveal that Fox glossed over one very important detail.