From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sloop owned by John Hancock
Liberty
was a
sloop
owned by
John Hancock
, an
American
merchant, whose seizure was the subject of the
Liberty Affair
. Seized by customs officials in
Boston
in 1768, it was commissioned into the
Royal Navy
as
HMS
Liberty
, and she was burned the next year by American colonists in
Newport, Rhode Island
in one of the first acts of open defiance against the
British crown
by American colonists.
History
[
edit
]
John Hancock, original owner of
Liberty
The ship was originally owned by John Hancock. In 1768, British officials alleged that Bostonians locked a
customs
official in the
Liberty
'
s cabin while the cargo of
Madeira wine
was unloaded in an effort to evade the
Townshend Acts
.
[2]
In retaliation, the British government confiscated
Liberty
, and she was towed away by
HMS
Halifax
. Charges against Hancock were eventually dropped, but
Liberty
remained confiscated.
The ship was refitted in Rhode Island to serve as a Royal Navy ship named HMS
Liberty
[1]
and then used to patrol off
Rhode Island
for customs violations. On 19 July 1769, the crew of
Liberty
under Captain William Reid accosted Joseph Packwood, a New London captain, and seized and towed two
Connecticut
ships into Newport. In retribution, Packwood and a mob of Rhode Islanders confronted Reid, then boarded, scuttled, and later burned the ship on the north end of
Goat Island
in Newport harbor as one of the first overt American acts of defiance against the British government.
[3]
[4]
[5]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
"NMM, vessel ID 370092"
(PDF)
.
Warship Histories, vol ii
.
National Maritime Museum
. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on 2 August 2011
. Retrieved
11 March
2014
.
- ^
a
b
"The seizure of Liberty"
.
The American Revolution
. Alpha History
. Retrieved
11 March
2014
.
- ^
Ships of the World Series, Vol. 799: Warships of the World to 1900,
Lincoln P. Paine (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000) p. 95
[1]
- ^
Millar, Early American Ships
- ^
Sherman, An Accounting of His Majesty's Armed Sloop
Liberty
This article includes data released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported UK: England & Wales Licence, by the
National Maritime Museum
, as part of the
Warship Histories
project.