1776 General Gazetteer with 1779–1827 Manuscript Notes of a Massachusetts Revolutionary War Privateer, Ship Master, and Selectman, Including Service Aboard the Pilgrim under Famed Captain Hugh Hill

On offer is an extraordinary Revolutionary War and early American maritime artifact: the personal copy of The General Gazetteer: or, Compendious Geographical Dictionary, fourth edition, 1776, owned and annotated with phenomenal Revolutionary War content by John Prince (1762-1848) of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Prince was a Revolutionary War privateer, ship master, selectman, and Justice of the Peace. Across the blank front and rear endpapers and pastedowns, Prince filled eight manuscript pages with notes spanning roughly 48 years, from 1779 to at least 1827. The book itself is significant to the manuscript content. The General Gazetteer was a practical eighteenth-century reference work identifying countries, ports, cities, rivers, harbors, distances, political divisions, and historical facts. This content would have been useful to a young mariner, and Prince used the blank leaves to record his work, memory, education, and thought. These notes are not casual marginalia, but personal working record that fills in a large gap in the existing knowledge of Prince and the famed Revolutionary ship the Pilgrim, captained by Hugh Hill (1740-1828). The most important entry is Prince’s firsthand retrospective account of his first voyage to sea during the American Revolution. On one page he writes, "1779 Pilgrim Sail’d April the 13 1779," and signs the book in Latinized form, "Johannes Prince Ejus Liber July the 9 1779" ["John Prince, his book. "]. In the surrounding manuscript he gives a narrative of this voyage, beginning, "The first of my going to Sea was in the Pilgrim, " identifying the famous Beverly privateer as "a ship of 16 9 pounders 140 Men" under "Hugh Hill, Commd’r. "This is an exceptional Revolutionary War naval passage. Prince records that during this cruise they took eleven British prizes, including a bark from Liverpool, England, armed with fourteen guns. He describes the vessel as a Letter of Marque loaded with goods, taken by boarding after a tense encounter in fog. The opposing vessel flew American colors, claimed to be from Charlestown, and then hauled down the American colors and raised British. Prince records that the British captain and sailing master were killed and that several men were wounded. He further notes that prisoners were landed on the coast of Ireland. The language is unusually vivid and unusually reflective. Prince does not simply glorify the action. Writing from the perspective of one who had been only seventeen years old, he adds: "War is a Calamity — privateering & Pirateering are about the Same. " He then explains the practical necessity of his choice: "At this period Æ 17 I so thought, but with me it was of necessity there was no other Employ, " adding that he did not have his father’s approval. This passage gives the manuscript unusual emotional and historical force: a Revolutionary War privateer looking back on the violence and moral ambiguity of privateering, while also explaining the economic pressure that drove a Marblehead teenager to sea. The entry is important in relation to Prince’s later documented Revolutionary War statement. In June 1839, Prince swore that he had taken an active part in the Revolution, had served in Rhode Island in 1778 under Col. William R. Lee, and had gone on nine cruises during the war aboard privateers and Letters of Marque. He also stated that he had been one of the prisoners aboard the British sloop of war Lively, and the "leader and adviser" of the prisoners who rose up in November 1782, captured the vessel, carried her safely into Havana, and sold her for $22,000 (Lindsey, 1915). That affidavit gives the broad outline of Prince’s Revolutionary service, but this manuscript appears to preserve something different and rarer: Prince’s earliest known firsthand account of his first voyage as a seventeen-year-old privateer. According to the Peabody Essex Museum finding aid, the institutional holdings of the John Prince Papers begin with Prince’s writing in 1784, while.…