Reservist

ISS1 2015

Reservist Magazine is the award-winning official publication of the United States Coast Guard Reserve. Quarterly issues include news and feature articles about the men and women who comprise America's premier national maritime safety and security

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and surrendered. Ham ordered the nearly sixty British officers and men ashore under an armed guard of about forty riflemen. The cutter and militiamen also repatriated the crew of the American merchantman Flight, captured earlier by the British barges. The Alexandria Gazette reported, "the loss of so many men and barges at this time will embarrass the enemy not a little, as it will weaken very considerably his means of annoyance." Beginning in early 1813, the British blockade of the East Coast had brought the naval war to home shores, especially in the Chesapeake Bay. On June 12, 1813, Captain Samuel Travis anchored Cutter Surveyor off Gloucester Point, near Yorktown, Virginia. The customs collector for the port of Baltimore built the Surveyor to serve the Baltimore station and commissioned it in 1807; however, during the British blockade it served in the southern Chesapeake Bay. Surveyor measured sixty-eight feet on deck, nineteen feet wide, and drew about six feet of water; and it carried a crew of about twenty-five officers and men, and a main armament of six cannon. Not knowing the proximity of British naval forces to his cutter, Captain Travis set out a picket boat with a small crew and installed boarding netting around the cutter's deck. At about midnight that evening, four Royal Navy boats carrying a party of nearly fifty British officers and men from the frigate HMS Narcissus approached through the evening haze with muffled oars. They managed to close within 150 yards of the cutter before the picket boat detected them and fired a warning shot. The British navigated their boats away from Surveyor's main guns, rendering them ineffective. Travis armed each man with two muskets and ordered them to wait until the British rowed within about fifty yards, when he gave the word to fire. The Surveyor's crew of eighteen men fought stubbornly, with seven men sustaining wounds, and managed to kill three attackers and wound seven more. However, the British boarding party gained the cutter's deck, overwhelmed the outnumbered crew and captured the cutter. The lieutenant in charge of the attacking flotilla later returned Travis's sword, commending him for the valiant defense of his ship in the face of overwhelming enemy forces: "Your gallant and desperate attempt to defend your vessel against more than double your number excited such admiration on the part of your opponents as I have seldom witnessed, and induced me to return you the sword you had so ably used...I am at a loss which to admire most, the previous arrangement on board the Surveyor or the determined manner in which her deck was disputed inch- by-inch." On June 21, 1813, nearly ten days after Surveyor's capture, Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones wrote the Baltimore customs collector that "as a Revenue Cutter can be of no use in the waters of the Chesapeake, during the continuance of the present state of things [British blockade], it will be proper for you to inform the officers and crew of the "Surveyor" that they are to consider themselves as being no longer in the service of the United States." By this time, Travis and his crew were prisoners on board the British 44-gun frigate HMS Junon anchored near the mouth of the James River. On August 7, 1813, the British paroled Captain Travis at Washington, North Carolina. He returned to Virginia after his release and lived in Williamsburg for much of the remainder of his life. The rest of the cuttermen fared far The battle for the Revenue Cutter Surveyor depicting the vastly outnumbered cutter crew defending their ship on June 12, 1813. (Painting by Patrick O'Brien, USCG Collection) 46 RESERVIST � Issue 1 • 2015

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