The ship named the Favorite, owned by Robert Johnston & Co, James Brown, and Richard and Abraham S. Hallett, and John G. Warren, all of New York, departed in 1800 with cargo owned by Frederic de Peyster and John Slidell. Bound for Cape Francis, the ship, commanded by Captain Charles Barnard, was captured on October 4, 1800, in lat. 20, long. 66, by the French privateer schooner the Patriot, and ordered to St. Pierre, Guadeloupe.
On December 4, 1800, a young man wrote a letter to his father in Guilford. The young man, who was in St. Kitts at the time, wrote “Honored Father – I embrace this opportunity to convey you a line, and inform you of my situation. I sailed from New York about the 12th of October, in the ship Favorite, Capt. Barnard, bound to Cape Francois. On the 4th of Nov. was taken by a French privateer, and carried into Guadaloupe, put into prison, and have just arrived here in a cartel. They took from me everything I had, both my venture and clothing, and scarcely left me a shirt to my back. Here I am destitute of a ship, money, or friends, and a stranger in a foreign land. Here are several vessels from northern ports, and one from New Haven, none of them will give me a passage. I am now bound to St. Bartholomew’s, in hopes that I shall get a vessel there bound to some part of America.”
Captain Barnard, of the ship the Favorite, in the previous year, had his sloop, the Cornelia, captured by the French, who condemned the vessel and cargo and sold that sloop at Guadeloupe.
The identity of the young man who wrote the letter to his father on December 4, 1800, is unknown.
Sources:
Mercantile Advertiser 22 Aug 1800 p3
Daily Advertiser 23 Dec 1800 p3
Litchfield Monitor 4 Feb 1801 p3
Federal Gazette & Baltimore Daily Advertiser 22 Jan 1800 p3
The French assault on American shipping, 1793-1813 : a history and comprehensive record of merchant marine losses. Greg H. Williams 2009
Compiled by Tracy Tomaselli 2020
