Frances Manwaring Caulkins

Frances Manwaring Caulkins does not mention the Patty incident in her History of New London but she has the following to say about the dangers posed by privateers to maritime commerce,  and in this context Patty’s story may be better understood:

“After ten or twelve years of great prosperity, reckoning from the peace of 1783, the commerce of the United States was checked by the depredations of belligerent European nations. The West Indies had various claimants; they were the resort of people of many tongues and hues, of royal fleets of legalized privateers, and of pirates and buccaneers.  The American traders were the prey of the whole.  Their vessels were subject to all the degrees of molestation, from simple detention and abusive words, through plundering, capturing, libeling, adjudication and condemnation, to entire loss of vessel and cargo, and often, impressment of the crew. New London had her portion of these wrongs. Her seamen also suffered greatly from the pestilential fevers of the tropics.”  

Caulkins goes on to give many examples from New London, and ends with this: “It was calculated that for twenty years, reckoning from 1790, so many from New London went to sea and never returned, being swallowed by the ocean, or cut off by the diseases of the tropics, as sensibly to diminish the population of the place.” (H.D.Utley, 1895, pp.581-582)