Introduction and overview

On July 31,1796 Captain Josiah Hempsted sailed out of New London harbor on the brig Patty  bound for the Caribbean island of St. Bartholomew, at that time a Swedish colony. Patty was loaded with horses and other trading goods on what should have been a relatively routine mercantile trip. However, on September 2, Patty, an unarmed merchant vessel, was seized by the well-armed French cruiser Iris and taken to the French island of Guadeloupe where the ship and cargo were sold off after a perfunctory trial.

The unfortunate Captain Hempsted and his crew had to make their way back to Connecticut after the humiliation of being held in a French prison  and paraded past a guillotine on their way to the tribunal.  Patty and most of her cargo were the property of maritime merchant Justus Riley of Wethersfield but the captain had invested some of his own capital in the venture. Based on a 1793 promise by President George Washinton to "redress" such unlawful seizures, Riley and Hempsted demanded compensation for their seized property but the wheels of justice turned very slowly. Thus Patty and her cargo ended up at the center of an international incident that was not resolved until more than a century later when the Hempsted and Riley heirs finally received compensation from the government for their loss in 1796--minus legal fees and probate taxes.

In 2021 the New London Maritime Society had the opportunity to purchase a collection of original documents associated with Patty's story. In the process of preparing the documents for a digital exhibit I discovered that historian Sandra P. Ulbrich had already researched and chronicled the history of the Patty incident and the subsequent quest for justice in an excellent article “Justus Riley and Justice for Patty”, published in the Spring 2019 issue of CT Explored. However, at the time that she wrote the article she was not aware of the existence of these documents which had previously been in private hands.  She was thrilled to see them when she visited the Custom House in June 2022.

After they were purchased Executive Director Susan Tamulevich photographed each of the documents.  Librarian Laurie Deredita created this digital exhibit for the Maritime Society using the Omeka program. The documents are old, stained and ragged, with evidence of having been folded, opened and folded again many times during the two centuries that have passed since they were written. Some of them are very hard to read, especially those written by Captain Hempsted. However, by clicking on the digital images of the documents and zooming in on the details the words become clearer.  The originals have been given appropriate archival treatment with the documents enclosed in mylar sleeves and housed together in an acid-free document box in the library in the Custom House where they may be examined.

Laurie M. Deredita, Librarian