collection of john armar lowry-corry, 8th earl belmore
The armed yacht Osprey (ex-James Madison), after its sale to the 2nd Earl of Belmore. sent to a prison ship at Chatham. The British listed Pault as a “man of colour” and a “seaman,” as were his Madison shipmates Zepher Quesir (a.k.a. “Gasseyr”), also of Savannah, and Oliver Gale of New York. Pault was fifteen years old when he was captured, making him the youngest POW in US Coast Guard history. He was returned home after the war. The War of 1812 proved a baptism by fire for the US Revenue-Marine, which experienced heavy losses of ships and men. In addition to the capture of 90 cuttermen, several of whom died in captivity, approximately two dozen men were lost in the line of duty. The service also lost six of fourteen
national archives of the united kingdom
The enlisted POWs shipped aboard HMS Polyphemus arrived in Portsmouth, England, and were then transferred to prison ships, or “hulks.” As notorious as some of the prisons were during the War of 1812, they paled in comparison to conditions in the hulks. Prison hulks were decommissioned warships; prisoners were confined below decks, many of which were gun decks with about four feet of headroom. Filth, disease, vermin, overcrowding, and lack of fresh air and clean water made life in hulks a battle for survival. Regarding these conditions, a US Navy prisoner recounted: “Here were 250 men, emaciated by a system of starvation, cooped up in a small space, with only an aperture of about two feet square to admit the air, and with ballast stones for our beds!” Twenty-eight-year-old Madison seaman John Bearbere of North Carolina wound up in one of these prison ships. On 28 May 1813, his lifeless body was transferred to HMS Pegase, a prison hospital ship moored in Portsmouth Harbor. It is believed Bearbere died of pneumonia. At that time, it was standard procedure to row the dead to shore in a small boat and bury them in a shallow grave. John Bearbere was the first Coast Guardsman to die in captivity. The location of his final resting place remains unknown. Three other Madison seamen sent on board HMS Polyphemus were described as “mulatto” and were likely freedmen. Of this group, Beloner Pault of Savannah was
Illustration of a British prison ship similar to those that held POWs during the War of 1812. 18
ocean-going cutters and all of its assets in the Great Lakes. These revenue vessels included not only losses due to enemy action, but also one lost to a catastrophic explosion and another that capsized in a hurricane. After arriving in Portsmouth, USRC James Madison was sold to the Earl of Belmore to become the armed yacht, Osprey. Captain George Brooks sailed the revenue cutter James Madison in an unauthorized, high-stakes gamble against the powerful Royal Navy and in doing so sacrificed the freedom of his enlisted crewmembers, at least two of whom paid the ultimate price. These are some of the long-forgotten heroes of the long blue line. William H. Thiesen is the Atlantic Area Historian for the US Coast Guard. A regular contributor to Sea History, Dr. Thiesen was awarded the 2017 Rodney N. Houghton Award for the best feature article in Sea History. He is the author of Industrializing American Shipbuilding: The Transformation of Ship Design and Construction, 1820–1920 (2006). His articles appear weekly in the online history series “The Long Blue Line,” featured on the Coast Guard Compass website. For more information on USCG history, visit www.uscg.mil/history. William J. Nelson is a research volunteer with the US Coast Guard Historian’s office. For more information on Coast Guard history, visit https://www.history.uscg.mil/. SEA HISTORY 175, SUMMER 2021