I have gotten back into some family history work lately, after a long break. I have been studying Mayflower ancestors and their first two generations of descendants in the New World... and I've come across not one, but two encounters with pirates!
In 1651, Elizabeth Howland (daughter of Elizabeth Tilley and John Howland, both Mayflower passengers) married Captain John Dickinson (sometimes spelled Dickenson, Dickarson, or other variations). They - and several of Elizabeth's other married siblings, including my direct ancestors Desire Howland and Captain John Gorham - lived in Barnstable, MA. By 1653, Dickinson was master of the 120-ton sloop Desire - the third vessel built in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was owned by Samuel Mayo, William Paddy, and John Barnes.
The ship was hired by Rev. William Leverich and the brothers Peter, Anthony, and Nicholas Wright, to take them, their families, and all of their possessions to Oyster Bay, Long Island, where they had purchased land from the Native Americans and intended to start a new town. On arriving in Hempstead Bay, the ship was seized by pirate Thomas Baxter, an Englishman who had a letter of marque from the Rhode Island government to prey on Dutch shipping (the English and Dutch were at war at the time). He allowed the passengers to disembark, then took the sloop and its cargo to Fairfield Harbor, Connecticut. It is possible that John Dickinson had run past Baxter's blockade on previous occasions, doing trade between New England and New Amsterdam, and that this qualified the ship in Baxter's mind as a valid target.
Capt. Mayo brought suit against Capt. Baxter, who was arrested, tried, forced to return his booty and pay a fine for "disturbing the peace", and banished from New Haven Colony. A further civil suit by Capt. Mayo won further damages, financially ruining Thomas Baxter, who is said to have gone to Nevis where he died. John Dickinson and his family moved to Oyster Bay themselves around 1658.
A generation later, around May 1695, Desire Howland and John Gorham's youngest son, Shubael Gorham, was traveling with his friends and family to Nantucket for his marriage to Puella Hussey when "the members of the wedding party were taken prisoner by a French shallop from Port Royal and were stripped of all their valuables." I have found a mention that Shubael's brother John was among that party, but nothing further to indicate which other family members might have been. They had eight other siblings alive at the time, all married with children. Their parents had passed.
While my brief research has not turned up more documentation and details of these events, they each must have been the talk of the family!
