Skipper Lunt, Seaman

Skipper Lunt. The claim of Skipper Lunt, a seaman on the ships Confederacy & Trumbull in the amount of $23.12 including interest to the date of the Confederacy’s capture on 14 April 1781, was adjusted by the Treasury Department on 9 January 1793. A man with this name appears on the prisoner list of the Jersey prison ship. It is suspected that he is Skipper Lunt, born about 1758, of Newburyport, MA who served as private in Captain Ezra Lunt’s Company of Colonel Moses Little’s 17th Regiment. A muster roll of the company dated 1 August 1775 notes Skipper Lunt enlisted on 17 July 1775. A company return probably from October 1775 records his age as seventeen. An order for a bounty coat or its equivalent in money due to him is dated 11 December 1775. A native of Newburyport and born in 1743, Captain Ezra Lunt was the son of Henry Lunt and the eldest of three brothers—Ezra, Daniel and Henry. Before the Revolution, Ezra Lunt ran a stagecoach between Newburyport and Boston. Later in the war, he was promoted to major and was appointed Commissary to Little’s Regiment. Captain Lunt’s Company of sixty men was in active service from 2 May to the middle of September with the officers and many of the men re-enlisting until December 1775. The company left Newburyport on 10 May 1775, arriving in Cambridge on the twelfth. On 16 June, Lunt’s Company marched to Charlestown and entrenched on a hill beyond Bunker’s Hill from whence they participated in the battle. Captain Lunt served at the Battle of Monmouth and in the Jerseys before being stationed at Fishkill, near Washington’s headquarter, in the Spring of 1781 where his brother Henry visited after leaving the Ariel which arrived in Philadelphia in February 1781. This timing is significant as it is about the time presumed kinsman Skipper Lunt entered service on the Confederacy. On 15 November 1776, Henry Lunt sailed with the third brother Daniel on the privateer Dalton under Captain Eleazer Johnson. Before the Revolution, Daniel Lunt was master of the Newburyport brig Lively. Captured on 24 December 1776, the crew of the Dalton including Henry Lunt were imprisoned at Mill Prison for over two years. After his release, Henry entered in the service of John Paul Jones as Midshipman then Second Lieutenant on the Bon Homme Richard, Alliance and finally the Ariel. After the meeting with his brother in 1781 in Philadelphia, Henry Lunt returned home to Newburyport where he entered on board the privateer Intrepid as First Lieutenant under the command of Moses Brown and owned by Nathaniel Tracy. Another probable relation to Private Skipper Lunt is Paul Lunt, First Lieutenant of Captain Ezra Hunt’s Company. Born in 1747, Paul Lunt was the son of Cutting Lunt and Deborah Jacques. Paul Lunt’s brother Cutting was Captain of Marines on the privateer Independence under the command of William Nichols in September 1776. Cutting Lunt also sailed with his brother Richard on the brig Dalton with relatives Henry and Daniel Lunt. Cutting Lunt sailed as Third Lieutenant on the Bon Homme Richard with his brother Richard on the frigate Alliance. Cutting sailed in October 1780 as sailing master under the command of William Coffin of Newbury on the privateer America, which was lost at sea with all hands in 1781 or 1782. The seaman Skipper Lunt is most probably related to both Captain Ezra Lunt and Lieutenant Paul Lunt. Although the precise relationship is not clear, both families are well represented in naval action during the Revolution, both served on the ill-fated brig Dalton and trace their ancestry to Ensign Henry Lunt, Jr. and Jane Skipper, whose son Skipper Lunt (1679-1757) was a master builder who lived near the Amesbury Ferry on the Merrimack River in Old Newbury. This Skipper Lunt’s son Abraham (1704-1783) and his wife Miriam Moulton also bore a son Skipper Lunt in 1735 who took the family name to Eliot, York County, Me. Abraham Lunt’s other son Daniel would also father a Skipper Lunt born in York, ME in 1780. The distinctive family name also passed to Newbury joiner Skipper Lunt who apparently died intestate in September 1771 and whose account book from the years 1736-1772 lies in the Peabody Essex Museum at Salem, MA. It is suspected that the Newbury joiner Skipper Lunt is the father of the Revolutionary War veteran, although there is no evidence to support this hypotheses. The only Skipper Lunt born in 1758 in Newbury is the son of Samuel and Sarah Lunt who is purported to have died shortly thereafter on 14 May 1758. It is interesting to speculate if Skipper Lunt also served aboard the Dalton with Henry Norwel and survived imprisonment in England, release and re-imprisonment in Bermuda only to be impressed into service on the Confederacy with James Hayes, Abraham Perkins, Abraham Edwards and forty unnamed others in the Summer of 1779. If so, he stayed on with the ship after her second cruise for her third and final one.