Continental Navy

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.

Jonas Page. According to New London’s Indian Mariners by Jason R. Mancini adapted from his article in Perspectives on Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Power in Maritime America, Mystic Seaport (2006); “A number of the workers (on the Confederacy) were associated with the Mohegan community directly across the river. Many of these men, including Peter Neshoe, Thomas Mosset, Turtle Hunter, Gurden Wyaugs, Ebenezer Tanner, Daniel Uncas, Dennis Mohegan, Simeon Ashbow, and James Jeffrey, were almost exclusively employed as ships riggers between October 1778 and February 1779. The nature of this work, which involved detailed knowledge of ship engineering and operation, suggests that these men were all by this time experienced mariners and recognized as such. Furthermore, men from various Indian communities, including some of those involved in the construction of the Confederacy, later sailed as crew members: Simeon Ashbow and Daniel Uncas as marines, Ebenezer Tanner as a cook’s mate, and William Fagins, Jonas Peege, and Turtle Hunter as seamen.” The claim of Jonas Page for service as boy on the ship Confederacy in the amount of $7.21 including interest to 19 May 1780 was adjusted by the Treasury Department on 4 December 1793.

Pirum Ripley. Pirum Ripley or Pyrum Ripley was born on 22 November 1762 in Duxbury, MA to William Ripley (1735-1766) and Lydia Hunt and lived in Norwich at the beginning of the Revolution. According to Pirum Ripley’s pension application #S-23388, he enlisted at New London in February 1778 for nine months on the 20 gun Oliver Cromwell as a common sailor under Captain Timothy Parker. According to the 1896 Yearbook of the Illinois Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, he enlisted at age 16 as a “powder boy.” They sailed from Boston and captured the British ship Admiral Keppel of 20 guns and sent her into Boston. After a stop in Charlestown, SC, the Oliver Cromwell was dismasted in a gale in the Gulf of Florida near the Bahamas. On the return voyage to New London, she captured a merchantman Brig and sent her into Boston. Ripley was discharged 1 October 1778. He is listed in the Frigate Confederacy Riggers’ Returns 1778-1779. After working on the ship’s construction, Pirum Ripley then enlisted on the Confederacy as a sailor on 1 January 1779 for six months. After sailing to Philadelphia, the Confederacy “made frequent sails” taking a 24 gun ship into Philadelphia and on another occasion took a schooner of ten guns bringing her into Philadelphia. She also on another occasion took a sloop which afterward proved to be neutral rebel. In October 1779, Ripley left the ship while lying at Chester. He served 10 months, four over his enlistment terms. Ripley next enlisted as a private for six months in the Continental Army in General Pearson’s Brigade of the Fourth Connecticut Regiment under Col. John Durkee at Nelson’s Point on 1 July 1780, three of which were spent in Norwich. He was transferred to Captain Buell’s Company of Light Infantry in Colonel Herman Swift’s Regiment of General Perry’s Brigade. They marched to New Jersey and “moved about from place to place.” They returned for Winter Quarters at the Highlands in New York. Ripley was discharged on 31 December 1780. He moved to New Lebanon, NY during that winter where he enlisted on 1 April 1781 for nine months in Colonel Marinus Willet’s New York Regiment. They marched to Saratoga. While at the garrison there, he was employed in parties scouting for Tories and Indians. On 1 April 1782, Ripley enlisted again at New Lebanon in Captain Gray’s Company of Colonel Willet’s Regiment for nine more months. Before that enlistment was up, he enlisted again on 1 January 1783 and served until January 1784 when he was discharged at the Schnectady Barricks. During his last enlistment, Pirum Ripley “marched up the Mohawk River as far as Fort Stanwix and built two block store houses. It was written, “he with other Marines made a march across the State of New York in midwinter to the Defence of Oswego.” On one occasion during this enlistment he and two companions traveled for three days with no other food than one cracker divided among them. Pirum Ripley married Hannah Plumb or Plum on 6 June 1785 and fathered twelve children including son Tyrannus born in 1787 who married Rebekah Howe, son William Plum Ripley who married Cynthia Spencer, daughter Rebecca born in 1796 who married Walter Blout and daughter Laura born in 1808 at Richmond, NY who married Daniel Wallace. After the war, Ripley lived at New Lebanon, NY about three years, then Coxsackie County, NY, then Middleburg, Schoharie County, NY, then Richmond, Ontario County, NY and then to Livonia, Livingston County, NY. Ripley relocated yet again to be with children in Silina, Washtenau County, MI in October of 1836. Finally, he moved back to New York on 3 June 1839 to live with his daughter Rebecca Blout in Franklinville, Cattarauges County. Ripley is described as a man of extensive reading who had an excellent memory and a man of most interesting conversation, as well as, a faithful member of the Baptist Church. Pirum Ripley’s pension application describes him as “having become infirm, and having but a small property, and no real estate, he prays for a pension which will enable him to live comfortably.” He died in Franklinville on 23 March 1844 and is buried there with his wife at Mt. Prospect Cemetery. A Piram Ripley Society was organized under Miss Elizabeth H. Blount in Washington, DC; where in 1899 the society which bears his name placed a tablet on the old house at No. 3051 M Street in Georgetown.