The Last British Fatalities of The American Revolution

A repost appropriate to the calendar…

The end of December on the New Jersey coast can be a fickle affair. Cold, raw, blustery one day. Sunny and brisk the next. Howling Nor’easter blizzard the day after that. December of 1783 was all of that. America’s revolt against the Crown was over. The Treaty of Paris had been signed in September. The humiliation of finally abandoning New York made the cold all the worse for the officers of HMS Assistance anchored off the entrance to New York’s harbor. She was a 50-gun, Portland Class British warship, and was part of the last remaining British contingent still in sight of American shores. She carried a crew of 350 officers, midshipmen and sailors. Many of the common sailors had been “impressed” – forced into service. Some may have been Americans themselves. For them, the allure of freedom in the Americas was a powerful draw.

December 30 dawned frigid and grey. The air was charged with the smell of a change in the weather. At mid morning, a longboat with six sailors and a midshipman was sent to gather fresh water from the nearby supply ship HMS Bridgewater. Seizing the opportunity, the sailors overpowered the middie and pulled with all their might for the Jersey shore on Sandy Hook.

This was the second group of deserters in as many days. Captain William Bentinck was having no more of it. He deliberated for some time, but his career was at stake. He summoned first lieutenant Hamilton Douglas-Halliburton and ordered the lieutenant to select a party and go after the deserters.

Hamilton Douglas-Halliburton was the son of a wealthy Scottish family and a member of the peerage. He was a bold and dynamic officer with seven years service in the Royal Navy and marked for bigger things. He chose a group of thirteen consisting of twelve young officers and midshipmen plus a sailor. They took Assistance’sbarge and set out for Sandy Hook. As they shoved off it began to snow. When they disappeared into the rapidly building snowstorm it the last time they were seen alive.

No one knows exactly what happened, but the snowstorm wound itself up into a two day full-blown blizzard. On January 2, 1784 the bodies of Douglas-Halliburton and the men of his command were found. In the poor visibility of the storm the barge struck a mud flat and stuck fast. 200 yards in either direction and they’d have probably made it. But aground in Horseshoe Cove, they were fully exposed to the elements. They had frozen to death. Their bodies were buried on Sandy Hook.

When his mother, Katherine, learned of her son’s death, she had a marble monument placed at the site of the graves; it read:

“Here lie the remains of the Honorable Hamilton Douglas-Halliburton, son of Shoto Charles, Earl of Morton, and heir to the ancient family of Halliburton of Pitcurr in Scotland, who perished on this coast with twelve more young gentlemen and one common sailor, in the spirited discharge of duty, the 30th or 31st of December, 1783 – born October the 10th, 1763: a youth, who in contempt of hardship and danger, though possessed of an ample fortune, served seven years in the British navy, with a manly courage. He seemed to be deserving of a better fate. To his dear memory, and that of his unfortunate companions, this monumental stone is erected, by his unhappy mother Katherine, Countess Dowager of Morton.”

In 1808, during the Napoleonic Wars, an armed French Corsair landed on Sandy Hook in search of water. Some of the crewmen took the time to destroy Halliburton’s monument. In time, the graves were lost.

But a century later, in 1908, during a construction project at the Sandy Hook proving grounds the remains were re-discovered. They were re-interred at Cypress Hill Cemetery in Brooklyn. Finally, in 1937, a Civilian Conservation Corp project installed a proper monument on the site. That still stands today.

Note – the Memorial has the date wrong. It says January 1783 … but that’s a year too early.