Henry Mowat (1734-98)
Mowat was an officer with an unparalleled knowledge of the New England coast as a result of a decade of survey work. He later became a key participant in the opening moves of the American Revolutionary War.
Born in Scotland, he was one of half-a-dozen sons of Captain Patrick Mowat of Hoy in the Orkney Islands who commanded the Tamar 16 on a voyage of discovery with Captain Hon. John Byron. One of his brothers, Commander Alexander Mouat, sailed with Captain James Cook and died from fever when in command of the Rattlesnake 16 in the West Indies in 1793, and others served in the navy and marines. The family name is variously spelled Mowat, Mowatt, Mouat or Mouatt.
Mowat first went to sea as an 18-year-old, and he passed his lieutenant’s examination in May 1758. He had to wait a further six years before he was actually commissioned lieutenant, on his appointment as the commanding officer to the survey vessel Canceaux 6 on 14 March 1764. Incredibly, he was to retain the command of this vessel for twelve years.
For the first ten years of his employment aboard the Canceaux, Mowat was engaged in surveying the Canadian and New England coast from the St. Lawrence around Nova Scotia to Boston. Most of this territory had been ceded to Britain by the French at the end of the Seven Years War, and so was poorly known to British mariners. The enforcement of customs regulations also formed part of his duties, with the result that he was not always looked upon favourably by the local populations. A typical capture occurred in the early autumn of 1768, when off Madame Island to the south of Cape Breton Island, he seized a smuggler brig from Jersey laden with valuable salt and French merchandise. A brief respite from his duties came in October 1770 when the Canceaux returned to Portsmouth from Halifax, but she was soon back on the North American coast.
By the early autumn of 1774, disaffection in the American colonies saw the Canceaux join Vice-Admiral Samuel Graves’ squadron, which was blockading Boston. In December she was sent to protect military supplies at Fort William and Mary at the mouth of the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire, but a pilot accidentally ran her aground. By the time she was freed a day later, the rebels had stolen some of the powder ashore she had been sent to protect. In March 1775 Mowat seized the ordnance at Fort Pownall at the mouth of the Penobscot in Maine. Taken prisoner at Falmouth that month by the rebel militia, he was released after negotiations involving local loyalists. In June the Canceaux was at Portsmouth in New Hampshire, where she took possession of two provision vessels that had come to supply the rebellious town.
During the autumn of 1775 the Canceaux was based at Boston. At this time, the Navy was seeking to take punitive action against the rebellious North American colonies for attacks on Royal Navy ships, and orders were given by Admiral Graves to burn the hostile New England ports. Placed in command of a squadron of five small vessels, Mowat arrived off Falmouth (modern-day Portland, Maine) on 16 October. Upon anchoring near the town the next day, he informed the authorities that he had orders to burn any seaport that did not lay down its arms. When the rebels refused to deliver up four carriage guns, small arms and four hostages, the populace was given two hours to evacuate, although in return for the kindness he had previously been shown whilst in captivity in the town six months earlier, Mowat did not immediately enforce this ultimatum. Meetings with a deputation did not resolve the impasse, and so from 9.30 the next morning until sunset, the squadron bombed and shelled the town before marines went in to set the remaining buildings alight. In total 400 properties were rendered uninhabitable. Although there were no civilian casualties, Mowat reported one of his own men was killed and another wounded in skirmishes with the local militia. This event meant that Mowat’s name became reviled among New Englanders, and it would come to be credited with turning many Americans to revolution.
After spending the winter at Boston, the Canceaux arrived at Spithead in late February 1776, bringing news of the campaign at Quebec. At the beginning of March orders were received for her to get ready for sea with all speed, and having collected transports from Cork bound for Quebec and Boston, she arrived at Halifax on 30 May.
On 2 June 1776 Mowat was promoted commander of the sloop Albany 16 by Vice-Admiral Marriot Arbuthnot, the C-in-C in North America, but from July until January 1777 he briefly commanded the frigate Milford 28 in place of the terminally ill Captain John Burr. During the last two months of the 1776 the Milford cruised off Boston Harbour, destroying a dozen enemy vessels in what some considered to be the most successful cruise of the war to date .
Returning to the Albany, Mowat’s sloop arrived at Halifax on 12 March 1777 in company with the armed brig Mercury 10, having days earlier fought a four-hour engagement with two American privateers of 20 and 14 guns respectively. During the action the larger of the enemies had suffered several burst guns, but after turning to sail downwind, the two Americans had been able to out-run the Albany and Mercury, both of which had been much damaged in the rigging. Reporting on the engagement from Halifax, an officer from the Albany claimed that the rebels had been seen throwing bodies overboard, and that they must have suffered considerable losses.
The Albany continued to cruise off the coasts of New England and Nova Scotia during the summer of 1777, and in late July she escorted a ship from Cadiz with a suspect cargo into Louisbourg. During April 1778 she was in the St. John’s River in the Bay of Fundy, and at the end of the year she and several tenders destroyed a number of rebel vessels at Buck’s Harbour near the Kennebeck River in Maine. She participated in Commodore Sir George Collier’s Penobscot Expedition during July and August 1779, with Mowat leading three sloops of war in support of a force of 750 men charged with establishing Fort George on the Bagaduce Peninsula at Castine as a base for loyalist families. Anchoring his sloops across the harbour entrance and moving his unengaged cannons ashore to assist the troops, he helped hold the base against rebel attacks from 23 July until 14 August, at which point he was reinforced by Collier aboard the Raisonable 64. The resulting destruction of the American force has been called as the country’s greatest naval defeat prior to Pearl Harbour, with 44 ships being captured or destroyed. During this campaign the Albany lost one man killed, four wounded, and one missing.
Mowat continued to command the Albany on the North American station, being largely based at Fort George in Maine, where one correspondent felt moved to write of Mowat’s ‘humanity, politeness and attention’ to the loyalist families. Although able to make the occasional voyage to Halifax, a report in 1780 mentioned that the Albany rode easily at anchor in the harbour at Fort George but was little better than a gondola at sea. On 30 May 1782 she arrived at Halifax, and Mowat’s last entry in the captain’s log was dated 25 October. The next day, being in his 48th year, he was posted captain of the sixth rate Sophie 28, a recently taken French prize, in which during 1783 he helped evacuate loyalists from New York to Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolutionary War. In August of that year the Sophie was at Halifax where Mowat gave an ‘elegant dinner’; he ceded the command to Captain Alexander Inglis Cochrane shortly afterwards.
For the next twelve years Mowat remained unemployed, and it was not until May 1795 in the third year of the French Revolutionary War, and having already turned 60, that he was appointed to the Assistance 50. During the summer the vessel was engaged in convoy duty from Stromness in the Orkney Islands, and she brought another convoy home from St John’s, Newfoundland in the early autumn. After a brief refit at Portsmouth, on 20 March 1796 she left Spithead for New York carrying the minister plenipotentiary to the United States, Robert Liston; during the passage she took the Bayonne privateer Chasseur 12. She was serving with the Halifax squadron when it captured the French frigate Elizabeth 36 off Cape Henry on 28 August and she escorted the prize to Halifax. On 1 November Mowat assumed command of the North American station, since Vice-Admiral Hon. George Murray had suffered a stroke. Cruising off Bermuda and the Virgina Capes early in 1797, he retained this command until relieved by Admiral George Vandeput on 15 April 1797.
Mowat was still serving on the North American station aboard the Assistance when he died of apoplexy on 14 April 1798 in Chesapeake Bay, in his 64th year. He was buried in the St. Johns Church Cemetery in Hampton, Virginia.
Mowat is described as ‘a little above middle size, of good form, and with a fresh countenance’. His career may have been harmed by the burning of Falmouth, though his slow promotion is more likely to have resulted from a lack of influential friends. His work, ‘A Relation of the Services in which I was Engaged in America, from 1759, to the close of the American War in 1783’ was long given up for lost, but when it was eventually discovered it regrettably revealed little about his service in the American Revolutionary War.
Sometime in the 1760s he married Esther Moore, and they had a son and two daughters who lived to adulthood. When in London, the family lived on Millbank Row, near where the Tate Britain Gallery is now. Esther died before her husband, but in his will Henry seems to have made provision for his widowed mother-in-law, as well as his children and a grandchild.