Brown-Crocker

Such misadventures were part and parcel of seafaring at this unsettled period. Crowell's adventures were duplicated by a score of others, for profits were so great that Yankee sailors were determined to make voyages whether or no. They set sail, Madison or no Madison, Embargo or no Embargo. The ad- ventures ofCaptain Rowland Crocker, of Falmouth, another neutral trader, furnish a good case in point. To call him a neutral trader is to do him scant justice, for in fact there were few experiences that he did not meet sooner or later in the course of his life. He was a whaleman, privateer, merchant captain, Liverpool packet commander, and State Representative; a musket ball had gone in one side of his body and out the other; he had shaken Napoleon by the hand; he had been captured by the French, and rewarded by Lloyds' for navigating a wreck through a gale. The exploit last mentioned took place in 1807. The ship was the Otis. She lay in the Downs ready to weigh anchor, with a cargo worth £100,000 under her hatches. A sudden gale sprang up; the anchors let go, and the vessel crashed into a frigate that was lying close aboard her. She was badly shattered — so badly that the pilot and a good many of the crew, believing her lost, took to the boats and went ashore. Captain Crocker, with what was left of his crew, got the Otis under way and, crippled as she was, worked her through the gale into Dover. Lloyds' did not exaggerate when they presented him with a silver cup inscribed with the motto, 'Forti et fideh nil difficile.' Perhaps the five hundred pounds that accompanied this mark of esteem was as acceptable to Captain Crocker as the Latin dictum. It was the Cape's mis- fortune that this energetic citizen, like many others of her sons, spent most of his life away from his native town. Crocker, as has already been seen, figured in every branch of maritime activity, from whaling to the New York-Liverpool trade in what a contemporary newspaper calls 'the floating palaces' of the packet lines. He retired after having crossed the Atlantic a hundred and sixty-four times without the loss of a ship.

Findagrave says 18 Jan 1852