Liverpool Packet
Painting of the schooner Liverpool, believed by some to be the schooner Liverpool Packet.
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| History | |
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 Nova Scotia
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| Name: | Liverpool Packet |
| Owner: | Enos Collins, John Allision, Joseph Barss |
| Port of registry: | Halifax, Nova Scotia |
| Commissioned: | 20 August 1812 |
| Homeport: | Liverpool, Nova Scotia |
| Nickname(s): |
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| Honours and awards: |
50 captures |
| Fate: | Sold to Jamaican owners 1815 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type: | Privateer schooner |
| Tonnage: | 67 |
| Sail plan: | Topsail schooner |
| Crew: | 40 |
| Armament: |
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Liverpool Packet was a privateer schooner from Liverpool, Nova Scotia, that captured 50 American vessels in the War of 1812. During the war American privateers briefly captured Liverpool Packet, the British soon recaptured her and returned her to raiding American commerce. Liverpool Packet was the most successful privateer vessel ever to sail out of a Canadian port.
Liverpool Packet was originally the American slave ship Severn, built at Baltimore and rigged as a Baltimore Clipper style schooner. HMS Tartarus captured the schooner in August 1811. The Halifax Vice Admiralty Court, under Chief Justice Alexander Croke, condemned Severn as an illegal slave ship as both Britain and the United States had recently outlawed the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The court then ordered her sold at auction and Enos Collins and other investors purchased her in October 1811. They renamed her Liverpool Packet, although she sometimes bore the nickname The Black Joke, a name of several infamous slave ships. At first her owners used the small and fast schooner as a packet ship carrying mail and passengers between Halifax and Liverpool, Nova Scotia.
Upon the outbreak of the War of 1812, the owners of Liverpool Packet quickly converted her to a privateer. Under the command of Joseph Barss Jnr, she captured at least 33 American vessels during the first year of the war. His strategy was to lie in wait off Cape Cod, snapping up American ships headed to Boston or New York.
She was a menace to New England shipping until the Americans captured her in 1813. On 10 June the privateer schooner Thomas of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Captain Shaw, master, mounting twelve guns and manned with a crew of one hundred men, encountered Packet. Thomas chased her for about five hours but light winds prevented Liverpool Packet from escaping.
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Wikipedia