Conyngham, Gustavus

▪ United States naval officer

born c. 1747, County Donegal, Ire.

died Nov. 27, 1819, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.

      American naval officer who fought the British in their own waters during the American Revolution.

      Conyngham was taken to America in his youth and apprenticed to a captain in the West Indian trade. Advancing to shipmaster, he was stranded in the Netherlands at the outbreak of the American Revolution. The American commissioners in France supplied him with a commission and sent him forth from Dunkirk, France, in May in an armed lugger. He captured two ships, but Britain protested the flagrant violation of French neutrality. Conyngham and his crew were imprisoned; his captain's commission was confiscated. The commissioners, with French contrivance, secured his release and supplied him with a new commission and the cutter Revenge. Operating around the British Isles, off Spain, and in the West Indies, he took 27 prizes and sank another 30 ships in the next 18 months.

      Despite this achievement, when Conyngham landed in Philadelphia in 1779, he was accused of corruption arising from his relationship with the American commissioners in France. The Revenge was confiscated, sold, and repurchased—still under Conyngham's command but now as a privateer. It was promptly taken by the British, and Conyngham, never especially concerned with either paperwork or neutral rights, was threatened with death as a pirate for being unable to produce his original commission. Imprisoned in England, Conyngham escaped to the Netherlands, where in 1780 he joined John Paul Jones in a cruise in the frigate Alliance. Acquiring his own ship, Conyngham was once again captured (May 17, 1780). Released nine months later, he spent the rest of the war on the beach.

      From the end of the war in 1783 until his death in Philadelphia in 1819, Conyngham waged a futile fight to gain compensation from Congress. Almost a century after his death, the commission that could have substantiated his claim was found in the collection of a Parisian autograph dealer.

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