Enclosure I: John Browne Cutting to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, 10 August 1790
Enclosure I
John Browne Cutting to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty
St. James’s Square Augt. 10th. 1790.
To the Right Honble. the Lords Commissioners of the British Admiralty.
The Memorial of John Brown Cutting respectfully sheweth.
That your memorialist is a native and Citizen of the United States of America, and has been intreated by four of his fellow Citizens to represent that they are truly such, and to ask your orders for their discharge from onbound his Britannic Majesty’s ships the Edgar and Crescent.
Your memorialist having first taken great pains to satisfy himself that Hugh Purdie, Thomas Henderson, Isaac Crapper and George Sheldrake, are really Americans, and not British mariners, now submits the best testimony of the fact which can be had here, not doubting that it will be pronounced sufficient to entitle them to that interference of your Lordships which is thereupon respectfully claimed and solicited for the said foreigners by their countryman, Your Lordships most obedient servant.
John Brown Cutting
FC (DNA: RG 59, PCC No. 121). Enclosures: (1) Copy of affidavit of Thomas Longman, bookseller of Paternoster Row, London, dated 5 Aug. 1790, stating that he had received letters from Alexander Purdie of Williamsburg, that he had been satisfactorily informed that he had a son who was a mariner, and that from evidence recently received he does not doubt that Hugh Purdie is his son and a citizen of Virginia. (2) Copy of undated affidavit of John Randolph Grymes, formerly of Middlesex county, Virginia, and now a resident of London and a subject of the realm, stating that he had known Alexander Purdie and believes Hugh Purdie to be his son. (FC of both enclosures in DNA: RG 59, PCC No. 121).