1. See Pickering to GW, this date.

2. After receiving GW’s reply, Pickering wrote a second letter to Rufus King, U.S. minister to Great Britain, on this date. Pickering explained GW’s desire “that the case of Captain Jessup may be noticed: We waited only for the original documents to arrive, to make to the British Government a solemn remonstrance on the tyrannical and inhuman conduct of Captain Pigot: but those documents having not yet arrived, I must content myself for the present, with transmitting to you the newspaper account of the transaction. Nobody doubts but that it is substantially exact. I am only astonished at the quiet submission of Captn Jessup, and other american Citizens, victims of the frequent tyranny and cruelty of British officers; and that some of them do not take instant vengeance on the Ruffians who thus put them to the torture. The affair is left, in its present form, to your discretion. When the original documents come to hand, I shall hasten to forward them to you; in the mean time the transaction seems to merit some attention” (DNA: RG 59, Diplomatic and Consular Instructions).

According to an account in The Argus, or Greenleaf’s New Daily Advertiser (New York) for 25 July, and widely reprinted, Hugh Pigot, in command of the British frigate Success, boarded the ship Mercury, of New York, and ordered his men “to cut and bring on board every thing that they could lay their hands on.” As the men cut away yards, stays, and sails, Capt. William Jesup of the Mercury requested “that they would cut as little as they could help.” Pigot ordered Jesup taken to the Success, where he was flogged until “he fainted under the blows.” Regaining his senses, Jesup asked Pigot to return a sail. Pigot replied: “You damned rascal, if you say one word more, I will have you to the gang-way and flog you to death!” Surgeons who later examined Jesup at Port-au-Prince “all expressed their surprize and indignation on seeing his bruised body” and eventually stopped his “vomiting of blood.”

The Daily Advertiser (New York) for 3 Aug. printed Jesup’s petition dated 4 July to Richard Rich Wilford, British commander at Port-au-Prince. Jesup described his ordeal and asked that “the proper authority” act to give him “that justice and satisfaction which the nature of an offense so glaring and unprecedented loudly calls for.”

King wrote Pickering on 9 Dec. to report his protest and the British reply (see DNA: RG 59, Despatches from U.S. Ministers to Great Britain).