HISTORICAL NOTE

Captain Benjamin Hitchings (1783-1822?) is documented as living in Andover 1813-1817, by the record of the birth of four children. After his death at sea, his wife continued to live in town until her death in 1863, aged 78.

His parentage and place of birth are unknown, but he probably grew up in Salem or Lynn. In 1810 he married Elizabeth Wilde of Salem. His profession was always that of mariner. In 1816 he was master of the ship Union, at over six hundred tons one of the largest vessels of the era, which belonged to William Gray, 1750-1825, shipowner and merchant of Salem to 1809, then Boston, one of the shrewdest and richest traders of the day. In 1799, Timothy Pickering called him "the first merchant of the United States"; in 1809 when he moved to Boston he owned thirty-six vessels and was worth $3,000,000. It was a mark of Hitchings' good reputation that he was one of Gray's captains. In 1816 he was in Calcutta; in 1817 he was preparing to sail to Isle of France (Mauritius). In 1820-21, master of the smaller, three hundred ton Clay, he sailed from Charleston, S.C. with a load of cotton. His ultimate destination was Batavia, on Java in the Dutch East Indies but he spent a year in England and the Low Countries. There he presumably sold the cotton and loaded his ship with gin, beer and especially specie (4,500 silver guilders) before setting off for the East. He arrived successfully in Batavia, and presumably bought pepper, the staple from Indonesia at the time. He seems to have died on the homeward voyage. The Clay returned home to Boston under the command of another captain.

The provenance of these papers is unknown. Charlotte Helen Abbott, in her notes on the Hitchings Family of Andover (typewritten, n.d.) does not mention these papers which related to his career as captain, but mentions that she once owned a letter from Hitchings to his wife which Jacob Abbott had found in a old bureau in his shop.

Used in the writing of this note were the above-mentioned notes by Charlotte Helen Abbott and a paper written by Anita B. Moulton for a course at Salem State College (typewritten, 1973.) Both of these are at the Andover Historical Society.

SCOPE AND CONTENT NOTE

These papers cover only a brief period of Hitchings' life. They have been divided into four parts, chronologically by voyage. The first part contains a single item, a homemade notebook in which Hitchings recorded his private trading in sugar, coffee and ginger, while in Calcutta with the ship Union. There is also a "Bill of Fare" or list of provisions for sea voyages available from Thomas Francis D'Cruz, a Calcutta merchant. The second part consists of a bill of lading for the Union, bound for Isle of France (Mauritius) via Rio de Janeiro with a cargo mostly of (salted) beef, flour and lumber.

The orders in the handwriting of William Gray have also survived. They are addressed to two men, Hitchings and another captain, Enoch Baldwin, who seems to have sailed as supercargo. They were given carte blanche to sell cargo for the best price possible and even to sell the ship if that would seem wise to them and make a large profit. Gray trusted them completely. The third subdivision of material is a single letter by John T. Leach, written 1819, merchant of Boston addressed to Hitchings, presumably somewhere in the Orient, trying to trace a bale of quills that had been consigned to Captain King of the Clarissa and had gone astray. The last group consists of papers tracing the movements of the Clay from Charleston, S.C. where cotton was loaded, to Cowes (isle of Wight), Antwerp and Amsterdam and back to Cowes, taking a year to trade its American cotton and load up with spirits and specie for the long voyage to the Dutch East Indies. There are a bill of credit, customs clearance documents and receipts for supplies and merchandise. Hitchings left Cowes February 5, 1821 for the last time and disappears from these records.

Processed by Mary F. Morgan, November 1982.

 

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