Scope and Content Note
The papers of Christopher Prince (1751-1732) span the years 1806-1891 and include a manuscript and typewritten transcript of Prince's autobiography and a booklet on a gathering of the Prince family.
Written in 1806, the autobiography provides a firsthand look into the life of colonial New England seafarers. It also contains Prince's eyewitness accounts of several maritime events of the Revolutionary War, including the imprisonment of Ethan Allen aboard the Gaspée (brigantine) in the fall of 1775 and the amphibious withdrawal of the British from Montréal later that year. The autobiography recounts Prince's employment by agents of George Washington in 1776 to sink four ships in the Hudson River to impede the British and Prince's enlistment as a landsman and steward aboard a Connecticut navy warship, the Oliver Cromwell. The memoir, which may be a nineteenth-century copy of the original, concludes with the ending of the war and an account of Prince's religious conversion to Christianity shortly thereafter. Sometime before 1817, Prince moved to New York, having retired from the sea because of rheumatism. Residing near the wharves, he spent the remainder of his life actively involved in the seamen's religious movement.
The other document in the collection is a souvenir booklet from a gathering of the descendants of Hezekiah and Isabella Coombs Prince of Thomaston, Maine, at Spencer, Massachusetts, in August 1891.