Joseph
Many stories surrounding the Joseph are plausible, even though the ship appears on few official lists. British forces, Americans, and pirates all purportedly commandeered the ship.
Jonathan Hamilton commissioned the brig Joseph in Berwick, Maine (then a district of Massachusetts) in 1794. Though modest in size at 191 tons, she sailed to both Europe and the Caribbean. Hamilton himself rose from humble origins. Once a fishmonger with no formal education, he did have the will to increase. Through shrewd acquisitions of forest tracts and mill rights, he amassed the means to trade lumber and, though he never went to sea, eventually commanded a small fleet of ships. Hamilton also participated in privateering, a legalized form of piracy, and used his profits to purchase sugar and rum plantations in the West Indies. He established mercantile and ship-chandler stores near his home base, expanding his commercial reach. Over time, his trade evolved from exporting lumber to Europe toward the more lucrative Caribbean markets. In essence, Hamilton had moved up the value chain.
The oft-told story of the Joseph’s capture by the British bears a distinctly propagandistic tone. Told here by George A. Nelson deputy collector of customs, compiled 1930-1932 Volume II, Part I.
"By the mid-1790s, British Royal Navy men-of-war halted and boarded Portsmouth vessels at sea and treated them as shabbily as did British privateers. In June 1795, for example, Captain Samuel Rice, commanding the Portsmouth brig Joseph, returned home worse for wear. Bound from Lisbon to Portsmouth, the Joseph was brought to by the British sloop-of-war Rattlesnake off Halifax, Nova Scotia. The lieutenant of the boarding party demanded Rice’s sea papers; Rice readily complied. When the Englishman then demanded Rice’s personal papers, kept in a private pocketbook, Rice refused. The British officer seized the pocketbook, Rice grabbed it back, and a scuffle broke out in Rice’s cabin. After much wrestling and a few blows, Rice “laid him on the floor of the cabin.” The fight ended when the British officer gave up. Rice evidently kept his papers."
Hamilton died in 1802 at the age of fifty-seven. Hamilton’s life illustrates not so much the triumph of ambition as the quiet, relentless logic of increase—a principle less concerned with prestige than with proliferation. Unlike ambition, which is rooted in the ego’s desire for recognition, increase operates as an autonomous force: impersonal, adaptive, and self-justifying.
