Capt. George Lamberton

d. 1646 · New Haven CT

Died 1646

Children include Elizabeth

Captain George Lamberton of New Haven, merchant and shipmaster, one of the London men who founded that colony and tried to make it a trading port. In January 1646 he sailed for England as master of the ship the town had built for the purpose, and neither he nor the ship nor anyone aboard was seen again.

The fullest account is a letter from the Rev. James Pierpont of New Haven to Cotton Mather, written about fifty years later from what Pierpont called the most credible, judicious and curious surviving observers. It says the vessel was new, built at Rhode Island, and so unsteady that "the master (Lamberton) often said she would prove their grave." It puts her at about a hundred and fifty tons; Savage, from the contemporary accounts, has her at eighty. They cut their way out through the ice in January, with the Rev. John Davenport and much of the town walking alongside, and Davenport prayed over them: "Lord, if it be thy pleasure to bury these our friends in the bottom of the sea, they are thine, save them."

Nothing came back in the spring. Then, in June, after a thunderstorm out of the north west and with the sky gone clear, the town saw a ship come up the harbour against the wind with her canvas and colours set, and hold that course for half an hour. Children called out, "There's a brave ship." She came near enough that a man might have thrown a stone aboard, and then her main top blew away and hung in the shrouds, and her mizzen top, and all her masting, and the hull heeled over and went into a smoky cloud that thinned out and left clear air. The people said, "This was the mould of their ship, and this was her tragic end."

Children

Elizabeth Lamberton (1630-1716)

Sources

Painted by Jesse Talbot, before 1880, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Drawn by F. R. Honey for Edward E. Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven (1881), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Trowbridge 1908 #100 for his daughter Elizabeth; the Rev. James Pierpont's letter to Cotton Mather, printed in Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven (1881), Appendix III, for the voyage and what the town saw afterward

James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England (Boston, 1861), vol. III, under LAMBERTON

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Cite: Heirology, "Capt. George Lamberton (d. 1646)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/capt-george-lamberton-1646-7dcb33.