CONYNGHAM, GUSTAVUS

born c. 1747, , County Donegal, Ire. died Nov. 27, 1819, Philadelphia American naval officer who fought the British in their own waters during the United States War of Independence. Conyngham was taken to America in his youth and apprenticed to a captain in the West Indian trade. Advancing to shipmaster, he was employed to bring gunpowder from The Netherlands at the outbreak of the American Revolution but became stranded in The Netherlands. The American commissioners in France supplied him with a commission dated March 1, 1777, and sent him forth from Dunkirk, Fr., in May in an armed lugger. He captured a packet plying with mail between England and The Netherlands and brought it and another prize back to Dunkirk. Upon British protest, Conyngham and his crew were imprisoned, the prizes restored, and the captain's commission confiscated. The commissioners secured his release, supplied him with a new commission and the cutter Revenge and sent him again on a cruise out of Dunkirk. Sailing around the British Isles and operating off Spain and in the West Indies, he took 29 prizes in the ensuing two years, but he was finally captured, carried to England, and threatened with death as a pirate. Amid threatened reprisals on the part of the Continental Congress, Conyngham escaped to The Netherlands, where, in 1780, he joined John Paul Jones in a cruise in the frigate Alliance. From the end of the war in 1783 until his death in Philadelphia in 1819, he waged a hopeless fight to gain recognition by Congress of his rank in the Navy. Almost a century after his death the commission that the French had confiscated and that could have substantiated his claim was found in the collection of a Parisian autograph dealer.