Jacob Nagle (1761 - 1841)

Able Seaman –HMS Sirius

this story is under review by Membership Team

Nagle, Jacob (1761–1841), sailor and diarist, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on 15 September 1761, the son of George Nagel (1735–1789), a German immigrant, and Rebecca Rogers 1741 - 1793).

The family spelt their surname as Nagel until they migrated to the United States and thereafter they largely spelt their name as Nagle. First names were similarly anglicised.

 The Nagle Family into which Jacob was born

 George Ernst Nagel was the first child of Joachim Nagel (1706 - 1795) and Anna Catherina (nee Geiss) (1708-1801). Joachim was born in Kefenrod which is now part of Kreis Wetterau/Budingen, Germany. He was baptized on 21 February 1706 in the Evangelical Church Hitzkirchen. His parents were Johann Heinrich Nagel and his wife Anna Elisabeth (nee Reifschneider). Johann and Anna had been married in the same church on 8 November 1702.

 Joachim married on 9 February 1735 in the same church, to Catherine Geiss the daughter of Frederick Geiss and Anna Maria.

 On 26 September 1749 Joachim, Catherine and four children arrived in Philadelphia aboard the Ranier. Joachim purchased his first land (under the name Yocham Nawgle) in Douglass, County of Philadelphia on 7 March 1752. He was described as a yeoman. On this land he built in 1752 a grist mill that was still standing in 1990. It was on the confluence of the Ironstone and Manatawny Creeks (near present day Pine Forge) and this indicates that he was a miller. In 1762 he purchased land in Douglass. Joachim was active in the Falkner Swamp Reformed Church and was described by his son as a strict Calvinist.

 George Ernst Nagel was confirmed in the Falkner Swamp Reformed Church at Easter 1753. He joined the military during the French and Indian War and was in Fort Lebanon (25 miles from present day Lehighton) in 1755 where his occupation is given as a blacksmith.  In 1758 he was an ensign at Fort Augusta (near present day Sunbury). At the end of hostilities in 1764 he was at Hohn Overwinter’s, Albany.

 During his military service he returned home in 1760 to marry Rebecca Rogers, the daughter of Roger Rogers (died before 1761) and Mary Millard (1704-1783). Mary Millard’s first husband was Mordecai Lincoln – the great grandfather of President Abraham Lincoln by his first wife, Hannah Salter.  Mary’s brother Joseph Millard married Hannah the daughter of Mordecai and Hannah. Mary’s son, Abraham Lincoln (step-brother to Jacob) married Annie Boone who was a cousin of Daniele Boone. The Rogers, Lincoln, Millard, Boone families were Quakers.

 In 1767 George paid tax on a house in Reading and his occupation was “cryer court”. In 1771 he was elected as Sheriff, Reading when he and his family moved to the jail as the Sheriff was also the governor of the jail. His term as Sheriff ended in 1773 and in 1774 he was elected to the Committee on Observation which implemented decisions of the Berkshire Provincial Congress.

 In 1775 he became a Captain in one of the companies of expert riflemen for Berkshire County. The company reported on 18 July 1775 in Cambridge Massachusetts just 34 days after the Continental Congress passed resolutions for an army to be formed under General George Washington. His company was therefore one of “The First Defenders.” He served at Boston, New York, the Battle of Brandywine and Valley Forge and was promoted to Colonel. In June 1778 George was court martialed for being “seen on the 15^th of May drinking either Tea or Coffee in Serjeant Howcrafts tent with his Whore, her mother, the said Howcraft and his Family to the Prejudice of good Order and military discipline.” Nagle was acquitted of all charges. Upon the consolidation of the 10^th and 11^th Pennsylvanian Regiments in 1778, Nagle was the junior Colonel and became supernumerary.

 He returned to his family in Reading and then established an inn in Philadelphia. It appears that the family was back in Reading at least when Mary Rogers died in Exeter in 1783. George died in Reading in 1789 when he was in the mercantile business. His estate was administered by two of his creditors. His widow, and Jacob’s mother, Rebecca died in 1793 in Reading.

 George and Rebecca had four children:

•  Jacob Nagle (1761-1841)

• Sarah Lincoln Nagle (c1773-1841)

• Anna Nagle (c1776-1861)

• Rebecca Mary “Polly” Nagle (bc 1778)

 Jacob’s life.

 No birth records for Jacob have so far been located. When applying for a Revolutionary War pension he gave his birthdate as 15 September 1761, stated that he was born in Reading and christened in the Presbyterian Church in the swamp. Due to his father’s military service his next sibling was not born until around 1773.

 Again, from his application of a pension in 1833 he stated that Jacob joined the Continental Army in 1777. He was 16 years old. He was involved in some skirmishes and at Valley Forge. An obituary of the Reading Adler of 16 March 1841 says that he fought in the Battle of Brandywine. After Valley Forge he served in the navy for two years and eight months, commencing on the Saratoga.

Early in 1780 he joined the Saratoga, a 16-gun sloop then being built at Philadelphia for the navy. With the launch of this ship delayed, Nagle changed to the Fair American, a 16-gun privateer. In company with the Holker, this captured more than twenty ships in six months' cruising. In 1781 Nagle went on two cruises on the 20-gun Rising Sun. In October he was shipwrecked on the Virginia coast, after which he joined the Trojan, only for it to be disabled in a storm, then captured by HMS Royal Oak. This led to Nagle's serving in another navy.

Still a prisoner of war, Nagle went down to St Kitts in the Royal Oak, and regained his liberty when French forces took the island in January 1782. This respite was brief, for in early March he was imprisoned at Fort Royal, Martinique, for aiding a British sailor. In May 1782, after the battle of the Saints, he was among prisoners of war exchanged for French ones. On and off Nagle was to serve in the Royal Navy for twenty years. On 25 May he joined the St Lucia as able seaman. The following April, upon the ending of the war, he transferred to the Ardent, in which he sailed from Antigua to Plymouth, where he was paid off in August 1783. Rather than return home, he first joined the Ganges, which went down to Gibraltar, and then one of the guardships at Portsmouth.

In March 1787 Nagle was one of the young seamen selected for service on the HMS Sirius, the frigate escorting the first fleet to New South Wales. In October 1788 Nagle went in the Sirius to Cape Town, returning to Sydney in May 1789. In March 1790 he was in this ship when it was wrecked at Norfolk Island, and distinguished himself by twice swimming between ship and shore as the crew struggled to save its precious supplies.

After twelve months on Norfolk Island Nagle returned to England in April 1792 in the Waaksamheyd.

For some months he lived in London's East End, experiencing its life to the full. In August he was pressed into the Hector, where he stayed for seven months, which included the time when the Bounty mutineers were held onboard. He next went into the Brunswick, from which he deserted in April 1794 to enter the East Indiaman Rose, in which he voyaged to Madras and Calcutta, where he met two convict women from Sydney who had established a brothel.

The Rose returned to England in July 1795, whereupon Nagle entered HMS Gorgon. On August 17 1795  at St Bodolph Aldgate London, he married Elizabeth Pitmans (d. 1802)—‘a lively hansome girl in my eye’ (Nagle Journal, 186)—and the pair had several children in the next years.

In November 1795 the Gorgon sailed to Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean. At Corsica in April 1796 Nagle transferred to the Blanche, so that he then saw action under the general command of Horatio Nelson and John Jervis.

He returned to Portsmouth at the end of June 1798. In July he entered the Netley, which cruised most along the coasts of Portugal. Appointed prize-master, he prospered from the ship's success. In June 1801 he transferred to the Gorgon, which sailed to Alexandria, and from which he was discharged at Woolwich in April 1802, as the peace of Amiens briefly held.

Sometime in 1802 his wife and at least two children caught the yellow fever in Lisbon Portugal and died 6 weeks later. It is said that he was taking his family from England back to the United States.

Nagle now decided to return to America. After visiting family members he went to sea again in the merchant navy, sometimes American, sometimes British, where he continued for twenty-two years. During this long period he voyaged to the West Indies, to Central America, to China in the Neptune (1806–8), and to Canada, Florida, and South America. In 1811 he sailed to Brazil, where he stayed until 1821. After several more trading voyages, in mid-1824 he retired from the sea.

Thereafter Nagle lived for two years with his sister Anna McCardell (married to Thomas McCardell) in Williamsport, Maryland.  His sister Sarah was widowed on the death of her husband John Webb, in August 1825 and so Jacob moved to live closer to her – which was in Canton, Ohio, where Sarah and John had settled in 1814. While in Canton, Jacob worked as a surveyor for the new town.

His sister died in February 1841 aged 68 years and just a few days later Jacob also died in Canton, Ohio, on 17 February 1841 and was buried there on 18 February. He was aged 80. His obituary in the Pennsylvania Republic of 12 March 1841 said “He was in the expedition which made the early settlements in New South Wales and was an active participant in the capture of the celebrated “Chief Bennelong….. Of the utmost simplicity in his manners, he was nevertheless of undaunted courage….He died like most of that band of brave and unconquerable heroes who periled all for the liberty we enjoy. Poor and destitute of the comforts of life, the only reward his country bestowed on him was a miscalled pension of thirty dollars a month.”

Jacob Nagle prided himself on being the most skilful of sailors. He also took pride in his personal appearance, being given to wearing waistcoats and silk jackets. He frequented prostitutes, towards whom he acted charitably when he thought their case merited it. He did not gather worldly possessions about him. However, late in life he wrote a long and surprisingly accurate reminiscence, which is full of details of and insights into the life of an ordinary seaman in the eighteenth-century royal and merchant navies.

As the form will for seamen put it so eloquently, Nagle knew all ‘the Perils and Dangers of the Seas, and other Uncertainties of this transitory Life’. He suffered severely from scurvy, felt the lash on his back, saw men killed in battle and executed. He was robbed and cheated of his money. He lost his wife and children to yellow fever at Lisbon in 1802. In twenty years he did not see his family; and by the time he returned to the United States his parents were dead. When in the throes of illness in Brazil, he wrote feelingly:

though I had traveled a good many years through the four quarters of the globe, been a prisoner twice, cast a way three times, and the ship foundering under me, two days and a night in an open boat on the wide ocion without anything to eat or water to norish us, and numbers of times in want of water or victuals, at other time in action, men slain along side of me, and with all, at this minute it apeared to me that I was in greater distress and missery than I ever had been in any country during my life. I fell on my nees, and never did I pray with a sincerer hart than I did at that presentime. (Nagle Journal, 312–13)

His grave (and indeed the cemetery) where he was buried cannot be identified with certainty. The Fellowship, together with the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Sons of the American Revolution placed plaques in the war veterans cemetery, Canton, on 18 May 2024.

M N Rhoads and J S Welsh, Joachim Nagle and his descendants (privately published, Elverson Pennsylvania, 1990)

J D Dann (ed), The Nagle Journal (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1988)

Initially written by William Hempel # 6740.1and updated by Roderick Best, June 2024.

 Sources  The Nagle journal: a diary of the life of Jacob Nagle, sailor, from the year 1775 to 1841, ed. J. C. Dann (1988)

Archives  U. Mich., Clements L., library, personal memoirs of time in Royal Navy