SNAP DRAGON & THE CAPTAIN

SNAP DRAGON & THE CAPTAIN

Excerpts taken from The Ups and Downs of a Seafaring Man by RoAnn Bishop,Reprinted with permission from the Tar Heel Junior Historian, Fall 2008, NC Museum of History; Bryan Mims Business North Carolina; and Pauline’s Pirates and Privateers via Burns Financial.

How little most Americans know about our second war for independence, the War of 1812, never ceases to amaze me. Despite that, it was with very little surprise that I found I knew nothing of today’s privateer until very recently. Though he was vastly successful at sea, taking upwards of 4 million American dollars in British prizes between 1812 and 1814, this daring sailor is only a regional hero in this day and age. If you don’t come from Swansboro, Burnsville or Beaufort in North Carolina, you probably don’t know him at all.

Like the sea he loved, Otway Burns’s life was full of rises and falls. The swashbuckling sea captain became North Carolina’s first naval hero during the War of 1812. Later he built one of the state’s first steamboats and served in the legislature. Yet he died poor and unnoticed, living his last years as a lonely lighthouse keeper on the Pamlico Sound.

Otway Burns was born in the soon-to-be State of North Carolina in 1775 in Swansboro on Onslow County’s White Oak River. Little is known of his childhood in the port town of Swansboro but it is a certainty that he went to sea young, probably aboard merchant vessels. Like so many other pirates and privateers before him, Burns had a knack for sailing and he spent most of his youth at sea. He did stay by land long enough to marry his cousin, Joanna Grant, in July of 1809.

Already wealthy enough to own his own ship by 1812, Burns and his partner Edward Pasteur decided to apply for an American letter of marque when war broke out with Britain. The two men went looking for a fast topsail schooner and found her in New York City. The Zephyr was a 147 ton, two masted vessel laid down in 1808 and perfectly suited to privateering. The men purchased her for $8,000, renamed her Snap Dragon (she would be known to her crew as “The Snap”) and Pasteur sailed her to New Bern, North Carolina to fit her out for their first cruise.

Snap Dragon measured more than eighty-five feet long and twenty-two feet wide, and weighed 147 tons. It carried a crew of eighty to one hundred men and as many as eight cannons. Snap Dragon left port in October to begin hunting British merchantmen. Pasteur is listed as captain on this cruise, but according to more than one account Burns would take command in an engagement or other dangerous situation. One biographer describes him as “…impetuous, recklessly brave, always right in his instinct for action over the more timid counsel of other officers, and uncannily able to see through the ruses used by the British in an effort to decoy the ship into a trap.” Just everything a privateer needs in a captain.

Examples of Burns’ reckless bravery abound. His crew was largely literate and many of them left memoirs of their time aboard The Snap. There are recollections of Burns staying up all night in dirty weather to see his ship through “…for she wanted watching by such a man as he was…”. Repeated chases by British frigates and men-of-war were evaded with Burns at the helm, largely due to both excellent handling of Snap Dragon and her innate ability for speed. In one particularly impressive instance, a daring escape from the Spanish port of Santa Marta, Columbia, created the need to leave men ashore behind. Burns solved the problem of their incarceration – and potential hanging as pirates despite Spain’s neutrality – by capturing a Spanish military transport and returning to port with her as prize then threatening to hang every man aboard if his men were not safely returned. The Spanish flinched, the Snap Dragons were returned to their ship and Burns sailed away without a scratch.

The Snap Dragon sailed the Atlantic coast from Venezuela to Newfoundland and brought in prize after prize, including British warships and their cargo totalling more than $4 million. On the final cruise, The Snap met a British man-of-war off the Orinoco River in Venezuela. Hours of fighting tore Snap Dragon up, dismasting her at the fore and breaking her bowsprit. She managed to evade her unnamed foe but it was only through a fortuitous meeting with another U.S. privateer, the Saratoga, that she limped back to Beaufort.

Burns days at sea were done after that. He was suffering from rheumatism and, though he continued as owner of The Snap, he did not take her out again. She was captured by HMS Martin off Halifax in June of 1814. Burns, now a widower, turned his attention to business and family. He built a house on Front Street in Beaufort, out of which he ran a taproom. He married again, twenty year old Jane Hall, and was set in his new home and marriage by January of 1815.

After the war, Burns used part of his privateering profits to open a ship yard in Swansboro. There, in 1818, on waterfront lot number six, he built one of North Carolina’s first steamboats, Prometheus. The paddle wheeler traveled the Cape Fear River between Wilmington and Smithville (now Southport) for seven years, even carrying President James Monroe in April 1819 on a visit to inspect Fort Johnson. The vessel was abandoned in 1825, probably because its engine wasn’t as powerful as those of newer steamboats.

After trying his hand at shipbuilding, Burns moved to Beaufort and dabbled in other businesses. But politics next grabbed his interest. A Democrat, he represented Carteret County in the state legislature from 1821 to 1835 (seven terms in the house and four in the senate).

In 1833, he made the tie-breaking vote to allow for the formation of new counties in the mountains, including Yancey. A year later, local landowner John Bailey donated 100 acres for the county seat, insisting that it bear the name Burnsville in his honor. In 1835 he suffered defeat over reform of the state constitution (Burns championed allowing education for slaves as well as the right to assemble for free blacks and slaves) and, in an example of bad luck and bad timing, lost his fortune to speculation. Having stressed his financial resources by investing in too many businesses, he had to sell most of his property to pay his debts. In 1836 President Andrew Jackson, another hero of the War of 1812, came to the aid of the near-destitute Burns. Jackson appointed him keeper of the Brant Island Shoal Light near Portsmouth. Burns died there on October 25, 1850—having outlived his three wives—and was buried in the Old Burying Ground in Beaufort. A cannon from the Snap Dragon rests atop his tomb.

Two North Carolina towns—Burnsville in Yancey County and Otway in Carteret County —were named for Otway Burns, as were two U.S. Navy destroyers during the first half of the 1900s. And there are two places in the state where statues still preserve the likeness of the scrappy, if somewhat delicate-looking, captain: one in Burnsville’s town square and one in Swansboro that overlooks the sea. Burnsville was named for Burns because, in 1835, he supported western North Carolina’s efforts to get more representation in the General Assembly. The easterners he represented voted him out of office.

Naval History & Heritage Command; Black & White photo of the Statue of Captain Otway Burns, Commemorative Landscapes photo of the plaque on his statue; and current photo of the Statue of Captain Otway Burns by Michael Miller via landmarkhunter.com