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Archiver > Mariners > 2000-04 > 0956458111


From: Dennis Bell <>
Subject: [Mar] William Peckover, Bounty Gunner
Date: Sat, 22 Apr 2000 19:48:31 -0700


Hi Folks:

I'm attempting to reconstruct the Royal Navy career of one of my distant
relatives, William Peckover, born in Aynho parish in Northamptonshire's
Cherwell Valley on June 18, 1748, the son of a farm family who went to
sea. He sailed with Captain James Cook on all three of his Pacific
expeditions, first as an able seaman, then as gunner's mate and finally
as gunner. From there, he went to sea again with Captain William Bligh,
just in time for the mutiny (Peckover sided with Bligh and talked him
into sailing the longboat for Dutch Timor, utilizing a pocket watch
William smuggled off the Bounty as a navigational aid). In his later
years, Peckover was fond of claiming he was the first man to sail around
the world four times, AND across the arctic and antarctic circles. I've
been able to assimilate a fair amount of stuff on his Cook and Bligh
voyages, but very little on the rest of the ships he sailed aboard,
during the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Below is a list
of those ships and the dates he boarded them, in each case as gunnery
officer:

30 Oct 1780 - HMS Dictator
15 Jul 1782 - HMS Resistance
11 Jun 1784 - HMS Recovery
16 Dec 1784 - HMS Warspite
27 Jan 1785 - HMS Amphitrite or Amphetrite
24 Aug 1787 - HMS Bounty
01 Dec 1790 - HMS Antelope
06 Jun 1791 - HMS Sultan
23 Jan 1792 - HMS Antelope
06 Feb 1792 - HMS Ocean
23 May 1798 - HMS Bedford
30 Aug 1798 - HMS Irresistible
14 May 1801 - HMS Gelykheid or Galykheid, believed to be a
captured enemy ship.

I'm looking for all the details I can get on these ships, their
histories, battles, etc., and particularly where they might have served
when my ancestor was aboard them. I do know that the Amphetrite was in
North American waters at the end of the American Revolution and took the
first load of United Empire Loyalists out of British-occupied New York
to New Brunswick/Nova Scotia in 1782.

I'm also hoping against hope that somebody out there can solve one of
our great family mysteries: what became of Gunner William Peckover? We
know he never married, and once lived on Lower Gun Alley in Wapping,
East London. But his death sometime after 1801 and the whereabouts of
his grave remains a mystery. Thanks in advance for any help you might be
able to give me.

Dennis Bell
Burnaby, B.C. Canada

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