removed with that officer into the Nonsuch 64, and continued to serve with him till the peace of 1783. The former ship bore a part in the Dogger Bank action, Aug. 5, 1781[1], on which occasion she sustained a loss of 20 men killed and 64 wounded. The Nonsuch formed part of Sir George Rodney’s fleet in the battles of April 9th and 12th, 1782[2]; and subsequently proceeded to New York, for the purpose of bringing home a body of Hessian troops, in British pay. She was paid off at Chatham in Aug. 1783.
From this period Mr. Butterfield served successively in the Grampus 50, bearing the broad pendant of Commodore Edward Thompson, on the African station; Winchelsea frigate, commanded by the present Viscount Exmouth, employed at Newfoundland; Culloden 74, and Melampus of 36 guns, on Channel service. He passed his examination for a Lieutenant in 1788; a circumstance which we are induced to mention in consequence of an opinion being prevalent that he was originally impressed into the navy.
In 1790, an unfortunate fracas between Mr. Hancorn, junior Lieutenant of the Melampus, and some of her Midshipmen, at a well-known tavern on Portsmouth Point, led to a trial at Winchester; but the latter party consenting to apologize for their intemperate conduct, the business was allowed to terminate without the infliction of any punishment, it being very clearly seen that the assault complained of by the Lieutenant had been produced by his own tyrannical conduct, particularly towards the subject of this memoir, whom he had on one occasion caused to be lashed to a grating and triced up to the mizen-peak, where he was exposed to the gaze of all the ships at the anchorage, and this for no greater offence than that of coming on deck fully equipped, before he acquainted him that the first Lieutenant, then absent, had just before consented to his dining out of the ship; or to use Mr. Hancorn’s own expression, for “getting under way before he had received his sailing orders.”
