On this day 250 years ago an anonymous writer in Northampton County, Virginia wrote a letter complaining of harassment by “Captain Collins” (actually Lieutenant Henry Collins) of the 6-gun schooner HMS Magdalen that was published in the next edition of the Virginia Gazette. Four days earlier Collins had searched a sloop at Hungars Harbour in Northampton County of Eastern Shore Virginia looking for contraband. The next day he ordered his crew to board the sloop again and seized a young apprentice of the sloop’s owner and held him captive for three days to interrogate the apprentice in an unsuccessful effort to find evidence of smuggling.

A month later Collins and the crew of the schooner Magdalen would seize gunpowder in Williamsburg, starting the armed conflict between the Crown and the Patriots in Virginia.

Source: “The Virginia Gazette. Williamsburg: Printed by John Pinkney for the benefit of Clementina Rind’s children. March 30, 1775” accessed at
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rbpe.1750130e