On this day 250 years ago off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, HMS Blue Mountain Valley was captured by about 40 New Jersey Continental Army soldiers led by Colonel William Alexander (usually referred to as Lord Stirling) and 77 Elizabethtown and Essex County Militia led by Colonel Elias Dayton. The Blue Mountain Valley had been blown off course and damaged in a storm while carrying supplies from England to Boston and had run aground on a sand bar 40 miles out from Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The British crew of Blue Mountain Valley mistakenly assumed the four approaching boats filled with Stirling’s and Dayton’s men were coming to aid their ship, and they were captured without firing a shot. Captain William Rogers sailed the captured Blue Mountain Valley to Amboy, New Jersey that night and then the next day to Elizabethtown where the New Jersey Continentals and Militiamen and captured crew offloaded the cargo from the ship.

The 120 New Jersey soldiers and militia who captured Blue Mountain Valley included two Grays, three Lees, three Meekers, three Millers, two Pursons, two Spencers, two Weekses, five Woodruffs, Col. Edward Thomas and two other Thomases, three Ogdens (including future New Jersey Governor Aaron Ogden), two sons of William Livingston Sr., who would become the first governor of an independent New Jersey and a Signer of the United States Constitution — William Livingston, Jr. and Henry Brockholst Livingston (himself a future Justice of the United States Supreme Court), William Marriner (who would go on to lead a number of successful maritime raids against British shipping) and Francis Barber, who had been Alexander Hamilton’s school teacher. William Henry Dobbs, the lookout for the New York Committee of Safety stationed at the Sandy Hook lighthouse, also assisted in the capture of the Blue Mountain Valley.

In addition to the Blue Mountain Valley‘s captain and its crew of 15 sailors, the Patriots captured the “Ship about 100 feet long on the Main Deck” carrying four three-pounder cannon and its cargo of

107 tons of coal, 100 butts of porter, 15 tons of potato, 112 tons of bean, 10 casks of sour krout and 8 hogs.

The captain and crew of the Blue Mountain Valley were briefly imprisoned by the Elizabethtown Committee of Safety, but because they had not resisted capture and had even helped sail the ship into port and unload its cargo, they were not held as prisoners of war and allowed to return to England.

Sources: https://allthingsliberty.com/2020/05/blue-mountain-valley-and-the-rise-of-lord-stirling/; Nelson at 70-71; https://www.monmouthhistory.org/250/capture-of-the-blue-mountain-valley; https://www.americanhistorycentral.com/entries/january-1776/