(MARITIME) Kennedy John F Correspondence of a merchant ship

Sale 2432 - Lot 211

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Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,000

(MARITIME.) Kennedy, John F. Correspondence of a merchant ship captain. 56 Autograph Letters Signed to wife Marcia Gray Kennedy of Baltimore; condition generally strong, stitch holes in left margins, with a few tape repairs at folds, most with address panels but no postal markings as they were delivered by sea, all in a worn early paper wrapper. Vp, 1796-1818

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John F. Kennedy (no apparent relation to the presidential family) was a merchant ship captain who married Marcia Gray in Baltimore in 1802. His letters to her are dated from all over the world, including Havana, St. Thomas, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Mauritius, and several cities on the American coast. His first letter to his future wife announces that his ship will "go out under the protection of our fine frigate the Constellation" (19 June 1796). On 12 August 1805, he describes the loss of a ship he owned: "my little favorite brig Jane shamefully captured by the French. . . . She is again recaptured by the British and sent to Jamaica. . . . Joe Gray had an engagement with the same privateer and made the Frenchman strike his colors. He had but 19 men, yet the Jane had 50." Two weeks later, he was fretting about how to replace the Jane's cash flow without "going into the disreputable schemes of slavers." On 27 October 1806, he offers advice on some investments: "I hope you do not give them to Jno. Poe, for he has no conduct and in a drunken moment might make a way with what he couldn't in his whole life make up." This may have been a relative of Edgar Allan Poe, who came from a Baltimore family. A run of seven letters dated from Gibraltar begins: "No American vessel has dared go out of the port owing to the Algerine fleet being out. They have captured a number of our unfortunate countrymen." He discusses the arrival of the American fleet under Commodores Decatur and Bainbridge on 27 October 1815.
During the 1814 Battle of Baltimore, Kennedy was laid up with fever at Norfolk, VA while his wife and children were in Baltimore enduring the bombardment. On 3 October, he wrote "My God what a time my love you must have had during the siege. Altho the fortune of war might have put an end to me, or deprived me or a leg or an arm and put an end to all my hopes in this world, I regret my not being in Fort McHenry as the greatest misfortune of my life." with--related family papers, 9 items including later family photographs, a family register written by Marcia Kennedy in 1857, later notes by a descendant, and a John Kennedy cash account from 1833-35.