Note 1 — LETTERS FROM CORNISH TO CLEVLAND

Facts regarding Samuel Cornish are few. In 1743, when captain of the fifty-gun ship “Guernsey,” he destroyed a Spanish privateer of twenty-two guns, which had taken shelter under an eight-gun battery near Cape de Gatt. He also performed numerous other services of the same kind, and took and destroyed a fleet of zebecks laden with provisions. In 1756 he was captain of the “Stirling Castle,” a vessel carrying 480 men, most of them the refuse of jails and the scum of the streets. In 1759 he was sent with reënforcements to the East Indies, in the “Lenox,” Captain Robert Jocelyn commanding, where he was reënforced in 1760 with five ships. He was at the reduction of Pondicherry in 1760, and at the reduction of Mahe in 1761. Thence he went to Bombay to refit, and went to meet Commodore Keppel for the attack of Bourbon and Mauritius, although these orders were later changed. His promotions are as follows: captain, 1742; rear admiral (white), 1759, (red), 1761; rear admiral (blue), 1762, (red), 1770. He was made a baronet in 1766. His death occurred October 30, 1770. See Allen’s Battles of British navy (London, 1878), i, pp. 147, 148; Clowes’s Royal Navy (Boston and London, 1898), iii, pp. 23, 196, 240, 565. ↑