Mark Barrett wrote:
I don't know why life has to be so complicated . . . . . !
i.e. they do have musters for Victor for 1780 but not for the middle part of the year which I think we are interested in here.
In this case, death is the reason life is so complicated!
Victor was lost with all hands at the beginning of October 1780 in the Great Hurricane of 1780, which devastated the West Indies, killing over 20,000 people, and in which the Royal Navy lost about 15 ships, with many more badly damaged.
It would appear that
Victor was quickly replaced with another vessel of that name the following month (November 1780). None of the usual reference books correctly document Victor, but I imagine that after losing so many ships, they urgently procured additional ships locally. The replacement
Victor was certainly on the Jamaica station, as Admiral Parker later appointed Thomas Fremantle (who had survived the wrecking of Phoenix in the hurricane) to her. Rif Winfield (and Peter Goodwin) identify our
Victor as the renamed captured privateer
Hunter purchased in 1779 and lost in 1780, but Rif Winfield does not list the replacement
Victor.
The loss of
Victor explains why both the captain's log and the muster are missing, but the master's log ADM 52/2059 at first sight seems a mystery. However, this is possibly easily explained. The National Archives catalogue actually lists two items for ADM 52/2059, both for
Victor:
Admiralty: Masters' Logs. Victor.
Date range: 21 September 1779 - 20 September 1781
Admiralty: Masters' Logs. Victor.
Date range: 05 November 1782 - 16 November 1782
The explanation is that the bound volumes in the National Archives often contain a number of masters logs (or musters etc.) bound together either for the same ship, or for several ships organised alphabetically. I suspect that the log for 21 September 1779 - 20 September 1781 will in fact be more than one log with a break of dates in the middle (the catalogue is far from perfect!). Whether the log contains entries for April 1780 remains to be seen!
Of course, an alternative but remote possibility is that all the reports of
Victor being lost were incorrect and she eventually made it back to land, or perhaps was salvaged.
Sugden cites John Tyson's account Add. MSS 34990:36, and as Clarke & M'Arthur state that Nelson found Tyson on board
Victor, it may well be that Tyson's account names
Victor. However, there is a puzzle over
Victor's captain, stated to be Samuel Hood Walker. Other sources (Beatson, Rif Winfield) list the captain as George Mackenzie (not the admiral of that name), lost with the ship in the hurricane. Samuel Hood Walker also drowned in the hurricane, then captain of
Scarborough, which was also lost.
Terrible times! Just think if Nelson had been lost too!
I find all this fascinating, and I do hope someone can get to the National Archives before long and unravel a bit more!
P.S. Pay books for both (?) ships survive (as they were kept at the Admiralty, made up from the returned musters), and will at least identify the captain:
ADM 34/831 Victor 1779 Sept 18 - 1780 Oct 31
ADM 34/796 Victor 1780 Nov 11 - 1782 Nov 16
Re
Atty: I think it would probably be a hired merchant ship, with a Navy lieutenant on board, but merchant master & crew. I would guess that the lieutenant kept his own log, but I have never seen one for a hired vessel.