Nelson & His World

Here's an interesting link to an Old Bailey record of the prosecution of an old seaman, Dixon Dawson, who served with Nelson, and his account of his service which he hopes will earn him mercy. The Old Bailey records show many accused men pleading service with Nelson in the hope of pardon, but this is quite detailed and has the ring of truth.


http://theconsummatedabbler.blogspot.co ... -some.html

Tony: NB that he served on 'the Fatale Minotaur' - would this be under Captain Mansfield?

I am always desperate for these stories to be true - but over the years I have found that some nine in ten are either incorrect or unprovable.

I checked out both the Trafalgar Roll and the NGS Medal Roll and no sign of either a Dixon Dawson or a Dawson Dixon.

I found another report of the trial and in there it calls him "John Johnson or really Dixon Dawson". TheTrafalgar Roll records one John Johnson on HMS Victory and the age looks about right - but it is hard to believe that he would have been using this alias 45 years earlier - and he was born in the U.S. which I would have thought might have been commented on.

So for now I have to put this down as intriguing but unproven.

Somebody do better than me - PLEASE!

MB

He did like alliterative names, didn’t he? – ‘John Johnson’ and ‘Dixon Dawson’

Given that his offence was one of deception, and that much of the evidence at his trial centred around the question of his sanity (including the story of him just being appointed as a captain), I do think we have to take his ‘service history’ with a pinch of salt! But at least we know that he was an in-pensioner at Greenwich hospital, so he had convinced them that he had at least some service history. The NA catalogue often gives dates of service against an admission document, but it is not so helpful this time:
His detail around the loss of the Minotaur is correct. Some of the survivors did spend nearly four years imprisoned in Valenciennes. But in the year of his trial (1850) William Gilly had published that detail in "Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849". See here for his account: http://www.minotaur.org/minotaur-wreck.htm including the tragic tale of Lieutenant Salsford and his pet wolf, who drowned together, clutched in each other’s arms/paws.

Anna, the captain of the Minotaur at the time of her loss was Captain John Barrett, who was lost with the ship. Mansfield had been forced to quit his command through ill health immediately on return from the 1807 Copenhagen expedition.

Dixon Dawson describes men from the Minotaur in 1809 boarding Danish gun-boats. The action that I am aware of was a severely fought boat action against Russian gun-boats at Fredrickshamn, but they may well have also been in action against Danish gun-boats, or that may be the sort of detail he could have confused forty years later.

But then he could easily have ‘borrowed’ some convincing service details from fellow Greenwich in-pensioners.

I can confirm that (as stated in the original blog post) Dixon Dawson does appear in a list of survivors from the wreck of the Minotaur. The list appeared in newspapers in February 1811 (e.g. The Times, 11 Feb 1811). Interestingly, another survivor’s name was John Johnstone, which is very similar to Dawson’s chosen alias.

Coincidentally, in the last couple of weeks I have been in contact with the descendant of another survivor of the shipwreck – or to be accurate, a descendant of his brother. Both brothers were at Trafalgar: one in the Minotaur, and the other in the Britannia.

Anybody out there with any advance on two Trafalgar ancestors?

P.S. The blog entry didn’t record the verdict on Dixon Dawson – which was ‘Guilty’, but recommended to mercy by the Jury, 'in consequence of the great length of time he had been in the service, and his extreme age' – which resulted in Transportation for 10 years. As he was 71 years old, I’m not sure how far that qualifies as ‘mercy’?