Naval interest

Naval interest, a pair of George III silver mounted coconut cups,

by Thomas Holland II, London 1799,

the coconuts carved foliate decoration and cornucopia and with the initials S.P below a crest, plain silver mounts, on a raised circular foot on a square base, wooden undersides of bases, height 20.5cm. (2)

Provenance: Samuel Piguenit, and then by descent to the current owner.

Samuel Piguenit born 25th November 1764 and baptised at St Maurice Winchester, the son of James Piguenit and Elizabeth Avery. They were a Huguenot family who had fled to England.

Samuel elected to go to sea and became a Purser in the Royal Navy and in the mid 1790s found himself on station in the West Indies.

In particular he was the Purser of the Perdrix, which the British had commissioned on 2 February 1796 under the command of Captain William Charles Fahie. On 13 January 1798, while Fahie was on leave to take temporary command of the fleet, then anchored before St. Kitts, Lieutenant Charles Peterson was in command of Perdrix. She and Favourite, which was under the command of Thomas Pitt, Lieutenant Lord Camelford, were both in English Harbour, Antigua undergoing refit. A dispute arose between the two lieutenants over who was senior and so in charge of the port and both vessels. In the dispute, Camelford shot and killed Peterson for mutiny. What triggered the dispute was the departure from the harbour on the previous day of HMS Babet, whose captain, Jemmet Mainwaring, had previously been the senior officer in the port. Peterson had been first lieutenant under Camelford for three months when Camelford had taken over Favourite, even though Peterson was senior on the lieutenants list and represented Captain Fahie. The two ships' companies almost fired on each other when Camelford shot Petersen. Captain Henry Mitford of HMS Matilda arrived that evening and put Camelford under arrest. Mitford put Lieutenant Parsons of Favourite in command of Perdrix and sent her out to sea. The subsequent court martial acquitted Camelford. Samuel Piguenit was called as a witness during this Court martial.

He also distinguished himself in an action as written in James NAVAL HISTORY

"1798.

On the 7th of December, as the British 22-gun ship Perdrix, Captain William Charles Fahie, mounting 20 French 6-pounders and two English 12-pounder carronades, was cruising to leeward of the island of St.-Thomas, an American master gave information that his vessel, the preceding evening, had been boarded by a French ship of war, seven leagues to the eastward of Virgin-Gorda. Captain Fahie used every exertion to get to windward of the last-named island ; but, owing to the prevailing strong gales, accompanied at times by heavy squalls, the Perdrix did not, until the 10th, effect that object. On the 11th, at day light, a ship was discovered from the mast-head in the south-east quarter, and soon ascertained to be a cruiser. Not a moment was lost in pursuing her ; and, after a 16 hours' chase, the Perdrix brought to close action the French privateer-ship Armée-d'Italie, Captain Colachy, mounting 18 guns, four of them long 12, and the remainder long 8 pounders. An animated fire was kept up for 42 minutes ; when the latter, being reduced to an unmanageable wreck, struck her colours.

The damages of the Perdrix were confined to her rigging and sails, and, out of a crew of 153 men and boys, she escaped with only one man wounded ; while the loss on board the Armée-d'Italie, whose crew numbered 117, amounted to six men killed and five wounded. Captain Fahie, in his official letter, highly commends the conduct of the two lieutenants of the Perdrix, Edward Ottley and James Smith ; also of Mr. Moses Crawford, the master, and Mr. Samuel Piguenet, the purser, the latter of whom volunteered to serve on deck."

The significance of his presence at St Kitts is that he had married Rebecca Burt on 12 April 1795 at St George's Basseterre. They had three children, of whom James George Piguenit the youngest was born in 1799.

It is not known what happened to Samuel but it is believed that he was lost at sea about 1803.