A few weeks after the April 1775 battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, the British warship HMS Cerberus, a 28-gun frigate, arrived in Boston harbor carrying three British generals that would go on to play key roles in the American Revolution: John Burgoyne, Henry Clinton, and William Howe.
The very name of the sixth-rate ship, Cerberus, did not go unnoticed to Bostonians. Cerberus was a mythical Greek god, a monstrous three-headed dog often called the “hound of Hades.”
The ship provided naval reinforcement at the Battle of Bunker Hill and was the target of an early torpedo attack by David Bushnell‘s newly developed powder keg torpedoes in 1777. On August 13, 1777 a Bushnell floating mine/keg sank a small (captured) schooner serving as a tender to HMS Cerberus in Black Point Bay, New London, Connecticut, killing three men, but did not seriously damage the ship.
HMS Cerberus’ distinguished 20-year career as a British warship ended when it was deliberately burned by its crew in in Narragansett Bay north of Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1778 to prevent it from falling into the hands of the powerful French fleet, allies of the American patriots.
This was the first major naval action after the Franco-American Alliance of 1778, a partnership created after the American victory at the Battles of Saratoga in 1777.
Joseph W. Zarzynski, a Saratoga County maritime archaeologist and regular contributor to New York Almanack, will help mark the 250th anniversary of HMS Cerberus‘s arrival in Boston harbor with a lecture on the history of the warship and share details on underwater archaeology projects by the University of Rhode Island and more recently by the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project that studied its historic shipwreck.
The lecture will take place Saturday, October 11, at 12 noon at Sullivan Free Library, 101 Falls Boulevard in Chittenango, in Madison County, NY. The lecture is sponsored by the New York State Archaeological Association’s William M. Beauchamp Chapter.
Zarzynski was an underwater archaeologist with the Rhode Island Marine Archaeology Project (RIMAP), a not-for-profit corporation, during their underwater archaeological survey of the Cerberus in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He is also the author of eight books including Fort William Henry’s Moments in Time (2023) and Ghost Fleet Awakened: Lake George’s Sunken Bateaux of 1758 (2019).
Illustration of HMS Cerberus (1758–1778) by John Whitesel.
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