NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: David Pike
Date: 2019 Dec 18, 03:49 -0800
Don Seltzer you wrote: There was no RN officer named David Ross during this period. There was an American David Ross who served in the Continental Navy, and in 1800 commanded a privateer during the Quasi-war with France.
The paragraph about Lt/Capt David Ross of the Belvedere appears throughout the Internet (a fact that would send a plagiarism checker into overdrive), mainly in connection with the naming of the USS Ross. However, these were fluid times, and there’s little about his country of birth or history before or after Belvedere (which certainly visited the UK, and presentation items were not unknown, e.g. Bligh’s presentation sword after the second breadfruit expedition), or his connection, if any, with Capt David Ross of the 73rd Rgt, who got tangled up with the emerging US 20 years earlier. DaveP
