Thomas Symonds
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Captain Thomas Symonds, R.N. (died 1793) was a British naval captain of the American Revolutionary War.
In 1780, in England, he replaced John Luttrell as captain of HMS Charon, and sailed for America with a naval force. After successful anti-convoy operations on the Atlantic crossing and coastal cruising, the ship became trapped in the York River, Virginia, where Symonds took supreme command of British naval forces in America. Charon was destroyed and sunk with red-hot shot soon afterwards.[1] At the end of the Siege of Yorktown, it was he (as the most senior naval officer present) and Cornwallis, Lieutenant General of the British Armed Forces, who signed the Articles of Capitulation on October 18, 1781.
His son was William Symonds, Surveyor of the Navy, and his grandsons included William Cornwallis Symonds and Thomas Matthew Charles Symonds.
[edit] External links
- The Avalon Project at Yale Law School
- Between Slavery and Freedom: Virginia Blacks in the American Revolution, by Sylvia R. Frey, The Journal of Southern History, 1983, Southern Historical Association
- Rhode Island in British Strategy, 1780-1781, by William B. Willcox, The Journal of Modern History, 1945, The University of Chicago Press
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