Otter was a maritime fur trading vessel. Between 1795 and 1798 it visited the Pacific. It was most famous for the rescue of Thomas Muir, a famous Scottish political exile.
Muir was convicted of sedition before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh in 1793. He was sentenced and transported to the convict settlement at Sydney Cove for the space of fourteen years on 31 August 1793.
Otter, commanded by Capt. Ebenezer Dorr, was fitted out at Boston, and despatched for Sydney. The Boston register of clearances, Treasury Department archives, dates her clearance 20 August 1795. She anchored in Sydney Harbour on 25 January 1796. On 11 February 1796, Muir escaped from the convict settlement on board Otter.
Captain Dorr took Muir and other escaped political prisoners onboard and sailed to the Pacific Northwest Coast. There the Otter cruised for furs in the spring and summer of 1796. Some sources say that the ship struck a chain of sunken rocks near Nootka Sound, on the west coast of North America, and was wrecked. Every person on board perished except Mr. Muir and two sailors. This is unlikely. Other reliable sources state that when Muir parted from Otter at Nootka in June 1796, Otter continued north to Bucareli Bay, on the west of Prince of Wales Island and then sailed into the harbor of Monterey on 29 October 1796, the first United States vessel to enter a Californian port.
The voyage of Otter across the Pacific was famously chronicled by Pierre François Péron.
Description
Little is known of Otter. Some accounts state that she was probably a 168-ton ship, the Master was Daniel Bennett and she was owned by Loring & Curtis. It is most probable that her homeport was Boston.
Spanish accounts state that she carried six cannon and a crew of twenty-six men.
Captain Ebenezer Dorr
Ebenezer Dorr was born in Suffolk Massachusetts on 30 Dec. 1762. He was the fourth in his family to bear that name. In 1775 his father Ebenezer Dorr (1738-1809), like Paul Revere, rode from Boston to warn residents of Massachusetts about the advancing British army. On 16 Sept 1790 he sailed from Boston aboard the brigantine as supercargo under Captain Joseph Ingraham on a voyage to the Northwest Coast and China for the Old China Trade. The voyage was ultimately a financial failure. Dorr returned to Boston with Hope in the summer of 1793. In 1795 Dorr was given command of Otter on his second voyage to the Pacific.
The rescue and transportation of Thomas Muir
The incident in which Otter rescued Thomas Muir, a famous Scottish political exile, is well documented. Muir was sentenced on 31 August 1793 to be transported for sedition for a term of fourteen years. In the middle of April 1794, he left England on board , and after a tedious voyage reached Sydney on September 25 of the same year. At this time Sydney was still a very small colony at Sydney Cove with about 1,500 people. Muir stated in letters that he purchased a "small hut and several acres of land". Accounts indicate that the land was located in the immediate vicinity of Jeffrey Street in the modern suburb of Kirribilli. After Muir had been in this penal settlement about two years, a project was formed in America to rescue him from captivity. Some sources credit the American president, George Washington, with the rescue attempt. Other sources discredit this idea. An authoritative paper titled "The Odyssey of Thomas Muir" by Marjorie Masson and J. F. Jameson examines the escape of Muir from the convict settlement at Sydney.