History | |
---|---|
Great Britain | |
Name | Liberty |
Owner | John Hancock |
Captured | June 1768 |
Great Britain | |
Name | Liberty |
Acquired | June 1768[1] |
Fate | Scuttled and burned, Newport, Rhode Island, July 1769 |
General characteristics | |
Class and type | Sloop[2] |
Liberty was a sloop owned by John Hancock, an American merchant, whose seizure was the subject of the Liberty Affair. Seized by customs officials in Boston in 1768, it was commissioned into the Royal Navy as HMS Liberty, and she was burned the next year by American colonists in Newport, Rhode Island in one of the first acts of open defiance against the British crown by American colonists.