Two hundred twenty-five years ago, Captain Thomas Truxtun of the 36-gun U.S. frigate Constellation patrolled the Caribbean to defend the new nation’s maritime commerce against an unlikely adversary—France. The short-lived Quasi-War saw Truxtun victorious against the French frigate L’Insurgente in February 1799 and again in January 1800 against the French frigate La Vengeance.
Truxtun was awarded a silver urn (now at the White House Historical Association’s Decatur House in Washington, D.C.) by the “Underwriters and Merchants at Lloyds Coffee House in London” for that first victory, and a gold medal (now in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection) by Congress for his second action.
But the Truxtun artifact most relevant to the success of the young U.S. Navy is a fragile Chinese porcelain punch bowl, 16 inches in diameter, which survived the centuries and now is finding a new home, showcased in the library of the U.S. Naval Institute.
The improbable journeys of Truxtun’s 1790s punch bowl and its twin—gifted by Truxtun to President George Washington—help tell the story of a fledgling navy trying to establish its professional roots and justify its existence at a time when the United States was not even sure it needed or wanted a navy.
Truxtun was born near Hempstead, Long Island, New York, in 1755. Orphaned at 10, he began a 35-year career at sea two years later when he was apprenticed to the captain of a British merchant vessel. Impressed into the Royal Navy briefly in 1771, he saw the organization, customs, and traditions of a professional navy firsthand before returning to the merchant service. By 1775, all of 20 years old, Truxtun was married and the master of his own trading vessel in New York.
With the American Revolution underway, Truxtun was captured by a Royal Navy ship on just his third trading voyage—his vessel and her cargo were condemned and sold as prizes of war. He returned to Philadelphia and joined, and later commanded, a series of American privateers preying on British maritime commerce to help meet the pressing need for war supplies.
On 17 March 1782, with the war’s end in sight, Truxtun attended a public dinner in Philadelphia for General Washington at which, as Truxtun recalled, Washington praised Truxtun’s valuable contributions to American victory by declaring him to have “been as a regiment to the United States.” Thus was born a strong professional relationship.
After the Revolution, Truxtun was part of the new nation’s growing maritime trade, commanding several ships on some of the earliest American cruises to China and India in the late 1780s and early 1790s, bringing back cargoes of tea, cotton, and porcelain to eager consumers.
When the United States faced interference with its merchant vessels from Barbary corsairs in the Mediterranean, Congress in 1794 authorized a six-frigate building program. Truxtun became one of the captains appointed by President Washington to oversee the building and fitting out of each ship—in Truxtun’s case, the 36-gun Constellation in Baltimore.
Leaving his successful merchant career, Truxtun was fully immersed in the construction of the ship but found time to publish a book titled Remarks, Instructions, and Examples relating to the Latitude & Longitude to provide his contemporaries and subordinates with his navigation experience. Most importantly for this story, he included an appendix with his own system of masting and sparring dimensions illustrated by a foldout engraved plate of a notional 44-gun frigate rigged to his specifications.
The hulls of the 44- and 36-gun frigates had been designed by Joshua Humphreys, with the aim that each ship would be powerful enough to defeat an equal-sized opponent and fast enough to escape a larger or numerically superior enemy. Speed was a premium attribute, and the locations of the masts and their yardarms and their dimensions—referred to as “masting and sparring” a ship—were of paramount concern. Truxtun’s appendix and diagram contributed to the decision process for the six frigates.
In the midst of this shipbuilding, Truxtun commissioned a merchant ship captain headed for China to have two porcelain punch bowls made with this same ship image in 1-to-1 scale across the bowl’s inside curved surface. When delivered, one bore the monogram “TT,” and the other, captioned with the word “DEFENDER” below the ship’s image in the bowl, featured a “GW” monogram and was presented by Truxtun to President Washington. Truxtun hoped to gain Washington’s support for the Navy in general and his career in particular.
Truxtun went on to acclaim in the Quasi-War and then faded from the naval scene after several arguments over his relative rank in the new navy. While he did not serve during the War of 1812, many Truxtun-trained officers did, and the U.S. Navy’s reputation was burnished by several single- frigate actions, most notably by the frigate Constitution, “Old Ironsides.”
The Chinese porcelain bowls embarked on their own fascinating journeys after their owners’ deaths. George Washington’s “GW” bowl, referred to by Martha Washington in her will as “the bowl that has a ship in it,” was bequeathed to her grandson, was stolen from Arlington House during the Civil War, and was returned on loan to Mount Vernon a century later. In 2018 that loan became a permanent gift, and the GW bowl is on display in the Mount Vernon Museum.
Truxtun’s own “TT” bowl passed to his descendants, and his great-great-grandson donated that bowl to the Naval Historical Foundation (NHF) in 1949. When the NHF dissolved as a nonprofit at the end of 2022, the bowl and many NHF programs found a willing home at the U.S. Naval Institute—a fitting outcome, since the Institute had provided the $1,000 seed money to launch the NHF in 1926.
—Captain Charles T. (Todd) Creekman, U.S. Navy (Retired), Executive Director Emeritus, Naval Historical
Foundation (1999–2016)
