People: Samuel Clowes





Name Clowes, Samuel
 
Place of work Greenwich
 
Employment dates
c.Jan 1690/1 – mid Feb 1694/5
 


Posts Indentured Servant and Assistant




Born 1673/4, Mar 16
 
Died 1760, Aug 27
 
Burried Grace Churchyard, Jamaica
 



Much of what we know about Clowes’s time at Greenwich comes from a letter written by Flamsteed to Newton which is dated 2 March 1694/5, where he records: ‘my servant about 10 days agone ran away from me without any provocation in hopes as I suppose of preferment at sea for his skill. I have hopes he may returne because he is bound to me by Indenture   if he should not tis a great loss to me tho he be of a capricious humor’.

Given that some of the later servants employed by Flamsteed, including Clowes’s replacement James Hodgson, were indentured for a period of seven years, it seems likely that Clowes, who was taken on as a youth, was indentured for a seven year period too. Born like Flamsteed in Derbyshire, he was appointed Surveyor to the province of New York in October 1700 in which role he produced an historically important map titled: Indian Country west of Albany, New York, the original of which is held in the National Archives at Kew. He moved to Jamaica in 1702, where he remained for the rest of his life.

 

Further reading

The History of Long Island: From Its Discovery and Settlement, to the ... pp.106–7. Benjamin F Thompson, New York, 1843

Samuel Clowes My 7G Grandfather from the blog: Langdon Notables

An account of the Revd. John Flamsteed, Francis Bailey, (London, 1835)

The correspondence of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, ed. E. G. Forbes and others, 3 vols. (1995–2001)