page_title: Otter (1795 ship)
section_title: Captain Ebenezer Dorr
hierarchical_section_title: Otter (1795 ship) / Captain Ebenezer Dorr
caption_attribution_description: Image of Thomas Muir from The book "The Life of Thomas Muir, Esq. Advocate, Younger of Huntershill, etc.
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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 Hope 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.
caption: Thomas Muir circa 1793
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