Annotation:Spithead Fleet

Somewhat curiously, however (for, after all, it refers to the British Navy), it appears in the music manuscript copybook of an American Revolutionary War fifer named Nathaniel Brown, of Verplancks Point, New York (on the Hudson River) and Durham, Connecticut (the ms. is in the possession of the New Haven Colony Historical Society). Brown was a fife major of the “Fourth Connt. Regt.” according to his inscription, brown-uniformed men under Colonel John Durkee. The regiment had a fife and drum corps. Interestingly, the Fourth had a high proportion of black soldiers, and, in June, 1780, they were “so numerous…that the officers segregated fifty-two former slaves and freemen into the Second Company under the command of Capt. David Humphreys” [Lanning, African Americans in the Revolutionary War, 2005].