Alvin Cowser (1768-1839) was a captain of the British Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars.
Biography[]
Alvin Cowser was born in London in Great Britain in 1768, and enlisted in the British Royal Navy at the age of ten. During the American Revolutionary War he served as a cabin boy aboard HMS Dauntless, and fought in the First Battle of Ushant. After the war he was made a midshipman aboard HMS Mercy, and fought in the French Revolutionary Wars in the Glorious First of June and the Third Battle of Cape Finisterre. By 1798 he had become the captain of HMS Hector, a 122-gun Heavy First Rate.
In 1802 Cowser's HMS Hector dueled "Belle Poule", a French 80-gun steam ship, off the coast of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). Cowser and his ship holed the French ship and boarded her, and although French captain Pierre-Thiery Clarisse was killed, the HMS Hector surrendered after most of its crew was killed. Cowser was captured and held on the Chateau d'If until the end of the war with France in 1814. He returned home with awards and died in 1839.