Author: Rattenbury, J. F.
Biography:
RATTENBURY, Joseph Freeman (1784-1834: ancestry.com)
The son of Joseph Freeman Rattenbury (1746-1817), an excise officer and chamberlain to the corporation of Plymouth, and his wife, Elizabeth Dobel (1764-1832), he was baptized in the Quaker chapel in Marazion, Cornwall. His education is undocumented. On 24 July 1810, he married Ann Maria Ball (1789-1875) at St Andrew, Holborn, London. Born in New South Wales, she was the daughter of navy officer Henry Lidgbird Ball (1756-1818) and his partner, Sarah Partridge, a convict transported in 1784. From Aug. 1808 (or earlier), through 1810, he was a barrister with chambers at 10 Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn. He set aside his law career to become an insurance broker in Copthall Avenue, but by Nov. 1811 he was bankrupt. His ship insurance partnership with John Ogle Ogle (d 1833) at 43 Mark Lane also failed; it was dissolved by mutual consent in June 1814. Those setbacks, “the loss of [his] beloved parent, and some present circumstances,” led to his eccentric, perhaps desperate, decision in mid-1817 to abandon country and spouse to fight alongside Venezuelan insurgents. A set of calamities instead stranded him for two years in Florida and the Carolinas. When he returned to England in 1819, he settled among his wife’s relatives in Mitcham, Surrey, and published an account of his Floridia adventures, Narrative of a Voyage to the Spanish Main in the Ship “Two Friends” (1819). He returned to America in 1822, now with his wife, and again in 1832, with the intention of becoming a citizen, possibly to boost his claim to the 50,000 Florida acres that Spanish authorities had granted him in 1818. His hopes were dashed when a United States commission declined to recognize the grant. He and his wife died, childless, in Paris, within six weeks of each other, he in mid-Aug., she on the first day of Oct. 1834. His book of poetry, Edgar and Ella (1822), was not well received; a reviewer in MR called it a “‘mewling and puking’ Walter-Scottish production.” Despite his obvious intelligence and irrepressible energy, Rattenbury failed in most of what he attempted to accomplish. (ancestry.com 6 Oct. 2023; PROB 11/1839; London Gazette [12-15 Oct. 1811], 2005; MR 97 [1822], 436; Exeter Flying Post, 16 Oct. 1834; “Unmasked: The Author of Narrative of a Voyage to the Spanish Main in the Ship ‘Two Friends’,” Florida Historical Quarterly 78:2 [1999], 189-206) JC