Nathaniel Meserve (1704–1758) was an American shipbuilder.
Meserve was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to Clement Maserve and his wife Elizabeth Jones.
On December 16, 1725, aged 21, he married Jane Libby and together they had ten children. Nathaniel Meserve would become a shipwright in his native Portsmouth, a hub of early American shipbuilding.
In 1749 he was hired by the Royal Navy to build a 50 gun warship HMS America at his shipyard. During King George's War Nathaniel was a lieutenant colonel in the New Hampshire Militia regiment at the 1745 capture of Fortress Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. His shipbuilding experience allowed him to build sleds to transport the cannon over the marshy ground. During the French and Indian War Colonel Meserve led the New Hampshire Provincial Regiment in 1756 to Fort Edward New York and in 1757 to garrison Halifax, Nova Scotia.
In 1758 Col. Nathaniel Meserve was with General Amherst in another attack on Fortress Louisbourg because of his service in the 1745 capture of the fort. Here he contracted smallpox and died along with his eldest son.
Famous quotes containing the word nathaniel:
“There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says NO! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no,—why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag,—that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)