USS Alfred
1774 frigate
USS Alfred was a 24-gun frigate of the Continental Navy. She was originally the merchantman Black Prince which had been launched in 1774. The Continental Navy acquired her in 1775, renaming her Alfred and commissioning her as a frigate. In 1775, Alfred participated in the raid of Nassau and Battle of Block Island. The Royal Navy captured her in 1778 and took her into service as HMS Alfred before selling her in 1782. She then became the merchantman Alfred, and sailed between London and the British colony of Jamaica.
Black Prince
Black Prince was built at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1774. No record of her builder seems to have survived, but it is possible that John Wharton may have constructed the ship. She was owned by Willing, Morris & Co., a merchant trading firm operated by Thomas Willing and Robert Morris. John Barry served as the ship's only master during her career as a Philadelphia merchantman.
“USS Alfred” enters the record as 1774 frigate. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alfred and frigate can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7867194. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1774, 1775, 1778 and 1782.
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This entry incorporates text from “USS Alfred” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.