Captain Buntin Goes Shopping: A Liverpool Jug with Newburyport on its Mind
by Marc Cendron
inspired by Betsy & Kem Widmer
In the dining room of the Museum of Old Newbury’s Cushing House stands a large, gleaming creamware pitcher made in Liverpool, England, in the early nineteenth century (likely c. 1805–1810), probably by a Liverpool pottery serving the American export market (often attributed to the Herculaneum Pottery). It is a “Liverpool jug” in the classic sense: a utilitarian form turned into a souvenir—part commemoration, part advertisement—through transfer‑printed imagery and a bold inscription.
On one side, a three‑masted ship under full sail carries the name MASSACHUSETTS. On the other, a harbor plan, complete with soundings and a lighthouse, reading NEWBURYPORT HARBOUR. Beneath the images runs the proud toast: “SUCCESS TO THE COMMERCE OF NEWBURYPORT.” The pitcher is at once local and international: Newburyport’s maritime ambitions rendered in ink and glaze by English potters for an American customer.
Creamware was a technological and aesthetic breakthrough of the mid‑1700s: a light‑colored earthenware body coated with a lead glaze that produced a glossy, glass‑like surface. Josiah Wedgwood refined and popularized the material so successfully that he marketed it as “Queen’s Ware” after receiving a commission from Queen Charlotte in 1765. By the turn of the nineteenth century, creamware (and its close cousin pearlware) was being produced across England in enormous quantities.
Transfer printing made these wares especially effective as souvenirs and advertising pieces. Rather than painting each object by hand, potteries could print fine, engraved designs onto paper, then transfer the image onto the glazed surface, creating crisp lines and repeatable results. Liverpool was a major center for the technique and for export ceramics aimed at Atlantic markets; in 1756, Liverpool printers John Sadler and Guy Green famously claimed the invention of transfer printing for pottery. One of Liverpool’s best‑known firms—the Herculaneum Pottery (active 1796–1841)—produced large numbers of transfer‑printed jugs and pitchers that celebrated ships, ports, political events, and commercial networks. Many were tailored to American tastes, pairing neoclassical figures and allegorical “America” with ships, flags, and mottos that read like toasts raised at a captain’s table.
Illustration of Pennington's Pottery Works, Liverpool, from The Ceramic Art of Great Britain from Pre-historic Times Down to the Present Day: Being a History of the Ancient and Modern Pottery and Porcelain Works of the Kingdom and of Their Productions of Every Class by Llewellynn Frederick William Jewitt, 1878
Why would English potters print a Newburyport toast?
At first glance, an English factory printing “Success to the commerce of Newburyport” seems almost ironic. But it makes perfect commercial sense. Liverpool potteries made what their customers wanted, and American merchants, New Englanders especially, were an enormous market for British manufactured goods. A personalized jug could be ordered to celebrate a vessel, flatter a merchant, or commemorate a profitable voyage. In other words, it was merchandising with a purpose: a handsome household object that also advertised a ship’s name, a community’s identity, and a trading relationship.
The moment when this pitcher was likely made was also a moment of heightened risk. Britain and France were at war, and both powers sought to restrict neutral trade. Britain’s Orders in Council, issued between 1806 and 1809, tightened rules on port‑to‑port commerce and authorized capture and condemnation of vessels that violated the restrictions. For American shipowners, these policies turned ordinary voyages into legal and financial gambles.
The ship named on the pitcher was not an abstract symbol. Legal records held at the National Archives in London identify MASSACHUSETTS as a Newburyport‑associated vessel whose master was Captain Thomas Buntin, acting on behalf of himself and several partners, Amos Atkinson, Stephen Frotheringham, and Ebenezer Hale, described as “severally of Newbery and Newbery Port” and citizens of the United States. The printed appeal in a prize case shows Buntin pursuing the ship’s claim after an adjudication in the Vice‑Admiralty Court at Malta. The respondent in that appeal was Giovanni Battista Caviglia, commander of the private ship of war ENDEAVOUR, identified as the captor.
Those few lines from a court title page carry a whole Atlantic story: a merchant ship out of Newburyport, a British privateer, a detour into the Mediterranean, and a dispute that reached London’s prize appeals system. It is exactly the kind of story that helps explain why an object like this pitcher mattered. A “presentation” jug was not simply a keepsake; it was a marker of belonging to the maritime economy, an economy built on ships, credit, navigation, insurance, and (when things went wrong) litigation.
The harbor plan on the pitcher underscores that connection to navigation and print culture. The plan resembles the kinds of engraved charts and harbor views that began appearing in the early nineteenth century in editions of Edmund March Blunt’s American Coast Pilot. Blunt first published the Coast Pilot in 1796; the earliest editions circulated without charts, but later editions introduced engraved coastal plans and soundings that were essential tools for captains and mates. Liverpool potters drew from this wider world of printed navigation, turning practical knowledge into decorative imagery that could sit on a sideboard.
Seen today, the pitcher offers a vivid snapshot of Newburyport’s commercial self‑image (the town was incorporated in 1764) at the height of its maritime era. The motto is triumphant, perhaps even a bit boastful, yet the years that followed were difficult for New England shipping. War‑time restrictions, escalating diplomatic conflict, and (soon enough) the War of 1812 reshaped Atlantic trade. Newburyport’s own “Great Fire” of 1811 added a local catastrophe to international uncertainty. In that light, the pitcher becomes more than celebratory: it is a reminder of how much Newburyport’s prosperity depended on oceans, politics, and chance.
And it brings us back to the simplest, most human possibility: that a Newburyport captain, perhaps Captain Buntin himself, perhaps someone acting for him, walked into a Liverpool shop, chose (or commissioned) a handsome creamware jug with familiar images, and carried it home. The object still does what it was made to do: it makes a ship, a port, and a commercial community visible.