An Elegy on the Death of John Gidley, Esq; Capt. Sueton Grant, Mr. Nathanael Coddington, and Mr. Tayler

On 19 September 1744 about five hundred pounds of gunpowder blew up in the warehouse chamber of the privateer Prince Frederick at Newport, Rhode Island. The Boston Evening Post of 24 September reported that the injured were expected to recover. The elegy mourns four deaths: John Gidley, Captain Sueton Grant and Nathanael Coddington Jr., who were the vessel's owners, and a Mr. Tayler.

The elegy was printed for the occasion in two columns inside heavy black mourning rules. It describes the dead as "burnt, naked, black, and all o'er wound."

The printer was Ann Franklin (1696-1763), widow of James Franklin, Benjamin's older brother. James had carried the press from Boston to Newport in 1727 and died in 1735. Ann kept the shop going and was the only printer in Rhode Island in the 1740s. Her son James Jr. later printed the colony's Acts and Laws of 1752 on the same press.

No other copy has been traced, and the sheet is not among the three 1744 Newport imprints recorded in John Eliot Alden, Rhode Island Imprints, 1727-1800 (New York: Bowker for the Bibliographical Society of America, 1949). The upper left corner is missing and takes one letter of the text with it. The edges are chipped, and the sheet is stained and folded.

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