Captain Gamaliel Bradford, was a sea captain, privateersman, and later a prison warden who earned notoriety during the Quasi-War with France commanding two privately owned and armed merchant vessels known as letters of marque. Born November 4, 1763 in Duxbury, Massachusetts, he served in the 14th Massachusetts Regiment at a young age during the American Revolution, initially as a private and eventually was commissioned a lieutenant in the Continental Army. At the end of the war he went to sea as a mariner and by the 1790s commanded merchant vessels as a master mariner.