Captain Lambert Wickes was one of the senior officers of the Continental Navy in the opening years of the Revolutionary War and was noted for his daring raids on British shipping. In his sloop-of-war Reprisal, he took Benjamin Franklin to France in 1776 and became the first American naval officer in European waters after the Declaration of Independence. Born near here on Eastern Neck Island, about 1735, he was lost with his ship in a storm off Newfoundland on October 1, 1777. Franklin called him “a gallant officer, and a very worthy man.”