Daniel Collins

Little is firmly documented about this Daniel Collins beyond his own book, so the clearest picture comes from contemporary bibliographic records and his firsthand account. In Narrative of the Shipwreck of the Brig Betsey, published in Wiscasset, Maine, in 1825, he identifies himself as the brig’s second mate and one of only two survivors of the voyage.

The book recounts the Betsey’s departure from Wiscasset in November 1824 for Matanzas, Cuba, its wreck, and the murder of crew members by pirates on the Cuban coast. Because Collins wrote as a participant rather than a later historian, the narrative has the urgency of lived experience and the plainspoken detail of someone determined to record exactly what happened.

No reliable portrait or well-established biographical profile appears to be readily available from the sources found here. What remains most notable is the work itself: a compact but vivid survival narrative that preserves one sailor’s witness to shipwreck, violence, and endurance at sea.