Rebels at Sea, page 2
The exact number of privateers and privateersmen who operated during the Revolution is unknowable, but the figures we do have suggest that they were pivotal to the war. Records are incomplete and often duplicative—many were logged both at the congressional and state level. Further complicating any attempt to arrive at reliable figures is that contemporary accounts often applied the term “privateer” to vessels that were most certainly not privateers. As a result, many Continental navy vessels as well as state navy vessels were incorrectly labeled as privateers in newspapers, letters, and official government documents printed during or just after the Revolution. Some historians have perpetuated the error. Haraden’s sloop Tyrannicide, which was a Massachusetts navy vessel, is frequently called a privateer in modern accounts.
The best single source of basic facts on privateering during the war is the Library of Congress’s Naval Records of the American Revolution. It lists 1,697 armed vessels that received letters of marque from the Continental Congress and which were manned by 58,400 men and carried 14,872 cannons. Yet these numbers cannot be taken at face value. Quite a few of the listed vessels received multiple letters of marque, for different cruises in different years, and thus were double- or triple-counted; many men served on more than one privateer; and a considerable portion of the cannons saw service on more than one ship as well. Even as they are, in part, duplicative, the Library of Congress records are also incomplete: a few states, notably Massachusetts and New Hampshire, issued their own letters of marque independent of Congress, but it is not clear exactly how many of these state privateers there were. Some sources claim the number was relatively low, perhaps around one hundred, while others say that there was as many as one thousand. Although the overall number of privateers cannot be precisely known, it was large, and most likely within a few hundred of 1,697. Similarly, the number of privateersmen certainly was in the tens of thousands, and the privateers upon which they served carried many thousands of cannons. Reflecting on the sheer size of such a fleet, historian John Franklin Jameson claimed that privateering during the Revolution “assumed such proportions as to make it . . . one of the leading American industries.”
Privateers were not evenly distributed across the states. Based again on the available, imperfect data, Massachusetts launched the largest number of privateers, with approximately six hundred, followed by Pennsylvania, with around five hundred. Connecticut and Maryland each provided about two hundred. Rhode Island had nearly one hundred fifty, while Virginia and New Hampshire came in well below one hundred. There were a few North Carolina and New Jersey privateers, while South Carolina and New York, which was partially under British control from the summer of 1776 to the fall of 1783, sent out only one each. As far as is known, Georgia and Delaware didn’t commission any privateers.
Before proceeding any further, a common misconception must be laid to rest. Many observers before, during, and since the Revolution have argued that privateersmen were virtually indistinguishable from pirates, those enemies of all mankind who pillaged any merchant vessels they came upon, often torturing victims while leaving a wake of terror on the high seas purely for personal gain. Claiming that it bears more than a passing resemblance to piratical behavior, some have called privateering “licensed” or “legalized” piracy. And in truth, given the origins of privateering, it is easy to understand why so many viewed privateering and piracy as two sides of the same coin.
The first recorded instance of privateering was sponsored by England in 1243 during the reign of Henry III. From that point of origin, the legally sanctioned practice blossomed and spread, appearing in virtually every European war of consequence through the 1700s, being employed by the English as well as the French, Dutch, and Spanish. But some countries, especially England, stretched the limits of privateering beyond what was generally deemed acceptable, helping give it a dark name.
For example, in the sixteenth century Elizabeth I issued letters of marque to her so-called sea dogs to attack her sworn enemy, the Spanish, and divest them of the riches they were violently looting from the Aztec and Incan Empires of Central and South America. This would have been in accord with the laws of privateering if England and Spain were at war, but Elizabeth often issued the letters when the two countries were nominally at peace.
One such letter of marque was given to Francis Drake before he left England on his circumnavigation of the globe in 1577. Drake attacked multiple Spanish towns and ships along the western coast of South America, amassing a fortune in silver and gold. His ship, the Golden Hind, returned triumphant to England, anchoring in Plymouth Harbor on September 26, 1580. While the irate Spanish king, Philip II, labeled Drake a pirate, which he undoubtedly was, the English viewed him as a privateersmen and a national hero—lending support to poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s trenchant observation some 250 years later that “no man is a pirate, unless his contemporaries agree to call him so.”
Another egregious example of piratical privateering occurred during the Nine Years’ War (1689–1697), known as King William’s War in America, which saw most of Europe arrayed against the French. In the British colonies in North America, particularly New York and Rhode Island, governors issued letters of marque to armed ships giving them permission to attack French vessels. But the governors knew full well that these “privateers” had no intention of fighting the French, and that they instead planned to sail to the Indian Ocean and prey on ships from the Mughal Empire traveling between India and the Red Sea ports of Jeddah and Mocha laden with coins, textiles, and other exotic East Indian goods. These so-called Red Sea Men were nothing more than pirates who viciously plundered Mughal shipping and brought their riches back home. And it wasn’t only the pirates who profited but also the governors themselves, who charged for privateering licenses and took a cut of the lucrative hauls.
Engraved portrait of Sir Francis Drake, circa 1583.
Then there were privateersmen turning to piracy once a war ended. This happened after the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–1713), when suddenly out-of-work privateersmen became pirates and launched the most notorious phase of what is called the golden age of piracy, during which thousands of pirates, including Blackbeard, terrorized sea-lanes from the North Atlantic to the West Indies.
With such a history, it is no wonder that so many have viewed privateering and piracy as synonymous. The popular historian Barbara Tuchman wrote that “privateers were essentially ships with a license to rob” that engaged in the “business of maritime breaking and entering . . . equivalent to a policeman giving his kind permission to a burglar.” But while there might be truth in this, particularly with respect to an earlier period of history, it does not apply to privateering during the American Revolution. By that time, laws had been better codified, government oversight of the practice was more effective, and legitimate privateersmen had less incentive to veer into piracy. As we will see, privateersmen operating during the American Revolution were not pirates, and the vast majority acted honorably, observing international law and the laws and regulations laid down by the Continental Congress during the war. The few exceptions only served to prove the rule.
The cast of characters in Rebels at Sea includes some of the most famous Americans of the time, and since. John Adams, Benedict Arnold, Benjamin Franklin, Elbridge Gerry, Nathanael Greene, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, Robert Morris, and George Washington, to name a few, all appear in significant roles. Beyond these well-known personages, there are numerous privateersmen who are central to the story. In addition to Haraden, their ranks include Offin Boardman, James Forten, David Ropes, Luke Ryan, and Andrew Sherburne.
Rebels at Sea does not focus solely on the achievements of American privateering. It also highlights when American privateersmen failed in their missions, and it details how the British viewed their scrappy seafaring opponents, and what steps they took to defeat them. Another dramatic and tragic thread of the story involves the prisons in England and the prison ships in New York’s Wallabout Bay, where most of the inmates were former privateersmen. While the prisons in England were bad enough, Americans who ended up on the crowded and pestilential prison ships experienced conditions so horrific that they beggar belief.
Thousands of books have approached the Revolution from every possible angle: diplomatic history, military history, the economic incentives on each side, social relations in the colonies, the fate of loyalists, and much more. There have also been countless biographies of the many leading individuals who played critical roles in the conflict. Rebels at Sea places privateersmen, most of whom were not famous or even well-known individuals, at the very center of the war effort. It demonstrates that, when the United States was only a tenuous idea, they stepped forward and risked their lives to help make it a reality.
* The term “pounder” refers to the weight of the solid shot fired by a cannon (that shot or projectile is typically referred to as a cannonball). A six-pounder cannon or gun fires a ball that weighs six pounds.
† A lugger is a sailing vessel named for its rig, which uses lugsails fore-and-aft. Such sails have four corners and are suspended from a spar or yard that hangs from the masts. Luggers were typically fast ships, and were often used for smuggling.
‡ A broadside is the coordinated, nearly simultaneous, firing of all of the cannons on one side of a vessel, a fusillade intended to gravely damage or disable an enemy ship.
REBELS AT SEA
CHAPTER
1
Massachusetts First
Marblehead’s Elbridge Gerry, the man in charge of drafting Massachusetts’s seminal privateering law.
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It was war, but it began as a very strange war, initially waged without complete conviction. On April 19, 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord shattered the increasingly tense standoff between Britain and its American colonies. Fired by patriotic zeal, a motley assemblage of colonial militiamen rushed to the outskirts of British-controlled Boston, laying siege to the city. Soon after, in Philadelphia, the Second Continental Congress appointed George Washington as commander in chief of the Continental army. Before he arrived in Cambridge to assume his duties, the bloody Battle of Bunker Hill had further ruptured the relationship between the colonies and Britain, making any attempt to secure a late peace appear even more improbable.
Yet despite these momentous events, and prior flashpoints including the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the Intolerable Acts, and notwithstanding the energizing rallying cry of “no taxation without representation,” the delegates to the Continental Congress would not make a clean break with Britain. Instead of promptly announcing their independence and launching all-out war, the deeply divided delegates, who represented an equally divided populace, sent the Olive Branch Petition to King George III in early July, affirming their loyalty to the sovereign and imploring him to repeal the unjust and punitive laws that had riled the colonies so that peace could be restored. The delegates, however, knew that merely waiting for a response was not enough. The colonies were being attacked, and they needed to fight back. The petition had made that choice clear. As delegate John Adams stated, Congress’s goal was to “prepare for a vigorous defensive war, but at the same time to keep open the door of reconciliation—to hold the sword in one hand and the olive branch in the other.” The colonies would defend themselves on land and at sea. And on the seas, privateers would play a critical role, with Massachusetts leading the way.
Boston Tea Party engraving, circa 1789. On the evening of December 16, 1773, American colonists disguised as Indians boarded the merchant ships Dartmouth, Eleanor, and Beaver, which contained a total of 342 chests of British East India Company tea, smashed the chests, and dumped the tea—roughly 90,000 pounds—into Boston Harbor.
That Massachusetts should pursue privateering was little surprise. One reason had to do with history and familiarity. In every war Britain waged in the early to mid-1700s, most notably the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), it sent forth fleets of privateers to attack its enemies, with many of those privateers sailing from the American colonies. In these wars, New York and Rhode Island pursued privateering with the most eagerness and success, sending out hundreds of vessels that captured an even more impressive number of prizes, netting millions of pounds in profits. Massachusetts sent out scores of successful ventures as well. Thus in the earliest days of the American Revolution, many of the men who would be making decisions about Massachusetts’s war footing were quite knowledgeable about privateering. And for their splendid education in the art and practice of privateering, the colonists had the expert tutelage of Britain to thank.
Another reason Massachusetts turned so quickly to privateering was that its residents felt aggrieved. It had been the rebellious thorn in Britain’s side for many years before the revolution, with Boston serving as the locus of much of the action, earning it the appellation “the metropolis of sedition.” As a result, Massachusetts had borne the brunt of the punishment when Britain lashed out at its “children” across the sea. The British believed that if the rabble-rousers in Massachusetts could be crushed any further, resistance would be squelched (a premise that proved to be woefully misguided). To that end, the Boston Port Act (effective June 1, 1774) brought a naval blockade. It was followed by the broader New England Restraining Act, also called the New England Trade and Fisheries Act (effective July 1, 1775), intended to “starve New England” by restricting the trade of its colonies to Great Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies. The act also prohibited the colonists from fishing anywhere in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Three groups of individuals were particularly upset about these acts: the Massachusetts merchants, fishermen, and sailors whose ships were tied up to the docks as a result. Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the French diplomat, spy, arms dealer, and playwright who penned The Barber of Seville, wrote a letter from London to King Louis XVI in September 1775 that attested to anger felt on the waterfront. Based on intelligence he had gathered, he said that “all those persons who took part in maritime commerce, which the English have brought to an end, have joined the fishermen to make war on their common persecutors [the British]; all the persons who worked in the harbors have increased the army of furious men, whose actions are all animated by a spirit of vengeance and hatred.” Those “furious” Massachusetts men wanted to strike back at their oppressors and replace the earnings that had been lost. One way to do so was privateering.
Engraving by Paul Revere entitled A view of the town of Boston with several ships of war in the harbour, 1774.
A final reason Massachusetts engaged in privateering had to do with its exceptionally strong connection to the sea, and the proven willingness of its mariners to fight against tyranny and in defense of their liberty. Massachusetts was one of the most maritime-centric of all the colonies. Ports large and small up and down the coast harbored fleets of vessels devoted to all manner of fishing and commerce. Boatbuilding in the colony employed many thousands of men. Massachusetts seafarers and their vessels were the raw material needed for privateering. And those men—and their fathers and grandfathers—had already demonstrated that they were ready to defend any attempt to infringe their rights. Nowhere was this inclination more evident than in their resistance to impressment.
This November 19, 1774, British print shows Bostonians, held captive in a cage suspended from the Liberty Tree, a stately old elm near Boston Common that was used by colonists as a rallying point for resistance against British laws and actions. The image shows the Bostonians being tormented by three British sailors. Around the tree and in the distance is military evidence of Britain’s stranglehold on Boston in the wake of the Boston Port Act.
For more than one hundred years, the perpetually shorthanded Royal Navy had impressed American sailors, forcing them to serve on naval ships against their will. The navy pleaded necessity. Without such reinforcements, it would have been unable to adequately man its ships and, therefore, it would have been considerably weakened. As the self-proclaimed “lords of the ocean,” the Royal Navy could not let that happen.
Massachusetts was a regular target of impressment raids, and it also had a history of violent defiance. The most famous instance occurred on April 22, 1769, when the brig Pitt Packet was returning to its home port of Marblehead, Massachusetts, with a load of salt from Cadiz. The British frigate HMS Rose stopped the Pitt Packet ostensibly to search for contraband but in reality to impress its crew. Four Irishmen who called Marblehead home hid in the forepeak to avoid detection but were discovered. They told the head of the press gang, Lieutenant Henry Gibson Panton, that “they wanted nothing but their liberty,” adding that “they were resolved to die, sooner than be pressed on board a man of war.”* To demonstrate their seriousness, the four men armed themselves with “a fish gig,† harpoon, musket, and axe.” According to John Adams, who would later defend the men in court, one of the four, Michael Corbet, spread a line of salt across the deck and told Panton, “If you step over that line, I shall consider it as a proof that you are determined to impress me, and by the eternal God of Heaven, you are [a] dead man.” Unmoved by the threat, Panton replied, “Aye! My lad . . . I have seen many a brave fellow before now.” Then he took his snuffbox out of his pocket, placed a pinch in his nostril, and boldly stepped forward across the line, attempting to seize Corbet. True to his word, Corbet drove his harpoon into Panton’s neck, severing his jugular vein and carotid artery. A short fight ensued, ending with the four Irishmen taken prisoner, one of whom was severely injured. In the meantime, Panton bled out in the cabin of the Pitt Packet.
