Rebels at sea, p.10
Rebels at Sea, page 10
The first task was to size up the potential prize. Merchantmen and supply ships were often formidable, bristling with cannons. If the vessel looked too imposing, the privateer would give it a pass. But if it was a manageable size, the next step was making sure it was a British ship, or a ship from a neutral country that was supplying the British, which was also an allowable target. This was not always straightforward. Many ships carried multiple flags from different nations, using them to throw off potential enemies—the ruse de guerre, or flying of false flags. American privateers relied on the same tactic, often raising the British colors to lure ships in and then, when in firing range, hauling down the Union Jack and replacing it with an American flag—required before engaging with the enemy, according to international law, so as to leave no doubt about the vessel’s true identity.†† On more than one occasion, two American privateers, both engaging in such deception, began firing on each other before realizing their mistake.
The best means of determining if a vessel was a potential prize was to get close enough to ask for identification, typically using a speaking trumpet. If the answer raised suspicions, the privateer would likely ask the captain or crew to take down the vessel’s colors and then prepare for boarding so the truth could be discerned. By the same token, if the answer made clear that the vessel was fair game, the privateer would order those on board to surrender. If the Americans were lucky, they would immediately do so. If there was any hesitation or aggressive action, the fight was on.
Privateers often tried to pound the enemy into submission through repeated broadsides. Sometimes sharpshooters on the masts or in the rigging picked off officers and crewmen on the other ship. Another tactic was to bring the privateer alongside the potential prize for boarding. Scores of privateersmen jumping over the rails, waving cutlasses and leveling pistols, frequently overwhelmed the enemy in short order, especially when they were boarding a merchantman with a small crew.
These drawings of the Philadelphia privateer sloop Comet (left), and the privateer schooner Mars, whose owners hailed from Cape May, Cape Henlopen, and Philadelphia, were made by a Hessian soldier, Andreas Wiederholdt. He was one of more than two hundred Hessians on board the British transport ship Triton, which was virtually wrecked by a major storm and then captured as a prize by the Comet and the Mars and brought into Little Egg Harbor, New Jersey. Note that these two vessels show variations on the American flag during the Revolution. The flags have thirteen stripes but no stars. The Comet has five red, four blue, and four white stripes, while the Mars has seven red stripes and six white.
Relatively large privateers with multiple cannons were not the only type of vessel that had any chance of success in a fight. The New Jersey privateer Skunk, an open boat with only two cannons and twelve men, captured nineteen prizes in 1779. But this feisty little vessel had obvious limitations. When it was off Egg Harbor, captain John Goldin spied through the fog what he thought was a very large merchantman in the distance, and warily approached it. Getting near, he spun the Skunk around, so that its stern gun was facing the looming ship, and let a single shot fly. Soon enough, Goldin realized his mistake. “A momentary pause ensued,” wrote the New Jersey State Gazette. “All at once, the merchantman was transformed into a British 74,‡‡ and in another moment she gave the Skunk such a broadside that, as Goldin expressed it, ‘the water flew around them like ten thousand whale-spouts.’ ” The Skunk was still afloat, but its sails and rigging were severely damaged. Goldin ordered his crew to man the oars, exhorting them to “lay low, boys! lay low for your lives!”
Some privateering captains relied on cunning rather than arms. In the summer of 1776, the Philadelphia privateer Hancock was cruising the tropics when it encountered the British merchantman Reward, which had just left Tortola and was bound for London. The 115-ton Hancock was dwarfed by the 600-ton Reward, and with only 12 cannons on board, the former had two fewer than the latter. But the Hancock’s captain, Wingate Newman, wasn’t interested in a fight. Instead, he hoped to deceive. He had a British flag fluttering atop the mainmast and, to further allay the British captain’s concerns, put out a light indicating that he was in need of a pilot.
It worked. As the New-England Chronicle later reported, “the captain of the [British ship] . . . taking the Hancock to be one of the Tyrant’s pilferers was very much rejoiced to fall in with her.” Since dusk was fast approaching, however, the British captain decided to wait until morning to lend a hand. When morning came, he invited Newman to come on board the Reward and share breakfast with him. Newman demurred, claiming that his hands were too few and most of them sick, making it difficult even to man a boat to take him over. In a courteous move, Newman invited the British captain and some of his crew to join him on the Hancock for a friendly repast. The British captain and twelve of his men climbed aboard the American privateer and were subdued in short order. Not a shot was fired. Newman sent twelve of his own men to the Reward, and the ruse was complete. The Reward was now Newman’s prize, and it was quite a catch, carrying in its hold roughly a thousand hogsheads of sugar, a considerable amount of cotton, and a few cannons. But the most interesting items in the cargo were the large turtles intended for Prime Minister Lord North. So that there would be no mistake as to the intended recipient of these chelonian gifts, each turtle’s shell had been inscribed with the minister’s name.
Schematic of a British third-rate ship of the line from 1728. This is the size of the ship that the Skunk encountered (see pages 77–78).
Despite the evidence to the contrary, many authors and historians over the years have claimed that privateers rarely fought, and in fact shied away from fighting. While capturing a prize in a bloodless manner was the preferred and most prudent course, it is not true that privateers were averse to fighting or that fights were rare. There are many accounts of privateers battling heroically, their crews sustaining numerous wounded and dead. Jonathan Haraden’s career offers a series of examples, and another is provided by Wingate Newman during a cruise of the Newburyport privateer Vengeance.
A 400-ton brig with 20 cannons and 120 men, the Vengeance left Newburyport, captained by Newman, on August 16, 1778. One morning a little over a month later, Newman saw an enemy sailing in the distance and the chase commenced. Once the Vengeance was within firing range, a brief battle ensued, with the privateer using both bow chasers§§ and broadsides, after which the British packet Harriot struck its colors. While none were injured on the Vengeance, the Harriot had one killed and six wounded. Four days later, there was another firefight with the British packet Eagle, which the Vengeance quickly took. Again the men of the Vengeance were unscathed, except that Newman received a musket ball in the thigh. According to the Vengeance’s surgeon, Samuel Nye, the Eagle had “two of her people killed, and four or five wounded; one of them so badly I was obliged to amputate his leg.” Unfortunately for the Vengeance, its luck didn’t hold. In October it engaged in a vicious fight with the British brig Defiance, which had a crew of seventy-two and fourteen cannons. When the smoke cleared and the Defiance surrendered, eight British were dead or wounded. On the victorious Vengeance, the corresponding number was fifteen.
Losing battles could be ruinous for privateers. On June 7, 1776, the privateer brig Yankee Hero, 120 tons and 14 cannons, sailed out of Newburyport with only 26 men, not the 140 that would make up a full complement. Captain James Tracy planned to stop in Boston to fill out his roster before setting out on a six-month cruise. Soon after the Yankee Hero left Newburyport, two small boats filled with armed colonials came alongside informing Tracy that a number of British transports had been spotted in Massachusetts Bay that day, prime candidates for capture. Imagining that a fat prize would soon be theirs, fourteen of the men in the boats chose to join Tracy, bringing his crew to forty.
A short while later, a large vessel appeared on the horizon. Thinking it might be one of the British transports, full of army supplies, Tracy sailed for it. When he came within six miles of his prey, however, he realized it was a British warship. Since the Yankee Hero, with a reduced crew, was no match for such a powerful adversary, Tracy headed for shore, assuming that the warship could not catch up before the privateer reached a nearby harbor on Cape Ann. But the warship, which turned out to be the frigate Milford—nearly 600 tons, with 28 cannons and 280 men—was a fast sailer. Benefiting from favorable wind, it came within half a mile of the Yankee Hero in an hour’s time and fired its bow chasers, to which Tracy responded with swivel guns, reserving his big cannons for the contest to come.
As the Milford closed to within fifty yards, it let go with a deafening broadside, and its marines, standing on a main deck that towered over the relatively diminutive Yankee Hero, rained down musket and swivel gun fire. According to a report from the American crew, for an hour and twenty minutes the two vessels “lay not a hundred feet from each other, yawing to and fro . . . the privateer’s men valiantly maintaining their quarters against such a superior force.” To avoid the Milford’s big cannons, Tracy maneuvered the Yankee Hero under the warship’s stern. As the smoke cleared, he could see “his rigging to be most shockingly cut, yards flying about without braces, some of his principal sails shot to rags and half his men to appearance dying, and wounded.”
The Milford sheared off, and Tracy and his men used the reprieve to try to repair the rigging, yards, and sails. But before they made much headway, the Milford came in for another round. The Yankee Hero got off two broadsides, which were returned, but Tracy went down, shot through his right thigh. Still eager to continue the fight, he draped himself over a nearby arms chest and continued to bark orders, yet the excruciating pain and loss of blood made him faint. He was brought to his cabin, where he lay unconscious for a few minutes. When he awoke and found that the privateer had stopped firing, and that many “people round him [were] wounded, and . . . in a most distressed situation, most of them groaning, some expiring,” Tracy ordered his men “to take him up in a chair upon the quarterdeck, and [he] resolved again to attack the ship, which was all this time keeping up her fire.”
It was not to be. On the verge of fainting again, and seeing his brig crippled and so few men able to fight, Tracy surrendered. Four Americans were dead and thirteen wounded. There were casualties on the Milford as well, though how many is not known. Tracy and the other wounded privateersmen were sent to a jail in Halifax, from which Tracy and his fellow officers were paroled in the fall. The rest of the crew was impressed into service on the Milford and the Renown. As for the Yankee Hero, it was repaired and transformed into the HMS Postillion, and sent to serve off Newfoundland.
Then there were those battles that the combatants neither won nor lost but rather fought to a debilitating draw. The privateer Hampden’s engagement in March 1779 was just such an encounter. While cruising in the Bay of Fundy late in the morning on March 7, the Hampden spied a large ship in the distance and began the chase. Seven hours later, the ship hoisted the Union Jack, to which the Hampden responded by firing a shot, hoping to get the ship to heave to. But it continued on, and as darkness fell, the Hampden lost sight of it.
That night, the Americans “were in complete readiness for action,” and as dawn broke, the ship was just a few miles distant: close enough for the Americans to see that it was a “beautiful” 800-ton East Indiaman “of much superior force,” with 32 large cannons, “two tier of cabin windows, and a stern galley.” Its name was Bridgewater. Despite being outgunned, the Hampden’s captain, Thomas Pickering, assumed that the Bridgewater, not being a warship, was “badly manned,” and therefore he “determined to fight” it “as long as we could.”
An hour later, the battle started when the Hampden “came up under his lee quarter within hail, hoisted Continental colors, and gave him a broadside.” For the next three hours the two ships pummeled each other with cannon and small arms fire. By the time the shooting tailed off, the Hampden’s main deck was awash in blood and covered with splintered wood. Its three masts and the bowsprit were gravely damaged, the rigging and sails shredded, with four men dead and sixteen wounded. Pickering was among those killed. A crewman who had both of his lower legs shot off would manage to hang on for nine agonizing days before dying. Another crewman had “his mouth shot to pieces.” The Bridgewater was devastated as well, though its casualty figure was unknown.
The shattered Hampden, with only its foresail intact, was in no position to take the Bridgewater as a prize. Instead, its surviving men let out a defiant cheer, and the American privateer limped away. A month later, the frigate arrived back in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, its flag at half-mast, lucky to have made it without being overtaken and captured by the British. As for the Bridgewater, it ultimately returned to England. James Fenimore Cooper, in his history of the navy, wrote that “this [fight] was one of the most closely contested actions of the war, both sides appearing to have fought with perseverance and gallantry.”
A few privateers simply disappeared, along with their crews. On the night of May 3, 1780, a somber scene unfolded at the home of William Pynchon, a prominent Salem lawyer. His son William Jr., called Billy, was having dinner with his parents before heading out that evening on the privateer Fame for a voyage to Europe in search of prizes. According to William’s diary, Billy “looks sober, eats but little, seems to have no appetite.” As Billy said goodbye, his mother and brother cried and his sister made “a long face; grief is contagious.”
The Fame was in Amsterdam five weeks later, having captured a few prizes on its sail across the Atlantic. It soon headed for home. On the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, it snared another prize, which arrived in Salem on September 20. Upon stepping ashore, a member of the prize crew crowed that the Fame “sailed finely and chased all she saw.”
The prize’s arrival caused the Pynchon family considerable worry, since it had been captured twelve days earlier, plenty of time for the Fame to have sailed back to port from the banks. That night, Pynchon vented in his diary: “Now who tells us where she is? At Halifax, New York, or was she chased in her turn, and gone into some harbor?” The next day he cried out for his son, writing “No news of the Fame; William! William! Animum rege.”¶¶ On October 6, Pynchon wrote that his wife “is greatly dejected, having no news of the Fame. She has neither sleep nor rest.” Two days later, he reported that a neighbor “prophesies that the Fame and crew are gone to [the] bottom; it at present seems to be the language of fear; they may, for any one circumstance to the contrary, be either at New York, Newfoundland, Charleston, Quebec, or Europe, as well as foundered. Why then need they be given up for lost? God forbid!” The Pynchons’ suffering would continue, and over the next ten months, William often repeated the same refrains—exclaiming that there was no news of the Fame or recording still more rumors of the lost ship. Then his entries stopped. Billy and the Fame had vanished.
As dangerous as battles at sea and sailing in perilous waters could be, getting prizes back to port was also a fraught and sometimes deadly task. Prizes were necessarily shorthanded, given that privateers, seeking to continue their cruises, could not afford to place too many crew members on board. Most of the time, the prize’s relatively small crew was not a liability, and the journey to port was uneventful. But there were many instances of prizes being recaptured by a British vessel. Even worse were those cases in which the prisoners retook their own ship.
The British privateer sloop Tartar was captured by three American privateers off the Capes of Delaware in early June 1779. A prize crew was placed on the sloop, and all of the men on board the Tartar were taken onto the American vessels as prisoners, save for the captain, a Mr. Downe, and three other men, two of whom were handcuffed. The three American privateers continued to the West Indies, while the Tartar was sent to Philadelphia. It never appeared. A few days after the capture, Downe managed to slip into the main cabin unnoticed, where he took the priming powder out of the pans of some pistols located there and also grabbed a cutlass. Rushing onto the main deck, Downe slashed violently at his captors and was soon joined in the attack by the Tartar crewman who had been given the liberty to walk the deck. Hearing the commotion, the two handcuffed prisoners stormed out of the hold and knocked down those Americans who were still standing. Two of the prize crew were killed, the rest injured or otherwise subdued. Captain again, Downe sailed the Tartar into British-held New York City, where the surviving Americans were thrown in jail.
Privateers that were too successful could be vulnerable to the prisoners on board as well. The sloop Eagle, a New London privateer with a crew of thirty and six cannons, had an enviable run in the spring of 1779 cruising Long Island Sound and Block Island Sound, capturing seven British vessels. Manning them as prizes stripped the Eagle of half of its crew and created an imbalance on board the privateer, where there were now sixteen prisoners who immediately began plotting their revenge. When an opportune moment presented itself, they rose up and slaughtered every American save for two boys. The victors then sailed the Eagle to British-controlled Newport.
Once a ship was captured, sent into port, adjudicated in the vice admiralty court, and found to be a lawful prize, a public auction was held by the court’s marshal, the local sheriff, or an auction house to sell the ship and its contents. Anyone could bid, including quartermasters of the army and navy, as well as the owners of the privateers themselves. The proceeds were then distributed according to the privateer’s articles of agreement. In the later years of the war, instead of selling the contents and doling out the shares in money, the cargo itself was dispensed because Continental currency depreciated so rapidly that its value declined almost the second it was paid—hence the phrase “not worth a continental,” which was commonly used at the time.
