Rebels at sea, p.17
Rebels at Sea, page 17
“There has not been a more memorable action this war,” Adams told Genet, “and the feats of our American frigates and privateers have not been sufficiently published in Europe. It would answer valuable purposes, both by encouraging their honest and brave hearts, and by exciting emulations elsewhere, to give them a little more than they have had, of the fame that they have deserved. Some of the most skillful, determined, persevering, and successful engagements that have ever happened upon the seas, have been performed by American privateers against the privateers from New York.” Adams hoped that Genet could rectify the lack of coverage, at least in this case. Genet complied, and an account of the Thorn’s encounter with the Governor Tryon and the Sir William Erskine was published in the Mercure de France.
Painting by Irwin Bevan showing the American privateer Thorn capturing two British privateers, the Governor Tryon and the Sir William Erskine. The painting was done in the late 1800s or early 1900s.
The “Mischievous Holker”
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The Pennsylvania privateer brig Holker was cruising off the New Jersey coast late in the afternoon on July 6, 1780, when Captain Matthew Lawler recognized a ship in the distance. It was the former Pennsylvanian privateer sloop Active, which had been captured by the frigate HMS Iris just a few months earlier and was now the Admiral Rodney, a British privateer captained by Daniel Moore. The two privateers were almost evenly matched. The Holker had one hundred men, sixteen cannons, two cohorns, and a tier of swivels, while the Admiral Rodney had an equal number of cannons and eighty-three men. Both captains were up for a fight, and in short order “a very close and furious engagement” commenced.
Within twenty minutes, Moore had been struck in the head by swivel shot. Bleeding profusely, he continued to bark orders for a few minutes more before being relieved of his command and taken below. For another hour the two vessels pummeled each other at close range. How the battle ended depended on who was doing the telling. According to a British account in the New-York Mercury, the Americans fought bravely but turned tail first. “So much justice should be done the rebel crew as to say that, though in an infamous cause, they did not exhibit any symptoms of cowardice until half-past five o’clock; when, after receiving a well-directed broadside from the Rodney, they uttered a dreadful scream, made sail, and ran off.” Lawler’s account was much briefer, stating that “the enemy sheared off twice, at the same time an armed schooner coming down,” at which point the Holker sailed away because it was in no shape to contend with two opponents.
Regardless of whose story is more accurate, the bloody result was the same. The Holker returned to Philadelphia with six dead and sixteen wounded, with Lawler among the latter. The Admiral Rodney returned to New York, carrying six dead crewmen and twenty wounded. As for Moore, he died of his injuries a few days after landing and was buried at Trinity Church after a well-attended funeral, featuring fine speeches about his courage and fidelity to Britain.
Such a disastrous encounter was the exception to the rule for the Holker, arguably the most successful privateer of the Revolution. Owned by Blair McClenachan, it brought in seventy-one prizes over four years, under four captains on eleven cruises, a few in the company of one or two other privateers. In one of its most triumphant cruises, it captured ten prizes, which realized nearly £2,000,000 at auction. One of the ships captured during this cruise had an enormous quantity of flour and beef on board, bound for the British army. Instead, the food was sold to the Continental army on good terms and delivered to Washington’s troops.
Model of the Philadelphia privateer Fair American. In addition to its highly successful joint cruise with the privateer Holker, the Fair American (sixteen guns), captained by Stephen Decatur, went on a cruise in 1780 that netted nine prizes. One of those prizes, the Mercury, had on board seven British officers’ wives traveling to New York to join their husbands. When the prize was brought in to Philadelphia, the women were allowed by Congress to continue on to New York. According to one of the men on board the Fair American, as the Americans were attacking the Mercury, they “could hear the screeches of women.” After surrendering, the captain of the Mercury said that he “would not have struck so soon if it had not been for the ladies being on board.”
The only other vessel besides the Admiral Rodney that gave the Holker trouble was the Richmond, a Scottish privateer. Though relatively unimposing, with only ten cannons and thirty-four men, the Richmond put up a ferocious fight over two days just beyond the Charleston bar. The Holker and another American privateer, the Fair American, attacked first, at twilight on October 15, 1780, but they were beaten off. The next morning, the Holker and the Fair American attacked again, and after an hour and a half retreated to regroup, whereupon they renewed their attack, this time forcing the Richmond to strike its colors after another forty-five minutes of intermittent broadsides. Despite the intensity of the engagements, only one person on the Richmond died. Three were wounded. The Holker and the Fair American between them lost only one man and had one wounded.
The Richmond sailed for Philadelphia with a prize crew and eight prisoners on board. Though small in number, the prisoners were large in their resolve. They rose up and commandeered the arms locker, making themselves masters of the ship. A few of the Americans switched allegiance and joined the British, while the rest of the prize crew was loaded onto a jolly boat†† with some food and set adrift. The Richmond’s new crew sailed to Charleston, their original destination, which was then occupied by the British. So relieved were the ship’s owners that they gave each of the men who brought it in a reward of five guineas. No wonder the owners were delighted: the Richmond’s cargo, including silver bullion, two boxes of gold watches, and a great range of dry goods and wine, was worth about £175,000.
Two of the Americans in the prize crew who had joined the British proved to be rather foolhardy. A few months later, they returned to Philadelphia hoping to secure a cut of the prize money that the Holker and the Fair American had amassed in their recent cruise. The turncoats were seized by local authorities and tried for piracy. One was acquitted; the other, Thomas Wilkinson, found guilty “of joining with others of the crew in a revolt,” was hanged.
Like more than a few other privateers, the Holker was willing to lend a hand to those in need. In August 1779, while cruising off the New Jersey coast, Captain George Geddes saw a badly damaged ship riding low in the water and ordered his men to sail closer. It was a Boston brig captained by William Clark that had been en route to Port-au-Prince with a load of lumber. It had been nearly destroyed a few days earlier during a storm off North Carolina, with its mainmast and part of the upper hull ripped away. Clark’s crew had tried to fill the breach by stuffing it with wooden shingles and oakum, but still the ocean kept rushing in, forcing them to pump continuously for forty hours while standing in water up to their necks until they “were faint and ready to expire.”
A few men had been washed overboard, and one drowned, while many of those who remained were racked with dysentery. All of the brig’s navigational equipment and maps had been lost, and the only sustenance left was a nearly empty barrel of salt pork, a few pieces of hardtack, and a limited supply of water—to lighten the brig, a number of hogsheads of water had been pitched over the side. Geddes gave Clark everything he asked for and helped repair some of the worst damage. He said that the brig could stay with the Holker until it returned to port, but Clark wanted to set off immediately. “He acknowledged with a grateful heart, the kindness he received from Captain Geddes, and took his leave.” The brig arrived in Egg Harbor a few days later, having survived a squall.
About a week before this rescue at sea, the Holker captured the brig Diana off Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Its cargo included eighty cannons, ranging from two- to six-pounders, and more than 150 barrels of gunpowder and assorted goods from Europe and the Far East. Those munitions were a boon both to privateers and Continental forces, and in a gesture of respect, Geddes sent Washington a “pair of very elegant pistols” he had taken from the prize.
In early May 1781, McClenachan received distressing news. An article from Rivington’s New York Royal Gazette, reprinted in the Pennsylvania Gazette, reported that the Holker had been captured by the HMS Fox and brought into the harbor at St. Lucia, putting an end to its days as a privateer. McClenachan grieved for the loss of his favorite and most profitable ship, but one month later, Captain Roger Keane sailed the Holker into Philadelphia, astonishing the city’s residents and delighting McClenachan. In addition to bringing back a number of prizes, Keane told his boss that the British had taken to calling his vessel the “mischievous Holker.” This surprising development led the Pennsylvania Gazette’s editor, John Dunlap, to do some crowing of his own; he wrote a piece to inform Rivington’s of its egregiously mistaken notice of the Holker’s demise, noting that “after a successful cruise in the West-India seas (in which she was the terror of British commerce),” the Holker had “returned home in good condition to her native port.”
The end finally came on March 2, 1783. The Holker’s fourth captain, John Quinlan, had just completed a productive six-week cruise in the Caribbean during which the privateer had captured sixteen prizes. He was heading back to Martinique when the HMS Alcmene gave chase through a storm. The Holker crowded on the sails, but the strain on the hull was too great, and some of its planking pulled apart, letting the water flood in, ultimately upsetting the privateer and pitching the crew into the ocean. The Alcmene launched its boats and managed to save fifty-one men, the remaining forty-three having gone down with their ship. The Holker’s spectacular run was over.
Whaleboat Privateersmen and Outlaws
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During the Revolution, Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull Sr. issued more than a dozen privateering commissions to whaleboats, granting them permission to seize British shipping in Long Island Sound and adjacent waters and also to pillage those parts of Long Island under British control and take loyalist property on land. Many of the whaleboat privateers lived up to their commissions, restricting their attacks to British vessels and subjects. One of the most enterprising of these privateersmen was Ebenezer Jones, of Stamford.‡‡ His three whaleboats—the Rattlesnake, the Viper, and the Saratoga—each crewed by ten heavily armed men, and boasting a single swivel gun, captured more than thirty vessels.
Detail of a 1776 map by Thomas Jefferys showing Long Island Sound, where whaleboat privateers were particularly active. If you look closely, you will see that the sound was also called the Devil’s Belt, a nod to the fast currents and shoals that mariners encountered there.
Not all whaleboat privateers, however, were so scrupulous about their targets. A few went beyond solely attacking loyalists and used their commissions as a license to raid fellow patriots on Long Island. In April 1781, New York’s governor, George Clinton, wrote to Trumbull complaining that “it has been lately represented to me that several of the inhabitants of Suffolk County whose attachment to the cause of America is indisputable, have been divested of their property by parties acting under commission from your state.” Clinton demanded that restitution be made, and that his fellow governor take action to prevent any more pillaging.
Reports of criminal acts were not news to Trumbull. In fact, a few months earlier he had revoked whaleboat privateering commissions due to the “many evils committed by the armed boats.” But that action had not halted the attacks, and Trumbull had no interest in admitting to Clinton the scope of the problem. Instead, he deflected Clinton’s claims, asserting that the whaleboat privateers had been issued clear instructions with their commissions, setting forth acceptable behavior, and that attacking fellow patriots was certainly not condoned. To guarantee adherence to those instructions, he added, the privateers had put up bonds of £2,000 each, which would be forfeited if they engaged in illicit activity. However, Trumbull did concede “that in some instances this good intention has by evil men been contravened,” and that if any of Connecticut’s whaleboat privateers had stepped over the line of legality, those harmed should support their grievances with proof so that “full justice may be obtained.”
Connecticut governor Jonathan Trumbull Sr., the only colonial governor to side with the colonists against Great Britain.
There it stood until August 1781, when Lieutenant Caleb Brewster, a member of the Culper Spy Ring, which gathered intelligence on British army operations in New York for General Washington, informed Clinton of a new round of “atrocities” committed by Connecticut’s whaleboat privateersmen, who had been allowed by Trumbull to sally forth again with new commissions. Two whaleboats had landed at midnight on August 14 in Miller Place, on Long Island. The privateersmen marched to the houses of Captain Ebenezer Miller and his brother Andrew, both of whom had fought for the American cause. As they were confiscating Ebenezer’s arms, his son William, hearing the commotion downstairs, raised the bedroom window to look outside. One of the whaleboatmen raised his gun and fired, killing the boy instantly. In the meantime, at Andrew’s house the men didn’t even ask him to turn over his weapons. Instead, as soon as he opened the door, “one of the party struck him with the breech of his gun, broke the bone over his eye, tore his eye all to pieces, broke his cheek bone and left him for dead.” Both houses were then ransacked.
The same group of whaleboatmen, Brewster claimed, had crossed the sound multiple times on similar expeditions. In one instance they hung a patriot, army officer Richard Thorn, upside down to force him to divulge where he kept his money, until he passed out. They then cut him down, and when he revived slightly, one of the privateersmen slashed his neck. Next, the marauders attacked another patriot named Coulne in the same manner. “There’s not a night but they are over,” Brewster complained, and “if boats can cross, people can’t ride the roads but what they are robbed.”
Brewster’s alarming report prompted Clinton to renew his remonstrations with Trumbull, urging him to revoke all whaleboat privateering commissions—or else, he warned, there would be an avalanche of lawsuits and a great rift between the two states. Trumbull revised the commissions to make it clear that privateers were prohibited from “landing or going on Long Island above high water mark.” Nevertheless, the problems continued, and no doubt were exacerbated by raids conducted by noncommissioned or freelance whaleboat “privateers.” Hoping to finally put an end to the raids, in November Trumbull voided all privateering commissions. According to historian Jackson Kuhl, “After this, complaints about the Connecticut boats vanish from the public records but raids . . . persisted into the following year, even if they became less frequent in the aftermath of Yorktown.”
The Congress and the Savage
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Captain Thomas Graves,§§ of the British sloop of war HMS Savage, sixteen six-pounders, had done an excellent job terrorizing Americans and destroying their property. In the company of two other British naval ships, he sailed up and down the Potomac River for five weeks in the spring of 1781, burning plantations, houses, warehouses, and any other rebel property within a short distance from the riverbank. Graves also welcomed any Black enslaved persons seeking to take advantage of the offer of protection and freedom if they came over to the British side. One of the only plantations that Graves didn’t burn was George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. And that made Washington furious.
A View of Mount Vernon with the Washington Family, by Benjamin Latrobe, 1796.
While he was off fighting, Washington had left his home and plantation in the care of his cousin Lund Washington. On April 14, Lund watched as Graves’s men landed across the river on the Maryland shore and torched a number of houses. Graves, who knew full well who owned Mount Vernon, sent marines ashore on the Virginia side. The men demanded that Lund provide them with food, and threatened to burn the plantation to the ground if the demand was not met. Lund replied “that when the General engaged in the contest, he had put all to stake, and was well aware of the exposed situation of his house and property, in consequence of which he had given him orders by no means to comply with any such demands, for that he would make no unworthy compromise with the enemy, and was ready to meet the fate of his neighbors.”
When the marines returned and told Graves what had transpired, he ordered the Savage to sail across the Potomac and moor directly in front of Mount Vernon, whereupon he invited Lund on board. Hoping to calm tempers, Lund brought with him a live chicken as a present for the captain. Lund repeated the bold words he had offered to the marines, and Graves treated him with great kindness and deference, stating that he had the utmost respect for General Washington and would never entertain the idea of burning his plantation. Graves’s warm treatment had a transformative effect on Lund, who, after returning to shore, immediately sent a boat to the Savage filled with sheep, hogs, and other provisions. Seventeen of Washington’s enslaved people also escaped, throwing in their lot with the British. With that, Graves’s mini-armada departed downriver, continuing to light up the countryside.
If Lund thought he would be thanked for having saved Mount Vernon from being torched, he was badly mistaken. When Washington heard of these events, he dashed off an angry letter to his cousin. “It would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that, in consequence of your noncompliance with their request, they had burnt my house, and laid the plantation in ruins. You ought to have considered yourself as my representative, and should have reflected on the bad example of communicating with the enemy, and making a voluntary offer of refreshments to them, with a view to prevent a conflagration.” He continued: “But to go on board their vessels, carry them refreshments, commune with a parcel of plundering scoundrels, and request a favor, by asking a surrender of my negroes, was exceedingly ill judged, and, it is to be feared, will be unhappy in its consequence, as it will be a precedent for others, and, may be, become a subject of animadversion [criticism or censure].”
