Rebels at sea, p.3
Rebels at Sea, page 3
Adams’s recollection of the events was recorded many years later and differs somewhat from some of the testimony at the trial. In that telling, there was an angry back-and-forth, and the Irishmen did threaten Panton with death should he try to impress them. But there was no line of salt, and Panton did not stride into danger. Instead, Panton sat on a pile of salt patiently trying to convince the Irishmen to surrender, noting that they were greatly outnumbered, and only after his repeated remonstrances failed did Panton’s men attempt to break down the bulkhead and haul the Irishmen out. During the attempt, shots were fired, and Corbet thrust the harpoon home.
Regardless of the truth, the four Irishmen were tried in the court of the vice admiralty in Boston for murder and piracy. Adams believed that “in law, truth, and conscience, the commander of the Rose frigate ought to have been prosecuted for piracy and murder on the high seas, in illegally sending a pressgang to enslave freemen.” But he knew that wouldn’t be a winning argument, so he took a different tack, getting the charges dropped by proving that the men had acted in self-defense and their actions constituted justifiable homicide. Reflecting on the Pitt Packet affair many years later, Adams said that it “contributed largely to render the sovereignty of parliament odious, detestable, and horrible to the people.”
One of the most dramatic examples of mariners defending themselves against what they perceived as British overreach occurred in June 1775 in Maine, which was part of Massachusetts at the time. On June 2, the armed British schooner Margaretta, with a crew of about forty men, accompanied by two smaller sloops, the Unity and the Polly, sailed into the harbor of the sparsely populated town of Machias. They were there to obtain timber for the British military and for civilians in Boston, who were fast running out of firewood, a necessity for baking bread and for heating water to wash clothes and boil salted beef to make it palatable.
The voyage was organized by Tory merchant Ichabod Jones, who owned the sloops. He had an agreement with General Thomas Gage, commander in chief of the British forces in Boston, to sell wood to the British after trading barrels of flour and pork for it in Machias. The people of Machias had long supplied wood to Boston, but these were different times. It was just a few months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, and even though the locals were low on food owing to a recent drought and therefore should have been eager to trade, Jones thought there might be trouble. So, Gage had sent the Margaretta to make a show of force and ensure that the transaction went smoothly.
Engraving of John Adams, circa 1784, by John Norman.
Detail of map of the coast of Maine showing Machias Bay, circa 1776.
The patriotic inhabitants of Machias were indeed irate over the recent clashes and extremely reluctant to aid the enemy. Their hunger, however, was very real. After vigorously debating their options for a few days, they relented. A majority of the town agreed to terms laid out by Jones, and the exchanges began. However, Jones made a major miscalculation. Placing too much faith in the agreement and in the Margaretta’s cannons to keep colonial tempers in check, he offloaded the food and imperiously and foolishly announced that it would only be given to those who had voted in favor of his stipulations.
Those who had voted no were furious and quickly armed themselves, “determined to take Capt. Jones, if possible, and put a final stop to his supplying the King’s troops with anything.” On Sunday, June 11, scores of Americans from Machias and surrounding settlements rushed a church in which Jones, the Margaretta’s commander, James Moore, and some of his officers were attending services. Hearing the advancing mob, Moore and his men jumped to their feet. When the attackers burst through the church door, the British sailors leapt out the windows and ran toward the harbor. They made it to the Margaretta just as the Americans were about to close in. Jones, for his part, had run into the woods.
Over the course of the next day, the rebels, valiantly led by Jeremiah O’Brien and Benjamin Foster, commandeered the two sloops and a schooner and fiercely attacked the Margaretta twice. Each time, before the shooting began, the Americans hailed Moore, urging him to surrender and be treated well or to fight and die. And each time, Moore refused to give in.
During the second assault, the Americans, who greatly outnumbered the British, swarmed onto the Margaretta, firing muskets and swinging pitchforks and axes. Moore was shot in the belly and the chest, and five of his men were wounded before the British surrendered. The Americans suffered one dead and six wounded (one of whom later died). When an American asked Moore why he hadn’t struck his colors‡ either of the times they hailed him, he said “he preferred death before yielding to such a set of villains.” Moore lingered for another day before succumbing to his wounds. As for Jones, he finally emerged from the woods, was arrested, and was sent to Cambridge to be put on trial as an enemy of the province. Found guilty, he was briefly jailed, and his property in Machias was seized.
James Fenimore Cooper, in an early naval history of the United States, called the Machias affair “the Lexington of the sea, for like that celebrated land conflict, it was a rising of the people against a regular force, was characterized by a long chase, a bloody struggle, and a triumph.” Those who battled the Margaretta were not privateersmen, but they demonstrated the privateering spirit, and offered a clarion signal that Massachusetts men and, more broadly, Americans were ready and able to fight at sea.
The first talk of privateering in Massachusetts began in the summer of 1775. As early as July 5, Thomas Jefferson expressed delight at what he had heard was underway in Massachusetts and other nearby colonies. “The New Englanders,” he wrote to his friend and physician George Gilmer, “are fitting out privateers, with which they expect to be able to scour the seas and bays of everything below ships of war; and may probably go to the European coasts, to distress the British trade there. The enterprising genius and intrepidity of these people are amazing.”
Jefferson’s “privateers” were still prospective, since at this early date no colony was distributing letters of marque. Nevertheless, these unofficial privateers were having an impact. On September 1, Vice Admiral Samuel Graves, British commander in chief of his nation’s North American station, which was headquartered in Boston, wrote that he was “impatient . . . to scourge the inhabitants of” the seaport towns that had harbored privateers. They had done “so much mischief to” British transports and tenders, and “were continually popping in and out as soon as a merchant ship appeared off” the coast.
Throughout the summer, an increasing number of individuals in Massachusetts pleaded with the colony’s legislature, the General Court, to authorize privateering. On July 19, Edward Emerson requested that the court allow him to fix up a “schooner for a privateer . . . enlist thirty men to serve on board . . . and use and improve said vessel for the defense of the sea coasts in the eastern part” of the colony. A few weeks later, Agreen Crabtree, a resident of Hancock, Maine, informed the court that he had already outfitted his schooner, the Hannah and Molly, “as a privateer to distress the enemies of the United Colonies,” and had captured two British vessels that were taking supplies to British forces in Boston. To secure retrospective legitimacy for his actions, Crabtree asked that the court give him a letter of marque. At the end of August, a committee was established to deliberate over these requests, and then after another month had passed, yet another committee was tasked with considering “the expediency of fitting out a number of armed vessels.”
The appointment of multiple committees that debated but recommended no action rankled many. William Tudor, judge advocate of the Continental army and a former clerk in John Adams’s law office, wrote to his old boss on September 30, expressing exasperation at the court’s dilatory stance. He complained that just a week earlier, British naval forces in Boston Harbor had “carried eleven sail of [colonial] vessels into Boston, where after the formality of a trial in admiralty court, they are confiscated, to the use of Graves and his harpies. Notwithstanding these continual depredations, our [provincial] assembly will not be prevailed upon to fit out privateers. The delicacy is absurd surely.”
Tudor did not have to wait much longer. On October 9 the court appointed a committee, not to debate the need for privateers but rather to prepare a bill that would put Massachusetts into the privateering business. The person in charge of the bill-drafting committee was Elbridge Gerry.
Born and raised in Marblehead, one of America’s foremost fishing communities, Gerry was part of a family that owned a fleet of ships engaged in coastal and transatlantic trade. He was thus keenly aware of the devastating impact of the British blockade on the economy of Massachusetts. On the same day the committee was formed, he wrote about his new task to Samuel Adams, second cousin of John Adams and one of the most outspoken and radical of revolutionaries. “My attention is directed to the fitting out of privateers, which I hope will make them swarm here. Is it not time to encourage individuals to exert themselves this way?”
The resulting bill—An Act & Resolve for Encouraging the Fixing out of Armed Vessels, to Defend the Sea Coast of America, and for Erecting a Court to Try and Condemn All Vessels, That Shall Be Found Infesting the Same—was passed by the General Court on November 1. Massachusetts officials understood its significance: International law dictated that only a sovereign nation could grant letters of marque. If Massachusetts authorized privateers, that would necessarily mean that the colony was assuming sovereign status. But Massachusetts, like the other colonies, was not yet ready to officially declare independence, and Gerry was given the delicate task of writing the preamble to the bill, in which he had to justify the law without going too far.
Gerry engaged in the same fiction that many, though certainly not all, colonial officials adopted: that America’s complaint was with Parliament and, more specifically, the administration of Prime Minister Lord North, who was driving Britain toward war—and not with the British people or with King George, who was still viewed in the colonies as a benevolent ruler who desired reconciliation. Gerry’s preamble stated that it was North’s majority in Parliament, “being divested of justice and humanity,” that had “been endeavoring, through a series of years,” to establish “a system of despotism over the American colonies” through “their venal and corrupt measures.” As a result, the administration had become “a political engine of slavery.” The preamble also argued that since the commencement of hostilities, the Royal Navy, at Parliament’s direction, had been “infesting the sea coasts [of the colonies] with armed vessels, and daily endeavoring to distress the inhabitants, by burning their towns, and destroying their dwellings . . . plundering livestock, and making captures of provision and other vessels, being the property of said inhabitants.” Furthermore, Gerry claimed that the Massachusetts Charter compelled the colony to defend itself against external enemies, the enemy in this case being Parliament itself. In relying on the charter for guidance, Gerry conveniently ignored the fact that the Massachusetts Government Act, one of the Intolerable Acts, had abrogated the charter in 1774.
Engraving of King George III by Robert Pollard, 1778.
Prime Minister Lord North, circa 1780.
As Gerry later explained, “I grounded [the preamble] on the royal charter of the province, which authorized us to levy war against the common enemy of both countries. Such we considered the British nation, with the ships of war and armies employed against us; and we, accordingly, as loyal subjects, used all the power given us by the charter to capture and destroy them.” In other words, Massachusetts was fighting on behalf of itself and Great Britain against Parliament. It was a highly creative, though dubious, argument. When the act was printed in a London magazine, it was labeled a “political curiosity.”
It was also effective. The Massachusetts act granted letters of marque to individuals to fit out and operate privateers at their own expense. They were limited to attacking British vessels that assaulted American ships or invaded any part of America, or that were supplying the British fleet or army. To guarantee that privateers would stay within the law, shipowners were required to post a $5,000 bond (later $4,000), which would be forfeited if the privateer violated the restrictions. Finally, the law established vice admiralty courts at various ports throughout the colony that would have the responsibility of determining whether vessels brought in by privateers were valid prizes. If a prize were deemed valid, the judge would condemn the vessel and cargo and arrange for them to be sold at a public auction. After deducting the costs of the trial and auction, the judge handed over the rest of the proceeds to the privateer’s owners to distribute according to the arrangement they had agreed upon among themselves and the vessel’s officers and crew.
America’s first official privateer force was authorized, and nobody was happier than John Adams. Four days after the November 1 law passed, Adams wrote to James Warren, speaker of the House of Representatives of the Massachusetts General Court: “I want to know what is become of the whalemen, codfishers and other seamen belonging to our province, and what number of them you imagine might be enlisted into the service of the continent, or of the province, for private adventures, in case a taste of privateering and maritime warfare should prevail.” Warren responded enthusiastically: “What numbers might be enlisted in that service I can’t readily compute, but I have no difficulty in supposing, that at least three battalions might be raised in this colony. The taste for it runs high here.”
The first letter of marque was granted on December 7, when the Boston Revenge officially became a privateer. Others followed, although initially not in the overwhelming numbers that Warren had predicted, no doubt because cold weather was fast approaching and because it took time for merchants to finance and outfit vessels. Through early 1776, perhaps a dozen Massachusetts privateers went out. Among them was the Washington, a schooner out of Newburyport, which received its commission just a few days after the Boston Revenge.
The Washington was a relatively small privateer of forty tons, crewed by forty men, and armed with nine cannons and ten smaller swivel guns. Its captain was twenty-eight-year-old Offin Boardman, born and bred in the waterside part of Newbury (which became Newburyport in 1764), and a descendant of a long line of mariners. The Washington left port in late December for a cruise along the coast. It was a dull cruise, until January 15.
That morning, off Plum Island, just a few miles from central Newburyport, Boardman spied a vessel in the distance. After a short chase, the brig Sukey surrendered without a shot being fired and was taken into Newburyport, which sits on the banks of the Merrimack River. Ten weeks out of Cork, Ireland, the Sukey was laden with supplies for British troops, including 18,000 pounds of the “best beef,” 18,000 pounds of butter, and 700 gallons of claret.
Later that day, a ship flying British colors appeared just beyond the bar at the mouth of the river, tacking back and forth. Some men in town surmised that the vessel must have been lost and was trying to get its bearings. A plan was soon devised, and seventeen men, led by Boardman, all hiding weapons under their coats, piled into three whaleboats and began rowing toward the mystery vessel. Upon arrival, Boardman hailed the ship, inquiring where it came from and where it was heading. It was the Friends, sailing from London to Boston, came the reply from Captain Archibald Bowie. He asked what land was nearby and where the whaleboats had come from. Boardman responded, “We are from Boston, do you want a pilot?”§
Bowie, eager for the assistance, and seemingly unconcerned about the large number of men in the whaleboats, assented and welcomed Boardman onto the ship. The two men shook hands and shared recent news about London and Boston, while the Americans on the whaleboats casually ascended the gangway and a few came onto the main deck. Satisfied that all was in place, Boardmen abandoned the ruse and demanded that Bowie strike his colors immediately. Thunderstruck, Bowie complied.
Like the Sukey, the Friends was brought into Newburyport. It represented another impressive haul. Its cargo, destined for British forces in Boston, included roughly 160,000 pounds of coal, 12,000 gallons of beer, and twenty-three live hogs. The Friends had another surprise as well: military documents hidden in a secret compartment, which, along with a British lieutenant on board, were promptly turned over to George Washington at his headquarters in Cambridge.
Not only was Massachusetts the first colony to officially sanction and promote privateering, its actions also prompted other colonies to take similar ones. As early as December 1775, Joseph Ward, aide-de-camp to his distant cousin Major General Artemis Ward, predicted that the privateering impulse would spread beyond Massachusetts. “The good success of our privateers . . . is very encouraging,” Joseph Ward wrote to John Adams, “and I hope it will stimulate the seafaring gentlemen to greater exertions in that way.” In due course, where Massachusetts went, New Hampshire and Rhode Island soon followed, enacting their own privateering legislation in January and early March 1776, respectively.
The importance of the Massachusetts act of November 1, 1775, in unleashing privateering in the colonies became even clearer in hindsight. Some forty years later, Adams would write that the passage of the privateering act “is one of the most important documents in history. The declaration of independence is a brimborion¶ in comparison with it.” But privateers were hardly the only American vessels looking to capture British ships. Colonial (later state) navies were also on the hunt.
