Patriot Pirates (16 page)

Even with pride at stake, negotiations to integrate privateers into a manageable fleet under Manley’s leadership were testy. Chain of command, prize shares, ship-to-ship signals, and compensation to civilian crewmen “in case they lose life or limbs” had to be worked out. Beyond providing ammunition and other supplies, the government had to cover any losses to privateer owners that exceeded prize earnings. There was one more owner stipulation. “The Court will take off the restrictions with respect to manning.” After four months of spotty enforcement, the embargo was lifted.

Privateer sailors were as stubborn as their employers. They wanted something better than government-issue “stinking New England rum” to drink. And they demanded that the joint deployment be given a fixed time limit. Without it, “The owners are willing, the men are not.” Their participation was capped at twenty days.

Warren’s labors in hammering out the agreement led Adams to push Congress to create the Eastern Navy Department with Warren as its lead member. “The profit to you will be nothing,” he wrote his friend, “but the honor and virtue the greater.”

On May 21, the little fleet left Boston and headed north toward Cape Ann. One of Manley’s first communications was to remind the largest privateer,
General Mifflin,
“not to part with us upon consideration whatever. If we should fall in with two British frigates you are to engage one with the ship
Hancock
.”

General Mifflin
responded that some of its crew had suddenly taken ill with smallpox and the ship must depart the fleet at once. Two months later, the privateer was cited in a Liverpool newspaper for having chained the skipper of a transport seized off the coast of Ireland below deck for several weeks, leaving him crippled and causing “his flesh to swell to a shocking degree. All his prayers and entreaties were in vain. The inhuman tyrants had no compassion.”

And
General Mifflin
wasn’t the first privateer to bail.
Sturdy Beggar
and
Satisfaction
had stuck around less than two days, and within a week the Continental frigates were sailing on their own.

Flying false flags several miles ahead of McNeill, Manley lured into range HMS
Fox
, twenty-eight guns, subduing it after a ninety-minute battle in which four Americans and four British were killed. Witnesses aboard
Fox
reported that Manley, hollering through a voice trumpet, declared his vessel “an American rover” before unleashing his first broadside. During the fight he “ran continually from one end of the ship to the other, flourishing and swinging a great cutlass around his head and with the most horrid imprecations swearing he would cut down the first man who should attempt to leave his quarters.”

Boston
, arriving late to the scene, pumped a volley into
Fox
after the British warship already had struck its colors. This—and McNeill’s immediate claim on half of
Fox
’s prize value—infuriated Manley, and the captains icily continued their expedition with
Fox
in tow. Continued quarrels over signals and course directions came to a bitter head when the vessels encountered a pair of large enemy frigates,
Rainbow
and
Flora
, forty-four and thirty-four guns, off Nova Scotia in July.

The engagement was a forty-hour zigzag affair during which the Americans appeared to
Rainbow
’s commander, Sir George Collier, “irresolute and undecided as to their course and conduct.” This was an understatement. Manley mistook
Rainbow
for a giant ship-of-the-line and wavered before attacking, giving
Flora
time to enter the fray. The prize master aboard
Fox
sailed ineptly and was unable to lend fire support to
Hancock
. And McNeill, concluding that the enemy was unbeatable, tacked for the horizon, an act Manley understandably “execrated with many oaths.”

The last hours of the battle were severe, with multiple dead on both sides. Given an ultimatum to strike or die, Manley ran up extra sails in a last effort to escape. Collier wrote in his after-action report, “I therefore poured a number of shot into him, which brought him to the desired determination.”
Hancock
and
Fox
surrendered. “His capture will be extremely dispiriting to the rebels,” the British captain exalted, “as they placed the entire direction of their navy in him.”

When news of the debacle reached Boston in August, James Warren lamented the “sad reverse” and confided wearily to Adams, “I sigh for private life and incline to resign.”

Bradford offered a captive British officer to “redeem poor Manley” from imprisonment. When the exchange was completed eight months later, Manley returned to Boston to face court-martial for surrendering
Hancock
. During his absence, McNeill had supplied much lurid testimony about his colleague’s “blunders and misconduct” in the engagement against HMS
Rainbow
. The tactic backfired. McNeill, with his “overbearing haughtiness and unlimited conceit,” was found guilty and dismissed from the service while Manley was acquitted.

Unable to secure another Continental command, Manley signed on to the 16-gun privateer,
Cumberland
. Its owners’ design of a flag for the vessel signified their high confidence in their famed captain. Said to be “unusually large,” it featured the image of a pine tree, a snake with thirteen coils chopped into thirteen pieces, and the motto, “Join or Die.” Unfortunately, just weeks after sailing for the West Indies in January 1779,
Cumberland
fell to HMS
Pomona
and Manley was jailed with his crew in Barbados.

Past performance was the primary gauge of a privateer captain’s potential for success. Given the business’s dicey nature, fortune rather than experience became the quality most valued by investors. Manley, after bribing his way out of the Barbados jail, went on to skipper other vessels; his Revolutionary career was barely at its midpoint. After losing their entire investment, however,
Cumberland
’s owners likely would have concurred with whispers about him that circulated when he returned to Boston in quest of a new assignment. In contrast to 1776, when word around Washington’s headquarters had been that “good fortune seems to stick to him,” Manley was a two-time loser now. As a result, Revolutionary privateering’s first star was considered “an unlucky commander.”

In those days even a tainted skipper didn’t stay unemployed for long. In June 1779 Manley set sail in
Jason
, a twenty-gun vessel with a crew of one hundred. A few miles out of port, he was hailed by a state sloop and told, on order of the General Court, to quit his voyage and join a combined fleet of government and private warships. The debacle of the
Hancock
experience two years earlier had been forgotten. Officials had organized another joint operation on an even larger scale in an effort to expel a garrison of redcoats from Maine’s Penobscot Bay.

Fifteen privateers and twenty-four civilian transports, two-thirds of them from Essex County, would join three Continental brigs for the mission—the largest American naval expedition of the Revolution, and Manley wanted nothing to do with it. After agreeing to submit to the court order, he set his course in the opposite direction and headed off to raid loyalist transports off New York. It would prove a smart move.

His fortunes remained mixed, however. He captured several prizes, including, after an especially “warm engagement,” a pair of British privateers, one of which carried two sacks of gold dollars it had captured from a Spanish trade ship. But in September,
Jason
was overhauled by HMS
Surprize
. After suffering eighteen killed and a dozen wounded, most of
Jason
’s crew “broke open the forehatches and ran below, refusing to fight against a frigate.” Manley struck his colors.

When the British captain brought him aboard, he observed that the rim of Manley’s hat had been shot off during the battle. “You’ve had a narrow escape,” to which came the reply, “I wish to God it had been my head.”

In 1777 Manley’s captors had treated him with dignity, believing him the commander “in whom the Congress place all their confidence, and who is the only man of real courage they have by sea.” But this third capture provoked no respect. Unlike in 1777 when his vessel had been a Continental frigate, this time he was skippering a privateer. As such, he had no rights under the British legal system and no honor in the eyes of his adversaries. The rules of Parliament’s “Pirate Act” now applied.

Next stop for Manley was Mill Prison, thirty miles from his birthplace in England. He would be there for two years.

1779

P
ENOBSCOT,
M
AINE

Massachusetts tried again to assemble a joint fleet of privateers and Continental frigates in 1779, two years after its failure with
Hancock
and
Boston
. The goal this time was to drive seven hundred redcoats from their foothold at the mouth of Maine’s Penobscot River. The outpost threatened the region’s fishing and lumber industries, gave haven to loyalists, and posed a standing insult to New England’s maritime resurgence.

Puffed with confidence over the success of its privateers, the state assembled an amphibious task force for the mission. Newburyport, Essex County’s northernmost port, immediately pledged four armed vessels. Other towns initially showed “no general sense of urgency.” Their hesitancy was a negotiating position from which, after four weeks of dickering, they got the state to indemnify them from any financial losses resulting from the expedition and to allot ship owners 100 percent of any captured booty.

Ground forces were led by Massachusetts natives, including one of Boston’s favorite sons, Paul Revere. Dudley Saltonstall commanded the fleet of three Continental brigs, fifteen privateers, and twenty-four transports. With a personality hard to like (John Paul Jones, no sweetheart himself, called him “rude, unhappy”), Saltonstall possessed two distinctions that would prove significant. He was from Connecticut (Silas Deane’s brother-in-law, in fact), and he was a Congress-appointed officer.

The expedition, a sure snap against a vastly overmatched foe, was a fiasco. In multiple councils of war aboard Saltonstall’s flagship, the ground and sea commanders argued over who should initiate the assault on the Penobscot garrison. The former demanded a preliminary naval cannonade; the latter feared to sail too far up river lest “the enemy send a reinforcement of heavy ships. In that case they may block us all in and may take the whole of us.” As they dithered, a battle fleet under Sir George Collier arrived from New York and did exactly that.

One American vessel, offshore at the time, escaped. The others all fell to the Royal Navy (“transports on fire, men of war blowing up”) or grounded themselves in the river shallows, crewmen and soldiers fleeing on foot back to Massachusetts, an arduous slog in the summer heat that claimed the lives of hundreds.

Boston newspapers were ruthless in their derision. “Our irregular troops made an irregular retreat; it is in imitation of an irregular brigadier and a new-fangled commodore, without any loss excepting the whole fleet.”

An inquiry by the state’s General Court ruled that the disaster was entirely Saltonstall’s fault. Meanwhile “each and every” state and private skipper was found to have “behaved like brave experienced good officers.” But recent studies, notably George E. Buker’s
The Penobscot Expedition
, reveal a concerted “Massachusetts Conspiracy” to make the Connecticut captain the scapegoat.

The motive was simple. Costs to the state, which was on the hook for private losses as well as its own, exceeded $7 million. Nailing Saltonstall as the sole culprit shifted liability to Congress, his sponsor. Buker’s review of the expedition’s records reveals that, of all its officers, Saltonstall was the most aggressive and impatient for action. But opposite testimony provided by the Massachusetts men on his staff gave the Court grounds to force his expulsion from government service.

One typical example read, “I have been told by one who fell into the enemy’s hands that Britons spoke highly in praise of the commanders of the land forces as being judicious in their movements; but that the commander of the fleet they would hang for a coward.” Unfortunately, any further examination of this hearsay was impossible because the witness was “since deceased.” Congress subsequently paid Massachusetts $2 million in compensation for Saltonstall’s “uniform backwardness” and his “want of proper spirit and energy” in the Penobscot debacle.

Only one state officer was cited for misconduct—the artillery colonel Paul Revere, whose alleged “disobedience of orders and unsoldierlike behavior tending to cowardice” led to his brief arrest. Humiliated, Revere spent the next three years trying to clear his name, finally securing a statement from the Court in 1782 that granted him “equal honor as the others in the same expedition.”

A year earlier, Saltonstall had written the owner of a transport named
Minerva
requesting a job as its captain. The owner, who’d lost a privateer at Penobscot, replied that he wanted Saltonstall to skipper the vessel “as a cruiser rather than as merchantman, and chiefly that you may regain the character with the world which you have been most cruelly and unjustly robbed of.”

They converted
Minerva
to a warship. Among its prizes was
Hannah
, a transport carrying cargo worth £80,000. One of the top investors in the venture was Paul Revere.

Seven

They have taken up eleven bodies. The water was covered with heads, legs, arms, entrails, etc.

—Connecticut Courant,
July 1776

During the action, no slaughterhouse could present so bad a sight with blood and entrails lying about as our ship did.

—London Chronicle,
August 1776

One shot took off three midshipmen’s heads who happened to stand in range.

—Pennsylviania Gazette,
August 1776

Dire was the slaughter of the Rebel crews, and many a mangled corpse the decks bestrewed; while all down meandering on their sides issued in purple streams the sanguined gore.

—New York Gazette,
August 1777

M
anley’s commodore’s pennant from
Hancock
was delivered as a trophy to George III. Britons exalted over the “utmost bad consequence to the rebels” of losing the man understood to be “the chief executive officer of their navy.” It gave another push to the pendulum of war sentiment whose swings were becoming extreme.

British newspapers regularly printed letters from distant correspondents—travelers, merchants, military men. Their random news and often clashing viewpoints constituted the freshest perspectives available about the state of the war. A typical sequence in May 1777 featured one letter assuring London readers that naval patrols “have been very successful against the Americans and almost knocked up their trade by the many captures they have taken,” and then a few days later another letter passing a frantic rumor that forty out of a fleet of sixty transports had fallen to privateers on a recent voyage from Ireland to Grenada.

Similarly, a letter exhibiting utter confidence (“Whatever people may say or think in England, everybody here is satisfied that the rebellion is dying apace”) was followed by one full of worry. “These islands swarm with those vermin of American privateers. A day does not pass but they take some vessel.”

The editorial whiplash was constant. A gentleman on shipboard in America published an editorial in Liverpool that began, “Put no confidence in any news favoring the rebels.” Another groaned in the same paper, “Nothing is safe here. We cannot help thinking ourselves much neglected.” And a letter pronouncing that “the rebel force is everywhere rapidly declining” was countered with another’s hysteria. “God knows, if this war continues much longer, we shall all die with hunger.”

Unlike its strategic progress, the war’s impact on the British economy wasn’t in question. Maritime losses in the West Indies alone stood at £2 million by mid-1777. During the Seven Years’ War, insurance premiums had peaked at 6 percent of a cargo’s replacement cost. In the first eighteen months of the Revolution, that number increased fivefold. Newspapers had chronicled the “great pain” of merchants and underwriters from the beginning, and now editorials from the business community were frequent and howling. Trade was “ruined,” the Royal Navy “pitiful,” French complicity “iniquitous,” and Parliament content “to stand neuter.”

Many British armchair tacticians had ideas to help turn the tide. Most aimed at squashing French meddlers in the West Indies, who, it was said, “enjoy all the advantages of war without any of the inconveniences.” Two frigates assigned to blockade Martinique would make a good start, one merchant opined in the
London Chronicle
. “No step the Ministry could take would distress them more.”

Another said threats of “British thunder” against “French and other neutral ports” that were trading with the rebels would smoke out duplicitous allies. “An open enemy is much better than a secret enemy, and we trust Britain will yet take severe vengeance on every pitiful associate of the American rebels.” The view reflected people’s growing awareness that Britain had other secret enemies besides France.

The crews of privateers bearing congressional commissions, especially those signed by William Bingham, were increasingly of mixed nationality. Indeed, the only English spoken by many West Indian privateers was the “Strike to Congress!” they yelled as they closed on their prey. Spanish and Danish islands known to deal with American blockade-runners were now said to receive, with only perfunctory stealth, British prizes for settlement. As for the Netherlands, a diplomat’s observation that “these Dutch browse in all pastures” struck a sour note in London after reports that the fort at St. Eustatius had returned the cannon salute of a visiting Continental brig,
Andrew Doria
, in November 1776.

The gesture, which signified respect for sovereign flags, fueled British paranoia that the Netherlands was now “so far debased” as to recognize the American nation. After France officially entered the war on America’s side in 1778 and St. Eustatius replaced Martinique as the foremost “nest of spies and rogues who carried on clandestine trade with the enemies of Great Britain,” that paranoia proved justified.

Even in the face of such two-faced behavior, merchants generally stopped short of demanding an all-out military escalation against their European neighbors and against the rebels as well. Their early hope for a quick victory had banked, in the French foreign ministry’s analysis, on “the idea that all the ports in America would be blockaded and their ships burned. They had not taken into consideration the impossibility of guarding a coast 1500 miles long.”

Reports filtering back to America indicated that many British businessmen were “petitioning for an accommodation with the colonists upon commercial principles only.” Benjamin Franklin, writing for the Committee of Secret Correspondence, had counted on just such frustration. “We expect to make their merchants sick of a contest in which so much is risked and nothing gained.”

Britain’s hawks remained steadfast. Their usual rebuttal to any defeatism was to call it subversive. Victory was assured, argued London’s
Public Advertiser
. “All reports to the contrary are manufactured here by interested stockjobbers or by disappointed statesmen.” Negative war news was disinformation put out by Congress to deceive its own constituents. “They have no idea of their real situation; losses are concealed, defeats made victories, and French assistance represented as at the door. By such subterfuges, three-fourths of the rebels are engaged in nominal support of a desperate cause.”

There was concern that hostilities with America had been “carried too far to retract” and that initiating peace talks with Congress would, in the eyes of European rivals, “be manifesting their real weakness if they now consented to grant what they have so constantly refused.” Too, there was a visceral element to British belligerence. People resented America’s hit-and-run combat style on land and sea, deeming it an “unmanly way of fighting.” A perception of the privateers in particular as “bragging, cowardly banditti” was reason enough to persevere.

One report of the capture of a supply ship alleged that “rebels stripped the killed and wounded, robbed every article of clothes, bedding, and provisions belonging to the sick, burned the cutter and added every insult to the distress.” And any foe that would, “against the laws of God and Man,” fire on a vessel under a flag of truce deserved, it was declared after one such incident, “all the horrors of rebellion,” by which was meant no mercy.

Disgust with the “unequal terms” on which Britain was engaging the rebels—that is, the conduct of honorable warriors versus lawless rabble—was expressed by one of the Royal Navy’s ablest captains, Andrew Snape Hamond of the forty-four-gun HMS
Roebuck
. Stationed in American waters since early 1776, Hamond complained of “treating them with openness and generosity while they are daily practicing every kind of art, treachery and cruelty to destroy us.”

He particularly deplored the privateer trick of rigging abandoned vessels with “combustibles” that caused powder magazines to explode after British seamen took possession, a scene “horrible to behold,” one witness wrote. “It went off like the sound of a gun, blew the boat into pieces and set her into flame.” Before long, however, Hamond and other commanders resorted to “piratical” tactics that once would have shamed them, including such
ruses de guerre
as flying phony colors or distress signals and painting over their gunports to imitate defenseless merchant ships.

The captain found it worrisome that so few American captives opted to switch sides. But Ambrose Serle, who as Admiral Howe’s secretary wrote out “pardons for rebels,” filed a contrary report that applicants were “coming in for them by hundreds.” Serle took this as evidence “that the hostile business will be settled in the next campaign.” Writing on the very same day, a Royal Navy officer in Newport warned that American mariners “have employed themselves with such success to the southward that they have collected the means to prosecute this diabolical war for three years.”

Britons were unready for such a long struggle. Charles Garnier, a diplomat in the French embassy in London, believed that his host’s maritime pride, which, he said, “exceeds national pride by several degrees,” would crumble over time. He assured the foreign minister in Paris that “the great superiority of the English navy consists in the confidence which reigns in it—a spirit founded on the success and experience of its officers who are accustomed to master their element.” Undermine that confidence through “a slow war devoid of glorious adventures” and the Royal Navy and ultimately the British people “would be without strength and credit.”

That was Captain Hamond’s fear when he lamented the “defensive kind of war” Britain was waging. Dutiful optimism sustained him for a while (“Englishmen always rally when things are at the worst”), but after his crew suffered dozens of fatalities during the winter of 1776–77, some in battle, most from illness, he acknowledged “the great success the rebel small privateers have met with.” Meanwhile the land war, with its “sad blot” of British defeats at Trenton and Princeton, continued to sputter due to one “favorable moment” after another failing to be exploited by army commanders.

Most dispiriting was the apparent futility of the navy’s operational success. More than 120 American vessels were captured in the West Indies between November 1776 and April 1777. Losses ran into millions of dollars. Hundreds of casualties had been inflicted, thousands of prisoners taken. Yet the devastation, Hamond noted with puzzlement, “has been of very little consequence in distressing the enemy.”

Twenty-four-year-old William Bingham excelled at what he called “the art of uniting war and commerce.” The vast network of privateers he managed in the West Indies unsettled Congress with its unruliness but decimated enemy trade in the region and won him the bitter respect of the British press, which marveled that Bingham’s international status rivaled that of Britain’s ambassador to Paris.

This paradox was integral to the American game plan. Though fewer British transports were lost in the same period, the greater wealth and breadth of British trade corresponded to a higher value of its individual cargoes—the difference between, say, an American sloop carrying barrel staves and a fat British “Indiaman” packed with sugar, textiles, or slaves. “They have much more property to lose than we have,” Robert Morris wrote with typical pragmatism. William Bingham, who knew better than anyone the state of the maritime scorecard, concurred. “Upon casting up accounts, the balance will be immensely in our favor.”

B
y mid-1777, the French foreign ministry, observing from the sidelines, had received confirmation of its early prediction that Britain possessed “insufficient resources in men and money to sustain a prolonged war at sea.” Most telling was the public outcry—“disturbances in several places,” was how a French newspaper reported it—against the government’s impressment of seamen for the Royal Navy.

Impressment, or “the press,” was the age-old way that warships were manned whenever there were shortfalls in volunteers. Its techniques ranged from mere marketing to brute force. Sometimes it was enough to set up recruiting desks in waterfront pubs and let officers and sailors spin tales of world travel and
esprit de corps
; signups were taken on the spot. And sometimes, especially during war, press gangs were used. These were comprised of moonlighting navy men or hired local toughs. Paid up to 40 shillings per head, they filled quotas by snatching citizens from the private workplace and herding them to His Majesty’s ships.

The legal warrants under which the coercive “hot press” was authorized were much disputed. In his study of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century,
The Wooden World
, N.A.M. Rodger notes the fundamental conflict between the navy’s manpower needs and the people’s instinctive resistance to “any extension of government’s power to control and regulate. Thus, in the midst of war, public opinion and the law still worked strongly to hamper the Navy.”

In the midst of this war particularly, with its pressures of unconventional combat on land and sea, traditional dissension against impressment turned virulent. Elaborated upon by the French ambassador to Britain, Marquis de Noailles, those earlier “disturbances” in fact were bloody riots against the press gangs. “The sailors of the India Company fought back, as well as sailors from some privately owned ships. A naval lieutenant was killed, and there were about thirty men drowned or wounded.”