1775 (87 page)

Fighting Schooners

If large row galleys could mount 24-pounders and 32-pounders, the distinctive attribute of schooners was speed. As the war began, no one admired their qualities more than Samuel Graves.

In 1774 he had advised the Admiralty that “three or four good Marblehead schooners would do considerable service in the present weak State of the Squadron,” and by October 1775, schooners accounted for five of the 35 British warships keeping watch on the North American coast.
³⁴
From Graves’s standpoint, the American schooners, although carrying only four-pounder guns, derived their advantage from nimbleness and from being light vessels drawing little water. They can, he said, “lie under the Land, and, upon observing a Vessel or two unguarded, dart upon them suddenly, and carry them off even in sight of the King’s Ships.”
³⁵

George Washington must have had similar views. In August 1775, when he quietly began sending small Massachusetts vessels to sea in pursuit of British supply ships and transports, the craft selected were Marblehead and Beverly schooners. At first, the idea seemed doubtful—the first schooner sent out, the
Hannah,
was too slow—but he persevered, and ultimately the commanding general’s vessels took 35 British prizes before Washington left for New York. When Admiral Molyneux Shuldham arrived to replace Graves, he reported to the Admiralty that “I was much concerned on my arrival to hear of the Number of small Arm’d vessels fitted out by the Rebels, and which had taken many unarmed Ones of Ours bringing stores and supplies to this place.”
³⁶

As we have seen, the word
schooner
came into use in early-eighteenth-century Massachusetts, from the local colloquialism
to scoon
or “skim lightly along the water.”
³⁷
Schooner-rigged vessels were ideal for local fishermen, handling better in changeable coastal winds.

Chesapeake Bay mariners, searching for similar attributes, developed their own vessels during the 1730s. These pilot boats, as they were called, featured simpler fore-and-aft rigging that facilitated speed and maneuverability
and permitted smaller crews than regular schooners. These fast baycraft came of age during the Revolution, when Maryland’s Council of Safety noted “the impracticality of square-sail vessels escaping the bay; that small sharp-rigged vessels would more probably meet with success.”
³⁸
After the
Defence,
the three vessels owned or leased by the Maryland Council of Safety were pilot boats—
Dolphin, Plater,
and
Chatham.

The Virginia Provincial Navy, in turn, began in December 1775 with the pilot boats
Liberty
and
Patriot.
Commodore James Barron soon headed a flotilla of pilot boats and gunboats, with the original two being the best known.
Liberty
served throughout the war, capturing the
Oxford,
a British transport carrying 200 soldiers, and defeating the
Fortunatus,
a British naval tender twice the
Liberty’s
size.
^*
39
The colonies’ most innovative small craft, however, while hardly matching schooners for speed represented an extraordinary breakthrough in stealth.

Connecticut’s Experimental Submarine

Given the whaleboat-centered apprehensions of the captains of three great men-of-war in Boston Harbor that summer—
Boyne,
S
omerset,
and
Preston
—one can only imagine the effect of a credible mid-1775 report about the arrival of the Yankees’ underwater torpedo boat. In April 1775, David Bushnell had been building his vessel for almost two years, and by one surmise, “the hull would have been nearly complete.”
⁴⁰
By that summer, John Lewis, a tutor at Yale familiar with the project, wrote to Ezra Stiles in Rhode Island that Bushnell’s machine “is almost perfected for the destruction of the fleet in the harbor of Boston.”
⁴¹

Bushnell’s principal collaborator, Benjamin Gale, had already explained the machine to Benjamin Franklin, who met with Gale in October. The British, too, had heard of the work in progress, and in December New York governor William Tryon wrote to Admiral Shuldham that “it is conjectur’d that an Attempt was made on the
Asia
[formerly in Boston but then in New York], but proved unsuccessful. Returned to New Haven in order to get a Pump of a new construction which will soon be completed.”
⁴²

For all his credibility with Franklin and also Connecticut governor
Trumbull, Bushnell was falling behind schedule. By late 1775, he was losing any chance to strike in Boston. Indeed, the wooden behemoths he hoped to strike had been driven out of Boston by a combination of circumstances: unsuitability, weather, and apprehensions of danger. Now the attack would have to be made in New York Harbor, and Bushnell’s team of pilots would not be adequately trained and ready until early September. By this date, British invaders had taken almost complete control of the harbor. Bushnell could no longer delay, and he—or one of his pilots—had to strike quickly. Early on the morning of September 7, the attack on HMS
Eagle,
a 64-gun man-of-war, failed because the screw attaching the explosives wouldn’t engage. The pilot—not the most qualified one—guided the
Turtle
clear and, on being seen, set the mine’s clockwork in motion and jettisoned it. As he was being picked up by colleagues some distance away, the mine went off “with a tremendous explosion throwing up large bodies of water to an immense height.”
⁴³
Had it been attached, that would have been the end of HMS
Eagle.

Was Bushnell’s submarine worthy of success? Almost certainly. But for this chapter, the message could not be more relevant. In the words of Royal Navy Commodore John Symons, “The ingenuity of these people is singular in their secret modes of mischief.”
⁴⁴

The Semantics of Privateering

If American seamen in general could be expected to choose privateering over the disciplines of naval service, that inclination was most emphatic in New England. Not only did Yankees have a long tradition of manning privateers, but they had an unmatched hostility to the Royal Navy. This was based on its role in punitive customs enforcement of the 1760s, its part in shutting down New England access to the fisheries, and most of all its insistence on making New England the particular 1775 target of naval press-gangs and activities. New England seamen would seek revenge through the easier discipline and better remuneration of the privateers.

But here further caution is in order on use of the word
privateer.
New England was indeed in the forefront. Massachusetts authorities had passed the first colony-level authorization on November 1. The thing is, these “privateers” were not really privateers in the full scope the Revolution later allowed. Washington’s schooner fleet was not empowered to capture ordinary British merchantmen, and the commissions given by the Massachusetts
General Court in 1775 permitted only actions against British naval vessels and merchant ships bringing goods to occupied Boston.
⁴⁵

Full-fledged commerce raiding—the all-out variety that gave much fuller rein to private profit—took hold in the spring of 1776. Only then did Congress define
privateering
to allow the taking of “all ships and other vessels, their tackle, apparel and furniture, and all goods, wares and merchandises, belonging to any inhabitant or inhabitants of Great Britain.”
⁴⁶
This meant the gloves had been taken off, and John Adams was certainly correct to call this measure a Declaration of Independence in everything but name.

Privateering was the form of maritime warfare to which eighteenth-century Americans were best suited, but the number of actual privateers grew slowly. It only soared in later years when privateering totally overshadowed the fledgling navy in employment and importance.

A Genius for Small and Fast Ships

Like the British and Dutch before them, the seafaring American rebel drew on maritime traditions that had begun by running rings around the wooden walls of earlier institutionalized naval power. The Dutch had declared their independence around a maritime insurgency symbolized by the famous late-sixteenth-century Sea Beggars, who were adventurers, privateers, pirates, and patriots all in one. England’s naval coming-of-age might have been at its most glorious against the Spanish Armada and under the Francis Drakes and Henry Morgans, men who represented a kindred blurring of naval, privateer, and piratical identities. The American maritime spirit of 1775 bore some resemblance.

As suggested in the epigraph on
page 492
, the saltwater or official U.S. Navy of 1775–1783, despite some proud moments, was hardly critical to the outcome of the American Revolution. What
did
play a major role in the outcome were the many instruments of maritime insurgency—Benedict Arnold’s freshwater sloops and gundalows on Lake Champlain, the Pennsylvania row galleys that turned back the
Roebuck,
John Glover’s Marblehead whaleboat warriors, Washington’s schooner captains who captured storeships like the
Nancy,
the “powder cruise” mariners who took tobacco to fetch gunpowder and armaments in St. Eustatius or Martinique, John Derby’s fast-scooning
Quero
that got the American description of Lexington and Concord to London two weeks ahead of the official British version, and the 2,000 or so American privateers who captured so many British
merchant ships that Lloyd’s insurance rates from time to time went through the roof. Submariner Bushnell, too, can be thought of as an underwater David trying a new approach to felling the British Goliath.

Several of the American officers who deserve naval accolades actually held army commissions: amphibious warfare experts like Arnold, Glover, and perhaps most of all, George Washington. The latter’s attention to maritime warfare in Massachusetts and his effective use of small-scale amphibious movements both in his retreat from Long Island and in his surprise attack on Trenton three months later epitomized a genius for small ships. Where the new United States did less well during the Revolution was in pretentiously building frigates and foolishly venturing fleet actions like the Penobscot Bay battle in 1779. Jonathan Sewall, a former Massachusetts attorney general departing for Britain in 1776, cut to the quick by pronouncing it disgraceful for Admiral Graves to “tamely and supinely…[view] Fishing Schooners, Whaleboats and Canoes riding triumphantly under the Muzzles of his Guns, & carrying off every Supply.”
⁴⁷
Sewall’s words were not intended as a compliment to the rebels, but they were a sound appreciation of rebel success in Boston Harbor, at least.

By then, the Boston part of the Revolution was largely finished. If shrewd employment of small vessels had been a key to Patriot success in the Revolution’s first year, later yardsticks would be more painful. As the Royal Navy’s presence in American waters grew, so did the economic pressure of the British blockade, which, in the phrase of historian Richard Buel, helped to put the fledgling U.S. economy “in irons”—headed directly into the winds and unable to make way—between 1777 and 1780. And in 1781, when Lord Cornwallis’s resort to entrenching his tired army on the Yorktown Peninsula offered a chance for a conclusive American victory, that result could be secured only by the traditional battle-fleet supremacy briefly gained over Britain by America’s Bourbon Compact allies, France and Spain.

H
ow the American Revolution was fought not just in the thirteen colonies but around the world is a familiar tale, told most often with nods to French aid and the contributions of Frenchmen named Lafayette, Rochambeau, de Grasse, and d’Estaing. Once France went to war with Britain in early 1778, a few months after word of the British surrender at Saratoga, the Allies’ battleground stretched from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.

French gunpowder and arms had been reaching the rebels through Caribbean ports since the winter of 1774–1775, and the greater quantities arriving by 1777 had been vital to success at Saratoga. In 1781, a French fleet under the Comte de Grasse defeated a British fleet at the Battle of the Virginia Capes, setting the scene for Yorktown and Cornwallis’s entrapment and surrender. And there the story usually ends, with broader European involvements and circumstances ignored.

France was the most important European power affronted by the British but hardly the only one. Between 1763 and 1775, a Continental version of the imperial hauteur that many unhappy Americans perceived in the behavior of their mother country had given Britain ill-wishers from Seville to St. Petersburg. Monarchs and their foreign ministries viewed the island kingdom as insular and arrogant but also highly vulnerable should the restive North American colonies break into rebellion. Spain, almost as revenge minded as France, had gained importance since the Bourbon Compact of 1761 that strengthened the family and political link between the French and Spanish crowns. As Britain lost old friends and allies, a chance to improve the European balance of power lured the Bourbon entente toward the opportunity of underwriting rebellion in British North America.