Patriot Pirates (15 page)

He embarked with a vengeance on his new duties. He demanded detailed ledgers from former agents, informed the captains of the schooners (“our little navy,” he called them to Hancock) that he was their representative now, angled to manage prize shares for the schooners’ crewmen, and set about purchasing cannon for two Continental frigates,
Boston
and
Hancock
, recently constructed in Newburyport. Finally, he contacted French merchants to let them know that, “as Continental Agent, it probably will be in my way to do business with you.” At the close of the letter he put in his first order: tea and brandy, “for my account.”

Having already alienated agents in Massachusetts, he quickly got on the wrong side of John Langdon by knocking New Hampshire (“the cruisers from this state don’t shine in taking prizes”) and by urging the Marine Committee to settle Portsmouth prizes in Boston because “it’s a notorious fact that vessels nor cargoes will sell for more than half they would sell for here.” Langdon retaliated by warning friends in Congress that Boston, like Providence, had become a place where “there are schemes on foot to keep everything in their own hands.”

More damaging to Bradford was the distrust of his sailor clients, whose grumblings turned ugly when he was caught manipulating prices at the January 1777 auction of
Lively
, a valuable British transport. The episode highlighted an agent’s difficulty in serving the interests of captors, who wanted a maximum return on prizes, and the interests of the government, which sought to pay no more than a reasonable price for munitions and supplies culled from captured cargoes.

Lively
’s cargo included thousands of suits, shoes, and blankets desperately needed by Washington. As Bradford later told Congress, “the exigency of the army being such, I was obliged to send forward large quantities of goods uninvoiced.” Men from the Continental schooners that had captured the vessel were furious that the goods, rumored to be worth as much as £25,000, had been dispersed without payment.

They got even angrier during
Lively
’s auction when a Baltimore merchant, William Turnbull, presented himself as a military procurement agent there to bid on the remaining cargo. Out of patriotic generosity, the public sometimes withdrew from bidding on items needed for the health and welfare of Continental soldiers; that way, government agents didn’t have to pay top dollar. This benefited the cause but not the prize’s captors, who were never pleased when bidding was artificially dampened.

When they saw other buyers refraining, men from the schooners began bidding against Turnbull in an attempt to boost prices. He prevailed easily, but then came the scandal, which Bradford described to his superiors with careful understatement. “It seems at the close of the sale a gentleman offered Mr. Turnbull 100 percent on his purchase. This got about the sailors and created great bickering and uneasiness.”

Bradford had reason to be nervous. Because it had been stored in crates unseen by the general public, only he and Turnbull had known that
Lively
’s leftover cargo consisted purely of civilian goods—wine, women’s clothing, and housewares. Turnbull’s military procurement ruse had been proposed by Bradford as a way to hold down competition and clean out the ship at a bargain. What Bradford gained in the deal is unknown, but word soon spread that he “could not be trusted.” Shunned by clients, he retained his position thanks only to Hancock’s clout.

Three months after the
Lively
travesty, the Marine Committee formed a three-man oversight commission to monitor Bradford’s books. “We find complaints are made by the officers and seamen concerned in the capture of prizes that have fallen in your hands.” Though he remained in office until the end of the war, his authority was vastly diminished. In a last laugh, the sailors’ grievances had been compiled and sent to the committee “by Mr. Glover, their agent.”

B
radford blamed his job woes on “this growing evil” of avarice, but he was ill-suited to the waterfront scene from the start. The seamen, said to “pant for the expiration of their enlistments in order to partake of the spoils of the West Indies,” shocked him with their rudeness. Even officers were “vulgar enough to quarrel on the Sabbath morning.” They behaved “like pirates,” he said.

He blackballed captains who balked at sending him their prizes, withholding government funds needed to mount new voyages; they in turn continued to divert much of their business to Essex County. After taking fifty-five prizes since its inception in 1775, the Continental squadron fell into disarray. By the end of the year its schooners had been sold and its captains commissioned in the navy, though all but one would eventually switch to privateering.

Bradford’s efforts to launch the frigates
Hancock
and
Boston
—part of Congress’s original call for the construction of thirteen Continental warships—were only marginally more successful than his stint with the schooners, but he caught so much grief in the process that it merits some sympathy. Like Langdon, he constantly contended with privateers for armaments and crew. And it didn’t help that the two men assigned to command the frigates, John Manley and Hector McNeill, despised one another.

Manley, famous for capturing the ordnance ship
Nancy
in November 1775, had taken several more prizes since then. A popular hero, he wasn’t without detractors. John Paul Jones passed rumors that he was illiterate and ridiculed him as “a boatswain’s mate” who fatuously flew a commodore’s pennant. Jones resented that his commission predated Manley’s but that Manley ranked higher on Congress’s officer seniority list. “That such despicable characters should have obtained commissions as commanders in a navy is truly astonishing and might pass for romance with me unless I had been convinced by my senses of the sad reality.”

Among his men, however, Manley was considered “blunt, honest, and extremely popular.” This despite a temper that, when annoyed by a junior officer’s insubordination, for instance, caused him to strike the man “with a cutlass on the cheek with such force that his teeth were to be seen from the upper part of his jaw to the lower part of his chin.”

He was also generous—and often with diminished means. The Salem court had awarded him and his crew £2,500 in April 1776, of which £30 went to the lowest-rung sailors and £250 to the captain. (A Boston family at the time could live comfortably on about £50 a year.) But of his richest prizes, the supply-starved army “had stripped ordnance from
Nancy
, coal from
Jenny
, and clothing from
Concord
without placing a value on the goods.”
Nancy
didn’t receive its official valuation of £20,500 until ten months after capture, too late to garner money for its captors.

Even so, after pestering Washington for a ship “of equal footing with the enemy” and receiving a promise to command
Hancock
, Manley put up his own money to outfit the frigate after months of delay. “Persons who scarcely know the difference between a ship and a wheelbarrow” had gotten the lucrative construction contracts through inside connections. “Captain Manley,” the Massachusetts General Court noted of
Hancock
’s progress in November 1776, “has therefore exerted himself to get her round and has been obliged at very considerable expense to execute this business.”

He’d felt secure enough to contribute toward his ship’s preparation on the basis of a judgment of £1,000 due him for
Elizabeth
, a transport seized during the British evacuation of Boston that had been loaded with valuables stolen from local homes. Unfortunately the cargo subsequently was ruled private property and the judgment overturned before Manley or his crew got paid—only to be restored again in October 1777, far too late for it to be itemized and sold.

His counterpart aboard the frigate
Boston
, Captain Hector McNeill, though admittedly inexperienced “in the way of taking prizes,” shared his friend Jones’s disgust at being ranked below Manley. McNeill considered Manley an illiterate primitive whose leadership was suited only to “such creatures as himself.” Ordered to serve as his subordinate, he agreed to “follow as the jackal does the lion, without grumbling except in my gizzard.” In fact he grumbled plenty, to John Bradford.

“Impudent” was the agent’s opinion about the many snippy missives he received from McNeill, in one of which McNeill bluntly grouped Bradford with “the set of men who can only be called drones.” The letters often griped about money, but their most common refrain was personal derision of Manley. The general opinion that McNeill’s vanity was primarily to blame for the spat did little to resolve the problem of two navy commanders sailing in tandem, who, “like the Jews and Samaritans,” a friend advised John Adams, “will have no connections or intercourse.” Yet sail together they would—and, to further complicate matters, they would do so in company with nine privateers.

The plan to deploy Continental and private vessels in a joint operation had been adopted grudgingly. It arose out of mutual acknowledgment that antagonistic competition for ships, cannon, and crewmen was hurting both sides. Privateering’s huge popularity (a “moderate computation” at the time put the number of New Englanders participating at “not less than 10,000”) had led the government to place embargoes on privateers in hopes of quelling the demand that was depleting Continental ranks.

The embargo was predicated on military manpower quotas. Until a town had fulfilled its assessment, it could dispatch neither privateers nor merchant ships without official permission. Businessmen protested the policy change. “The government has been forward in encouraging private adventurers,” complained one consortium of investors with £12,000 tied up in a grounded privateer, “and in consequence of that our ship was fitted at great expense.”

Cooperation soured between the public and private sectors. When asked to lease vessels to the state, Elias Hasket Derby drove such a hard bargain (“I shall be willing if the terms suit me, together with five percent commission”), it was a slap at lawmakers. One of them, James Warren of the Massachusetts General Court, came to “execrate the policy of stopping our privateers” for the rancor it caused, the corruption it promoted, and the relief it gave the British from “the amazing damage we should have done them.”

John Adams concurred. “I am sorry the embargo was ever laid. I am against all shackles upon trade. Let the spirit of the people have its own way.”

One compelling argument to remove the embargo was tactical. Royal Navy frigates, based now in Halifax, were still patrolling Massachusetts Bay to devastating effect. Aboard HMS
Milford
, “foremast men” who earned bonuses for sighting colonial vessels had made £140 each in recent months on their prize shares. Because the frigates usually “cruised single,” a flotilla of American warships seemed the best way to defeat them.

John Manley captured the Revolution’s first and last significant prizes. After a maritime career that won him the devotion of his men and the respect of his British adversaries, Manley, like his relentless detractor John Paul Jones, fell into postwar obscurity. Unlike Jones, he remained there.

But privateers were averse to the yoke of Continental command and in any event avoided taking on the Royal Navy except as a last resort. Such confrontations usually went badly. Daring as they were, most privateersmen were seafaring novices who “could not find a rope in the night” much less match the gunnery skills of British professionals. A 1777 engagement in the West Indies was typical. Though the warships—one private, the other Royal Navy—were of equal firepower, the battle left two British casualties versus, on the American side, “16 killed and near 40 wounded. Two have since died of their wounds and many others likely to meet the same fate.”

An awareness of such grim statistics had accounted for an inglorious episode earlier that spring.
Cabot
, a sixteen-gun Continental brig on its very first day at sea, had been left in the lurch by a pair of state-leased privateers when
Milford
bore down to do battle. The sight of his fleeing compatriots had led
Cabot
’s commander to abandon ship under a rain of cannonballs. Boston newspapers tried to minimize the loss after the vessel turned up in Halifax as HMS
Cabot
. “The good, loyal, run-away Tories (from this town) who remain there were congratulating each other on the glorious (as they said) acquisition. Deluded creatures! They think the fate of America depends on a single brig.”

A court investigation into whether the privateers had “failed in a point of duty” cleared their captains on grounds that bad weather had disrupted communication; and indeed, bravery wasn’t an issue. The state skippers, John Fisk of
Massachusetts
and Jonathan Haraden of
Tyrannicide
, distinguished themselves in combat both before and after the incident. But privateering’s ingrained calculation of reward versus risk was a hard habit to break.

On April 23, Warren informed Adams that
Milford
and several other frigates were again in local waters. “We are endeavoring to get out Manley and McNeill to take her.” Several days passed as privateers debated joining the effort. Their hesitation gave way when a British warship, under a flag of truce, sent a boatload of American prisoners ashore “with a message and a challenge to Manley and McNeill and all the armed vessels in this harbor.” Continued Warren to Adams, “This has roused the indignation of the officers and tars [seamen], and given us an opportunity which many of us thought should not be neglected. We shall get the Continental ships and the privateers to sea and meet the challengers.”