Patriot Pirates (17 page)

To avoid such eruptions, the Royal Navy preferred to replenish its crews at sea. It was standard procedure to seek converts among enemy captives; the persuasion could be comradely or severe. In addition to pressing foreigners, the navy was allowed to grab sailors off British transports as long as it was done offshore. The remove from public scrutiny combined with the merchantmen’s sailing experience and penchant for seafaring made offshore presses the Royal Navy’s most consistently productive. Shipping firms condemned the practice, of course, even though their demand for warships to defend transatlantic convoys was a major cause of the manpower squeeze. Their hypocrisy was cited by some members of Parliament as evidence “of the unpopularity of the present barbarous war.”

Parliament’s hawks, on the other hand, defended the press as unpleasant but necessary. “Two very striking features” of the current rebellion forced the issue in their view. First, in the past the Royal Navy had included some thirteen thousand Americans in its ranks. “It is unnecessary to say where they are now. They are making reprisals upon our defenseless trade.” Second was the “mysterious conduct” of France and Spain, both of whom were expanding their navies. If they moved against Britain, “fifty, sixty, seventy frigates and sloops” would be required to repel them. And where were those ships? “Almost all in America.” More were needed, along with sailors to man them. Otherwise, lamented a former admiral to his fellow lawmakers, “things have an extreme disagreeable appearance.”

Soon it wasn’t just the maritime community that felt the sting of impressment. “It is beginning to snatch away servants from behind their master’s carriage,” the French ambassador gloated. When news of an upcoming sweep hit the dockyards of London’s Thames River, “most of the men withdrew into the city for protection.” Their flight, and the collusion of those who hid them, engendered a scofflaw culture hardly helpful to the government’s selling of the war to an increasingly dubious public.

Local officials obliged to enforce impressment procedures began to work against them. This was especially true in places unaccustomed to the coarse presence of roaming gangs. Three naval officers were arrested for running a hot press outside the London stock exchange. They had legal authority but briefly were thrown in jail anyway. Ambassador de Noailles gave Vergennes the good news. “There you have the first example of resistance by civil authority since impressment began.”

Forced to maintain the press despite rising opinion against it, British leaders enacted other controversial measures in order to keep a posture of stern resolve. George III issued a proclamation assuring punishment “to the utmost severities of the law” to any Briton found serving on a foreign vessel—a situation prevalent on American privateers, whose skippers often marveled at how readily British merchant seamen threw in with them. In addition to a money reward, the king offered a one-year amnesty from naval impressment to anyone turning in such an offender.

Prime Minister North’s infamous Pirate Act of 1777 likewise sought to harden British resolve. John Paul Jones spoke for all American mariners in protesting their designation under British law as “Traitors and Pirates and Felons! Whose necks they wish to destine to the cord!” But the act was widely criticized in Britain as well. It was called “cruel, persecuting” “ill-advised and intemperate” “unconstitutional” “shocking to humanity” and sure to bring “oppression and tyranny through every part of the realm.” For the five years it remained law, it was a rallying point for antiwar and humanitarian activists, for whom it exposed “the precarious tenure on which the liberty of England is held.” The controversy gave American leaders a useful gauge of anti-government feeling in Britain. Indeed, the first reports of the act to reach Philadelphia contained both its technical details and the encouraging news “that the city of London had ineffectually petitioned against it.”

On the heels of its passage came the admiralty’s announcement that the prisons at Forton and Mill were ready to receive captives taken at sea. “A shocking place,” wrote Jonathan Haskins, the first American to enter Mill. He was the surgeon on
Charming Sally
, a privateer out of Martha’s Vineyard seized in January after a brief cruise in which it took one prize. Others who’d suffered long confinements on prison ships and in their captors’ holds had a different view. One man “rejoiced greatly” at the change of scene. Another likened it to “coming out of hell and going into paradise.”

As the prisons filled, problems of sanitation, food, and the “negligence or connivance” of the guards rendered them less congenial. Illness, lice, and “the itch” (mange) were rampant. Inmates called their treatment “more cruel than Turkish enemies” with punishments that included flogging and up to six weeks’ lockup in tiny windowless cells known as “black holes.” The open-ended detention permitted by North’s Act added to the duress. By August 1777, most prisoners believed their welfare depended totally on American victory. Should Britain “conquer the country or even get the upper hand, we are positive the gallows will be our destiny.”

The admiralty tried to exploit this anxiety in order to entice them into Royal Navy service. After the war, Franklin, who despite North’s Act successfully negotiated exchanges for small groups of Forton and Mill inmates, praised their resistance to “the allurements that were made use of to draw them from their allegiance to their country.” He called it “a glorious testimony in favor of plebian virtue,” and pointedly noted that “This was not the case with the English seamen.”

The facilities drew considerable public curiosity. In coming to ogle the exotic rebel pirates (“Can they talk? Are they white?”), Britons were amazed to discover, wrote Charles Herbert of the captured privateer,
Dalton
, “They look like our people, and they talk English.” When prisoners were later indentured into the population as laborers and apprentices, their savage reputations were further humanized, planting seeds of sympathy that eventually led to underground networks dedicated to helping escapees elude capture and slip out of the country.

Initiatives on behalf of the prisoners sprung up at all levels of British society. Churches and charities donated food and clothing. One hundred Londoners met at a pub in December and raised £1,300, an amount quickly tripled by contributions from three members of the House of Lords. The money was distributed to inmates according to rank and went for the purchase of tobacco, tea, books, and writing supplies; a lot went for gambling and drinking as well.

The cause of prisoner relief inevitably became linked with Britain’s peace movement. In Parliament, opponents of the war supported fund drives and dispatched representatives, with pointed skepticism, on fact-finding missions to Forton and Mill. Newspaper editorials against the war added humanitarian pathos to their economic argument for reconciling with America. Reading them in prison, Charles Herbert sensed that Britain was “little short of civil war.” Though an exaggeration, the impression no doubt heartened him and his fellow prisoners, not to mention observers in America and Europe equally impatient for British resolve to crack.

T
o go along with North’s Act and the opening of two prisons for American seamen, Parliament took another aggressive measure by legalizing British privateers in March 1777. The resolution followed deliberations along the lines of Congress’s debates the previous year, with privateering’s potential for social chaos weighed against the damage it would inflict on the enemy.

It was out of such chaos that support for the policy had first arisen. Merchants on Antigua, center of Britain’s West Indian commerce, had been ravaged by rebel privateers. In reprisal, they began launching unauthorized warships against American trade in late 1776. Soon frantic reports of enemy privateers “cruising for northward vessels” filled American newspapers. France took note as well, fearing its trade would be ensnared in the melee.

Ambassador de Noailles, blind to the irony of decrying the same scourge he’d formerly applauded, demanded an explanation from the admiralty. The assurance he received of British merchants arming their transports strictly in self-defense echoed the indifferent replies he’d given the admiralty when the tables had been reversed. “The government being unable to attend to all the needs of merchant shipping, there is no other remedy but to encourage private shippers to protect their own interests.”

But the Antiguans took things to extremes. As their warships logged growing numbers of captures, the lucrative flow of prize cases through the island’s maritime court tempted British merchantmen to jump to privateers. When Royal Navy sailors began deserting for the same reason, civilian shipowners were warned by Admiral James Young, commander of the Antigua-based Leeward Islands squadron, to cease their illegal enterprise.

They ignored him. “This adventure is not in opposition to the Navy but to the rebellious Americans, and to make recaptures for our very heavy losses.”

It was another dispute Young didn’t need. For more than a year, he’d been trading letters with the governor of Martinique about that island’s dealings with American rebels. To call their correspondence confounding doesn’t do justice to his utter aggravation at the governor’s blithe dismissal of countless testimonies of American ships and British prizes popping in and out of the port of Saint-Pierre under the management of “one Bingham.”

Similar activity was occurring at St. Eustatius. In the period since its fort had saluted
Andrew Doria
, Young had learned that island merchants were “giving all manner of assistance to the American rebels, and daily suffer privateers to be manned, armed, and fitted in their port.” Governor Johannes de Graaff refuted the charges with the same flowery circumlocution (“I flatter myself that your Excellency will see great cause to suspect many current assertions”) used by his counterpart on Martinique. Rendering it still more infuriating was Young’s certainty that de Graaff, the richest merchant on St. Eustatius, was “an avowed abettor of a scene of piracy and depredation” who not only tolerated privateers, but invested in them.

No less frustrating than the stonewalling from foreigners was the continued minimization by Young’s superiors in London of the maritime challenge he confronted. He’d long complained that his area of operations (which now included the Danish Virgin Islands, lately reported to support “illicit traffic notwithstanding the orders and directions of their governor”) far exceeded the capacity of his squadron. “I take leave to assure your Lordships,” one of his many imploring letters began, “that these seas now swarm with American privateers, several of them vessels of considerable force.” But rather than grant his request for “not less than fifteen ships,” the admiralty authorized six.

To compensate, he refitted a number of captured sloops into eight-and ten-gun warships skippered by lieutenants and sailing masters. The
London Chronicle
reported admiringly, “It is said these armed cruisers have within a few months taken upward of fifty sail of American vessels, some of them privateers.”

Young’s appreciation for tactical improvisation didn’t extend to Antigua’s privateers. This was surprising given the fright instilled at Martinique and St. Eustatius by the prospect of being targeted by British raiders, something the admiral might have welcomed after the smug duplicity he’d endured. When seizures of neutral shipping inevitably occurred, how could he not have relished the Dutch outcry against British “brigands” or the Martinique governor’s panicky condemnation of “the acts of violence committed against our commerce by British pirates in a manner contrary to the terms of treaties”? But Young was nothing if not a proper professional and so agreed to correct any British misdeeds, though he did offer a jab about those islands’ “clandestine disposal of the cargoes of English vessels.”

True to his word, he demanded that Antiguan merchants immediately stop their privateering activity on grounds that it was “not only illegal but highly derogatory to the King’s authority.” Refusing to risk an international incident with one of Britain’s ostensible allies “for the sake of gratifying a few individuals,” he threatened these “robbers on the high seas” with arrest and warned that his cruisers would fire on private British vessels that refused to submit to inspection.

When the island’s attorney general ruled that Young’s decree undermined the merchants’ right to seek redress for stolen property, the admiral asked his superiors for “an issuance of orders” to clarify official policy on the matter. Before any orders arrived, the merchants took matters into their own hands. In what an observer called “a bold and unprecedented affair,” they deployed “a whole herd of lawyers” to sue Admiral Young “for seizing and sending into port the armed vessels employed by them.” Then they had him thrown in jail.

He took it pretty well, considering. His letter to the admiralty begun on the morning of March 8, 1777, alluded in passing to the merchants’ talk of initiating “actions of trespass against me.” In a “P.S.” added that evening, he was compelled to “further acquaint your Lordships” with news that he indeed had been briefly jailed and forced to put up bail of £1,100. Any outrage he felt was conveyed in his closing request for the admiralty’s “support and protection, which may hereafter prevent any commanding officer from being publicly insulted.” Another letter followed soon after—a request for transfer home from Antigua. “Three years in this climate is full long enough,” he wrote.

Word of Young’s arrest reached America within weeks. The
Pennsylvania Journal
mocked the merchants for humiliating the admiral for “spoiling the sport” of their greedy ambitions. But the broader ramifications were sobering. “The people at the Grenades, Dominica, Montserrat, Nevis, St. Christopher’s, Anguilla, and Tortolla have followed the detestable example of the Antiguans. They have many pirates out, and have been very successful.”

The real eruption of British “piracy” began three weeks after the admiral’s arrest, when George III approved Parliament’s decision to commission private warships “for the seizing and taking of all vessels, goods, wares, and merchandize belonging to the inhabitants of the colonies now in rebellion.” The proclamation constituted a resounding answer to Young’s request for clarification of the government’s position on privateering. That policy was now crystal clear. America was due for payback.