Patriot Pirates (19 page)

Comte de Vergennes, the wily French foreign minister, leaped at the opportunity to undermine Britain by offering secret military aide to Congress and granting safe harbor to American privateers. Confident that the American rebellion could be exploited to France’s advantage, he didn’t imagine that his gamesmanship might someday contribute to the fall of his government.

Spain’s longstanding dispute with Portugal, a British ally, over territories in South America had led its king, Charles III, initially to back Vergennes’s clandestine maneuvers against Britain with a hefty loan to Hortalez & Company. But those disputes had been resolved in Spain’s favor by mid-1777, cooling the king’s enthusiasm. He’d also begun wondering, with good reason it turned out, if a free and empowered United States might someday be a threat to Spanish possessions in the New World.

This wavering gave Vergennes pause, for he knew his monarch, the ever cautious Louis XVI, was loath to go to war without Spain at his side. As one historian later wrote, such considerations were “in strict accord with classic diplomacy, which indulged in no philanthropy and was much addicted to lying.”

The need for American fighters to make a good show was therefore more important than ever. British spy reports gauged the situation bluntly. “The great object of Messrs. Franklin and Deane is to obtain some open declaration in favor of America. This must soon happen; instantly indeed if Mr. Washington should gain any decisive battle against Sir William Howe.”

But good news was scarce. British troops still held Newport and in April 1777 had rampaged through western Connecticut. Having prevailed in numerous small skirmishes from Vermont to Georgia, they retook Fort Ticonderoga and its precious store of military supplies in early July. The action called attention to General John Burgoyne’s advance from Canada into New York with 8,000 men, alarming Congress with the prospect of Burgoyne linking up with Howe’s army in the lower Hudson valley and effectively cutting the colonies in two.

Deane painted a desperate picture to French officials. “The United States will be distressed to the last degree, if not absolutely ruined, in the next campaign unless relieved from some quarter or other.” But Franklin stayed optimistic, assuring Congress that war among the European powers was, if not imminent, inevitable. “When all are ready, a small matter may suddenly bring it on.”

Almost a year earlier, Deane had successfully lobbied, with French help and over British protests, for the release of Captain John Lee from a Spanish jail. Freeing the Newburyport privateer had established that, despite their outward amity, Spain and France didn’t share Britain’s belief that American commerce raiders were criminals. Neutrality agreements still forbade the material support of one another’s foes, but the public affirmation of Spanish and French disregard of British grievances marked a big step toward open hostility.

Rebel activity in European waters had increased after the Lee decision. Occurring just across the English Channel, the provocations were even more maddening to Britons than those in the West Indies. The main sore point was that under terms of their treaties, nations could receive any vessel in “distress caused by weather or want of provisions.” This loophole enabled visitors to feign hardship or disrepair in order legally to enter neutral ports to refit and meanwhile do business. When France and Spain invoked the clause to justify the American presence in their ports, Britain scoffed at the claims yet was helpless to disprove them.

The majority of American vessels in Europe were private transports engaged in the same commodities-for-arms trade that Congress was pursuing. The privateers among them were independent operators that had ventured across the Atlantic in search of prey.
Tyrannicide
and
Massachusetts
, after the shabby episode in which they’d abandoned the Continental brig
Cabot
to HMS
Milford
off New England earlier in 1777, proceeded to take twenty-five prizes off the British coast that spring.
General Mifflin
, which on the excuse of illness afflicting its crew had deserted John Manley’s navy-privateer fleet six days after leaving Boston, subsequently prowled the Irish Sea and sold prizes at the French port of Morlaix.

Rising States
and
Freedom
from Massachusetts and
Montgomery
from Maryland also carried prizes to France. Reminding their skippers of the restrictive “treaties and ordinances,” Franklin recommended “some convenient place on the coast where the business may be transacted without much observation and conducted with discretion. I suppose this may be done because I understand it has been practiced in many cases.” More commonly, privateers provisioned in French and Spanish ports but didn’t linger and rarely sold prizes there, dispatching them instead to America.

The first warship that sought entirely to base its operations in Europe was the sixteen-gun Continental brig
Reprisal
. Under its captain, Lambert Wickes,
Reprisal
had delivered Bingham to Martinique in mid-1776 and Franklin to France in December. Wickes had seized prizes on each trip, giving his eminent passengers a persuasive look at commerce raiding in action.

He’d sold his prizes openly in Martinique, but at Nantes had hastily unloaded them at half value to avoid attracting the notice of British observers. They got wind of it anyway, and within weeks London newspapers were calling it more evidence of French duplicity. “Is this not acknowledging the American privateer’s commission? And is not
that
an acknowledgment of the independency of America?”

Winter weather froze
Reprisal
in port through January 1777. During the hiatus Wickes joined Deane’s circle in Paris. Centered at Deane’s hotel, the high-living group included Carmichael, Bancroft, Beaumarchais, Franklin’s teenage grandson William Temple Franklin, and any number of “privateer masters who needed rest and relaxation” courtesy of their gregarious host. One visiting skipper wrote of the scene, “Carmichael and myself are constantly driving about in Deane’s coach, and have missed but one night of opera, comedy, or masquerade since I came to town.”

After the February thaw, Wickes took
Reprisal
on a three-week expedition in the Bay of Biscay that netted four British merchantmen and, at the cost of eight American casualties, the armed “Lisbon packet” carrying mail from Portugal to London. Returning to France, he let the prizes go cheap at 100,000 livres (about £4,000) to merchants who, in exchange for a bargain, “are willing to take upon themselves all consequences as to the illegality.”

Hushed up though they were, the transactions were immediately known to Lord Stormont, the British ambassador. His source was Bancroft, Deane’s friend and fellow partygoer. Paid by the British to uncover “intelligence that may arrive from America, the captures made by their privateers, and how the captures are disposed of,” Bancroft regularly hid notes in a tree near the Tuileries for pickup by his handlers. Through working as Franklin’s secretary and carousing with the affable, loose-tongued Deane, his access to American secrets was limitless. Thanks to Bancroft, Stormont’s complaint to Vergennes about Wickes’s activity was supported by an itemized list of prize sales.

Embarrassed to be caught red-handed in its tolerance of illicit behavior (he’d expressly demanded of his maritime officials that “the registers must not contain any item or any indication of this connivance”), the foreign minister gave Wickes twenty-four hours to leave port and face enemy warships waiting offshore. At once the captain claimed
Reprisal
had sprung a leak and provided a carpenter’s report as evidence. To British dismay, for it was all but certain that Wickes had poured seawater into his hold, a stay was granted on humanitarian grounds so that
Reprisal
could make repairs. The stay lasted three months, outlasting the Royal Navy blockade.

The prizes listed by Stormont meanwhile were snapped up by local merchants after registrations bearing false names and manifests were filed with the government. On May 22 the French naval secretary, Antoine de Sartine, informed the British ambassador with regret that “if there had been fraud, it would be very difficult to trace it now.”

By that time, Deane had added two vessels to Wickes’s command: Captain Henry Johnson’s Continental brig,
Lexington
, which had arrived in April with two prizes in tow; and
Dolphin
, a refurbished cutter recently purchased by the commissioners and skippered by Samuel Nicholson, a drinking buddy of Carmichael’s.

The “three American privateers,” as the British press called them, sailed on May 28. Circling Ireland twice during a month-long cruise, they seized eighteen vessels, sending eight to French ports, releasing three, and sinking seven. The squadron “most effectually alarmed England,” prompting forty British transports awaiting departure in the Thames River to shift their loads to French vessels, closing down a fair in Chester near the Irish Sea out of invasion panic, and generating, no doubt to the crown’s particular annoyance, glowing newspaper testaments from British passengers “of the humane treatment they met with from the commanders of
Reprisal
and
Lexington
, both of whom endeavored to make the situation of their prisoners as easy as their unhappy circumstances would admit.”

Reprisal
barely made it back to France. Chased into Saint-Malo by HMS
Burford
, Wickes had to heave his guns overboard to lighten weight. His report to Deane included a straight-faced gripe at his pursuers for ignoring the legal boundary of France’s territorial waters as the distance from shore of a cannon shot. “They pay very little regard to the laws of neutrality,” he complained.

In a replay of the aftermath of
Reprisal
’s February cruise, Stormont filed a protest with the foreign ministry. The main offense was the sale of prizes, and as before the speed with which they were purchased undercut any response that might have satisfied the British. It also—unfortunately for the cash-strapped commissioners—meant that no profit was generated. Deane explained, “The prizes are sold without condemnation and consequently to a great loss, as the whole is conducted secretly.” On the positive side, “Though these cruises have not been profitable to us, they have been of infinite prejudice to our enemies.”

At minimum, Stormont wanted the American warships banished. Vergennes rebuked Franklin and Deane (“this conduct offends the dignity of the King my master at the same time it abuses the neutrality which His Majesty professes”), but stopped short of expelling Wickes’s squadron from port. Rather, he had it “sequestered and detained there until sufficient security can be obtained that they will return directly to their native country.”

Since the Royal Navy again was poised to ambush Wickes upon departure, Vergennes’s order was really a disguised pledge of sanctuary. Stormont argued the point to no avail. “Vergennes insisted,” he reported with dismay after their meeting, “that no ship is ever sent forcibly out of a neutral port as long as cruisers that are in wait for her are within sight of the coast.” There was no such rule. It was just another instance, the ambassador fumed, of the foreign minister’s “usual frivolous answer.”

Meanwhile Vergennes told his staff that he was prepared to squabble along these lines indefinitely. “This sort of war will not be dangerous so long as governments do not meddle with it.”

After a two-month layover that featured parties and parades in the Americans’ honor,
Reprisal
and
Lexington
(
Dolphin
was unfit to sail) made a dash for home. Prior to sailing, Wickes instructed Captain Johnson to destroy, “if you are taken,” their codebook of ship-to-ship signals. “I will do the same.” He looked forward to their rendezvousing in New Hampshire. “The wind is now fair. I shall depart immediately.”

Neither man reached his destination.
Lexington
was overtaken off Brittany by HMS
Alert
. The journal of the British warship gives the cold facts: “5 a.m. saw a sail to eastward…fired a swivel to bring her to…he hauled down English colors and hoisted American colors…gave us a broadside which we returned…half past 2 she struck…the enemy had seven men killed and 11 wounded…the loss on our side was three men wounded and two killed.”

Many of the injured were “in need of amputation of arms or legs” London’s
Daily Advertiser
reported. Captain Johnson was sent to Mill prison along with 60 crewmen, including a large number of Frenchmen whom he blamed for his defeat because they “would not stand to their guns.”

Meanwhile
Reprisal
eluded the enemy but foundered off Newfoundland in heavy winter seas. According to the lone survivor, three massive waves swamped the ship and “carried her down” along with 128 men. Franklin notified Congress of Wickes’s death. “This loss is extremely to be lamented, as he was a gallant officer and a very worthy man.”

Beyond his personal fondness for the captain, which dated from their voyage to France in 1776, Franklin appreciated Wickes’s concern for “the distressed situation” of American mariners held in British prisons. Speaking for himself and his officers in a letter to Franklin, Wickes earlier had pledged, “We ourselves will readily and willingly assist them as far as our money or credit will go.”