Patriot Pirates (4 page)

Military trade was a seller’s market in the extreme. Merchants as readily sold “warlike stores” to any other paying customer, usually provincial governments bolstering local defenses or outfitting naval squadrons to patrol their rivers and harbors, as to the Continental Army. Washington’s lack of leverage was apparent in one deal with John Brown, whose last-minute retraction of an agreement to deliver fifteen casks of gunpowder was unapologetic. The General Assembly had offered more money, Brown shrugged, hence he “must give them the preference.”

The arms business was far from a sure thing, however. Several of the Browns’ early voyages “entirely failed,” and tactical tips included in their sailing instructions to skippers (“run in by night so as to escape them”) clearly came of painful experience. The ability to take risks and absorb losses was a key factor in their company’s emergence as an important supplier of powder and weapons.

To ensure its needs took precedence, Congress formed the Secret Committee to begin financing supply expeditions in the fall of 1775. Lacking credit or hard currency, the committee shipped tobacco, indigo, grain, or timber as barter for foreign munitions. Merchants brokered the deals. They used Congress’s money to buy export commodities and to hire vessels, captains, and crews. Then they arranged with their foreign contacts to complete the exchange on the other end.

They received commissions on each phase of the transaction—

5 percent of the value of the initial cargo, 2.5 percent of its sale price overseas. Congress covered any losses, news of which often came matter-of-factly from merchants with no real stake in the outcome. Reported one firm after spending a $45,000 advance on German arms, “It unfortunately happened that the ship has never been heard of and our agent perished in her. This of course prevented the execution of the contract.” The advance wasn’t refunded.

It was a lopsided arrangement to say the least. Since merchants worked on commission rather than set fees, there was no incentive to seek cheaper terms; indeed, higher prices meant higher commissions. The availability of items in foreign ports was hard to predict given voyages lasting weeks and months, so dispatching a cargo of tobacco in hopes of converting it to munitions was no assurance that the vessel would return with mortars and firing flints instead of pickles and table linen. And letting merchants, as enticement to participate in the effort, piggyback their private trade aboard vessels bound by contract to make military purchases created an environment vulnerable to manipulation.

Merchants commonly gave their captains shopping lists in which military supplies shared priority with high-demand civilian goods or personal wants such as the “good Florence oil, a chest of claret, and a keg of the best brandy” that Nicholas and John tacked onto a government order for sulphur, guns, and canvas. Initially, no negative stigma attached to these glaring conflicts of interest. It was accepted that capitalism and patriotism went hand in hand. John Brown bragged of unloading on Congress a surplus of candles that had been decaying in storage. He got top price and a commission besides. The army, once the candles were sold in France, got two hundred firearms and three thousand pounds of gunpowder.

But Congress grew impatient with results falling short of promises. Nicholas Brown & Company delivered only nine of thirty-six tons of powder stipulated in contracts worth $44,000, for example. After temporarily forbidding any international ventures not explicitly tied to military procurement, Congress concluded that the economic necessity of open trade outweighed the likelihood of some American goods falling into British hands. Merchants thus were permitted again to make deals in their own interest, meaning munitions, though always desirable, could take second place to whatever foreign products might pull a higher price back home.

“Powder expected to fall soon,” ran a typical purchase order. “All kinds of dry goods very high, selling at four times cost in America.” The decision? “Would advise you not to be large in powder. Put every shilling you can command in dry goods.” The needs of the army, in short, could wait.

S
triking liberal arrangements with savvy, experienced businessmen was Congress’s best option to supply Washington’s troops early in the war. The Secret Committee went on to appoint its own agents to negotiate foreign arms purchases while merchants gladly resumed independent operation. Though government contracts had offered surefire returns, huge markups on private imports were worth the risk of going it alone.

Too, critics had begun to complain about the Secret Committee’s operating procedures. A number of its members had received lucrative arms contracts. Willing, Morris & Company, a Philadelphia firm run by the committee chairman, Robert Morris, cleared £12,000 in powder deliveries “without any risk at all,” John Adams grumbled. The deal prompted “vitriolic” exchanges among members of Congress “on the general theme of business and patriotism.”

As war profits became manifested in business expansion and ever grander lifestyles, resentment increased. Commercial ties to the government invited suspicions of graft and, in a new development, inhibited merchants from obtaining munitions for themselves rather than for their country.

Nicholas Brown & Company began reflecting this altered priority in 1776. The “many accusations” of price gouging (“indecent as well as uncharitable,” sniffed John) were followed with charges that when it came to cannon and gunpowder, the company wasn’t interested in selling at all, preferring to arm its own vessels rather than supply the army and navy.

The Browns’ affronted contention that they were “as deeply engaged in the cause of the United States as any other men on the continent” wasn’t the denial it appeared to be. Though still seeking profits through traditional paths, they indeed were withholding munitions in expectation of embarking on an exciting new enterprise. It was the
Gaspee
paradox all over again—in doing for themselves, they were advancing the cause more than anyone could have realized. Begun in Massachusetts and quickly embraced by Providence’s wily entrepreneurs, privateering had come to Rhode Island.

1775

M
ACHIAS,
M
AINE

Eight weeks after the battles at Lexington and Concord, HMS
Margaretta
, an armed cutter carrying four cannon and 40 crewmen, sailed to Machias, Maine, seeking lumber to fortify the Boston garrison. It was commanded by a Royal Navy midshipman named James Moore. Hoping that news of the recent bloodshed hadn’t yet reached this far north, he planned to trade for the lumber with cargo items from two supply ships in convoy with him. Unfortunately villagers had heard rumors of war out of Massachusetts and were disinclined to deal.

To drive home the point they erected in their town green a “liberty pole,” a tall pine stripped of all but its top branches that had become a symbol of patriotic solidarity. Moore, a young man clearly on edge, demanded they provide the lumber and chop down the tree or else be shelled by his guns. The strong-arm tactic backfired. Immediately a mob assembled with “fouling pieces, pitchforks, a few scythes, and ten or twelve axes,” commandeered one of the British supply ships,
Unity
, and rammed it into
Margaretta
.

Moore shot and killed the first boarder and threw several hand grenades. Hollow shells of cast iron packed with powder and carrying a lighted fuse, they exploded among the Americans “with great effect” but didn’t deter the onslaught. Moore and five of his men were hacked to death and
Margaretta
was seized.

The leader of the assault, thirty-one-year-old Jeremiah O’Brien, was awarded
Unity
as a personal prize by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. He requisitioned
Margaretta
’s guns and set off to hunt supply ships running between Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia, site of the Royal Navy’s North American shipyard. In July he captured an enemy sloop and took it as his next vessel, which he renamed
Machias Liberty
.

He quit the Massachusetts navy to hire out as a civilian skipper in 1777, eventually earning enough money to build a twenty-gun warship in Newburyport. Upon its completion in 1778, he put up a £2,000 bond for a privateer commission (one of more than two hundred issued in Massachusetts that year), recruited a crew of 130, and undertook an expedition to the West Indies. It ended when his bid to pick off a straggler from a convoy en route to New York brought him “within musket shot” of an enemy frigate.

At such close range a privateer had no chance against a frigate’s firepower, which could bring a barrage of hurtling metal from up to two dozen twelve-pound cannon mounted along each side. The frigate HMS
Brune
, for instance, once obliterated a twelve-gun privateer with a single broadside. Its captain reported that in trying to treat the many wounded among the American schooner’s sixty-one crewmen, his boarding party found the vessel “so much damaged that we hardly had time to get them all on board before she sunk.” Similarly, a successful Boston privateer,
Speedwell
, carrying fourteen guns and ninety men, took a frigate’s broadside “between wind and water” (the portion of the hull normally below the waterline but exposed to the air if the vessel is heeled over in the wind). The result was that “she immediately foundered, and all her crew (the mate excepted) perished in the accident.” O’Brien therefore had little choice but to surrender.

He did time on the prison ship
Jersey
(“dysentery, fever, frenzy, and despair”) before being transferred to Britain’s Mill Prison. There, according to an account written in 1898, “the special malice of the British government” made him “the object of personal ill-treatment.” He escaped two years later, rowed across the English Channel, hopped a French ship to America, and got back to Maine just as hostilities ended. With nothing left of his wartime earnings, he worked as a customs official till his death in 1818.

O’Brien’s fame from the Machias attack (which has been called the founding event of the United States Merchant Marine because the ship he rammed into
Margaretta
was an unarmed transport) evidently made him cocky. While still in the Massachusetts service he’d boasted that “I shall not pay any regard” to financial regulations. True to his word, he later was accused of stealing “sundry articles” from captured prizes and docked wages “for that sum as so much unjustly received.” Ultimately seizing a dozen prizes as a privateer, he got no complaint from his navy superiors when he jumped to that roguish business. Rather, as a Continental official told John Hancock, “They are glad they’ve got rid of him.”

Two

The first fortunate adventurer will set many more on pushing their fortunes. Consequences may be very pernicious.

—from notes on the privateering debate in the Maritime Committee of the Continental Congress, October 1775

B
ritish merchants counted on a quick end to the war. Since previous flare-ups and trade interruptions had redounded to their benefit once relations with America returned to normal, many began stockpiling desirable European goods in anticipation of higher prices in the wake of hostilities. Edmund Burke, longtime Parliamentary critic of George III’s colonial policies, noted the dangerous exposure of those “exhausting their capital to the last farthing” on the bet of future windfalls, especially if, as he predicted, the conflict became a protracted struggle whereby the consequences to Britain “will be gradual and therefore incurable.”

The king all but guaranteed that result by opting on a middle course between reconciling with the rebels and swiftly overwhelming them. He rejected the eleventh-hour Olive Branch Petition of compromise sent by members of Congress in July 1775, yet he delayed in mobilizing a decisive military response. Even as battles were fought and forces added to the American theater, his generals in the field were told to put out feelers to Revolutionary leaders in search of a peaceful solution, a tentative approach to warfare that undercut the resolve of British officers and troops.

Loyalists, standing to lose their homes and livelihoods, were especially critical of their government’s dithering. Fretful editorials in London newspapers that “the African trade has felt the blow…the West India trade staggers…our manufactures begin to feel it…” were mild compared to shrieks of “Where is the boasted navy of our country?” from panicked American Tories.

The panic was shared by officials isolated in colonial ports with only sea routes to supply them. In the summer of 1775 the royal governor of Georgia found that rebel boats had bottled up Savannah harbor with “power to plunder anything that arrives here.” He sent an urgent plea to Admiral Graves to send a frigate south to disperse them. The letter was intercepted by colonists who substituted, under the governor’s seal, a buoyant fabrication saying that everything was fine. “I now have not any occasion for any vessel of war, and I am clearly of the opinion that His Majesty’s service will be better promoted by the absence of any vessels of war in this port.”

Not that Graves had any to spare. His fleet was expected to patrol more than a thousand miles of coastline between Canada and Florida with fewer than fifty warships. Ten were assigned to Massachusetts Bay alone, charged with stopping the flow of arms into New England. They were also to escort British transports into Boston, where, hemmed in by the Continental Army, provisions were running critically low; and they were to repel, Graves wrote with irritation, local sea raiders “continually popping out as soon as a merchant ship appears.”

Meanwhile the British ground commander, General Gage, demanded that Graves start hijacking colonial trade for foodstuffs of any kind. “The king’s troops must be supplied!” Agreeing that “every stratagem must be used,” the admiral coerced loyalist ships exporting “bread, beef, peas, oatmeal, and rice” out of New York to change course from Britain to Boston, and he arranged with double-dealing merchants from Newport to “put on the appearance” of seizing their cargoes by force.

Graves was pompous and timid, but even a bold commander couldn’t have fulfilled a mission described as “perhaps the most ungracious duty that has ever fallen to the lot of a naval officer.” Reports circulated in Britain that “within his own department the admiral is more hated and despised, if possible, than he is by the rebels.” He fell into despair as a result. “We are in every way more harassed than if on an enemy’s coast. My patience is nearly exhausted.”

George Washington monitored Graves’s travails through observers posted in whaling dories and from his vantage point on the heights surrounding Boston’s central peninsula. Realizing that the redcoats and some one thousand loyalist citizens jammed with their backs to the harbor were “suffering all the calamities of a siege,” he was satisfied that they were no more capable of attack than he was. Some guerrilla-style actions were launched—navigation beacons sabotaged, a lighthouse burned, impostors planted among Royal Navy pilots to deliberately run ships on the rocks—but till Washington amassed more powder and cannon there was little else to do.

Impatient to act, he eventually sent a force under Benedict Arnold to British-held Quebec and another under Henry Knox to retrieve fifty artillery pieces captured at Fort Ticonderoga in upper New York the previous spring. But in the fall of 1775 his most promising operations occurred at sea.

B
efore the war, a huge proportion of Massachusetts men had participated in fishing, shipbuilding, or ocean trade. In the coastal towns, one in six owned or part-owned a trade vessel, and the number of fishing and whaling boats exceeded one thousand, employing thousands of men. Washington consequently was deluged with advice about how best to deploy the region’s maritime clout. Not all of it was selfless, however. One gentleman offered a plan to torch Royal Navy vessels where they lay at anchor, though not “without an advantage in proportion to the service I may do.” To discuss his fee, he could be contacted at a local coffeehouse “care of Mr. Hugh James, the barkeeper.”

Congress had specified in its rather nervous appointment of Washington as commander in chief that he be circumspect and receptive to advice. Accordingly he hesitated to make decisions “under the sole guidance of my own judgment and self-will” and instead consulted with officers and political leaders. When seeking some way to break the stalemate of the Boston siege, he “deliberated at intervals of three weeks with Massachusetts lawmakers and Congressional delegates.” Their counsel invigorated his efforts to make real what had seemed mere fancy when he first surveyed the bustle of enemy vessels in Boston Harbor. “A fortunate capture of an ordnance ship would give new life to the camp, and an immediate turn to the issue of this campaign.”

It wasn’t a new notion. Massachusetts skippers, armed with neither legal authority nor heavy weapons, had been converting their fishing and cargo boats to bare-bones warships for several months now. On June 20, 1775, the colony’s Provincial Congress had resolved to outfit its own navy to counter British “piracies.” One week later, Nicholas Cooke, a Rhode Island distiller soon to become governor when revolution fever deemed Joseph Wanton insufficiently pro-war, called for other colonies to follow suit as “a great means of protecting our trade and also of picking up many provision vessels.”

Not waiting for outside approval, the Rhode Island Assembly had chartered two sloops under the command of John Brown’s
Gaspee
cohort, Abraham Whipple, whose first capture was one of the small tenders accompanying HMS
Rose
, the frigate that earlier had brought Brown in irons to Boston.
Rose
’s captain, James Wallace, vowed to hang Whipple “at the yard arm” for his thievery, to which the latter taunted, “Always catch a man before you hang him.”

When Rhode Island formally urged Congress to finance “an American fleet” on August 15, debate commenced full tilt. Many members thought the idea of taking on the Royal Navy insane. Still hoping for “a speedy reconciliation,” they feared that mobilizing Continental warships would incite enemy blockades of the Delaware and Chesapeake bays, strangling commerce in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Virginia. John Adams and two others, Silas Deane of Connecticut and John Langdon of New Hampshire, were assigned to review the matter and make a recommendation to Congress.

Merchants by profession, Deane and Langdon favored an aggressive buildup. (Deane proposed New London, Connecticut, as the future navy’s home base—a nice central location, plus he had business interests there.) Adams conceived the Continental fleet as strictly defensive, keeping “our harbors and rivers” as safe havens for vessels of the foreign trade so crucial to America’s survival. Leave the perils of open ocean to private adventurers, he cautioned. “To talk of coping suddenly with Great Britain at sea would be quixoticism indeed.”

While Congress debated launching any navy at all, the issue in Massachusetts, where commerce raiders had enjoyed just enough success to whet visions of big gains to come, was whether to follow through on the proposed provincial navy or turn loose the citizenry’s “pecuniary zeal” by legalizing privateering. The second course promised an instant navy at no cost to the government. Two points argued against it. If privateering flourished, fewer sailors would sign up for government service. And it had the potential, in the minds of some, to encourage social unruliness. Advocates sneered. In the face of British aggression, they said, “The delicacy is absurd surely.”

Discussion in Philadelphia and Massachusetts followed parallel tracks for much of that fall. Congress moved to establish a Marine Committee to oversee the production of thirteen frigates of twenty-four to thirty-two guns. Massachusetts lawmakers reiterated their support for a provincial fleet and considered petitions for privateer licenses as well. Expected to play a harassing role at best, privateers were envisioned as the third element of a nautical triple threat featuring Continental warships for ocean combat and midsized provincial vessels for coastal defense.

The Massachusetts General Court officially endorsed privateers in November with “An Act for Encouraging the Fixing out of Armed Vessels.” The act, termed “a political curiosity” when it was reprinted in London soon thereafter, permitted citizens to “equip any vessel to sail on the seas, attack, take and bring into any port in this colony all vessels offending or employed by the enemy.” It outlined procedures for obtaining commissions and laid the groundwork for establishing prize courts to assess and apportion the booty.

Men who’d pushed hardest for the act’s passage were first in line with applications. Many shared qualities that primed them for this new venture. In their twenties and early thirties, sons of merchants and ship captains, natives of ports outside Boston unhampered by British occupation, they leaped to the twin call of freedom and enterprise. Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead, vowing to make privateers “swarm,” had challenged hesitant lawmakers in October, “can we doubt the propriety of encouraging individuals by giving them the advantage resulting from their reprisals?” Ten months later he signed the Declaration of Independence at age thirty-two.

One of Gerry’s business partners was twenty-four-year-old Nathaniel Tracy, whose access to gritty mariners from his town of Newburyport made Tracy one of privateering’s first high-fliers. Just south, in Beverly and Salem, the Cabot and Derby shipping clans set about refashioning their trade vessels into warships, cutting gunports through the bulwarks and clearing holds to make room for extra crewmen needed to take possession of prizes and sail them home for trial. Only difficulties in acquiring weapons slowed the rush to get into the game. Once those became available, Elias Hasket Derby predicted, “There will be not less than one hundred sail of privateers out from the continent.”

In early 1776 Elias’s brother Richard Jr. was put in charge of outfitting warships for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Such insider connections were essential in what became a frenzied scramble for cannon and powder, and helped Elias turn his prediction into a massive understatement.

O
n October 5, 1775, John Hancock, president of Congress, excitedly forwarded to Washington spy reports out of London of a convoy on the way bearing huge loads of military ordnance. The general had been readying armed schooners on his own authority since the previous summer and was well along in commissioning “vessels to be armed and manned to intercept transports daily arriving at Boston.” The vessels were leased, their crews comprised of soldiers whose pay was to be supplemented by shares of any prizes. As commander in chief he could dip into his thin supply of munitions as needed, but that was his only advantage in what proved a frustrating process.

Critical of men “so basely sordid” as to temper their patriotic commitment “for the sake of a little gain,” Washington deemed one-third of a prize’s value to be sufficient for his sailors; that is, their shares would derive from one-third of the total (the captain getting the largest piece of that, then the surgeon, the lieutenants, on down to the privates and cabin boys), with the remaining two-thirds going to the government. Congress later increased the crew’s allotment to half the prize, but it hardly countered the conflict ahead, for privateers, once authorized by law, were entitled to the whole thing. The ramifications are obvious in retrospect—higher rewards make for greater appeal—but for Washington they were a lesson yet to be learned.

A stranger to the region, he depended on local officials to help equip and man his vessels. Crews were drawn from a regiment of former Marblehead watermen commanded by Colonel John Glover, a fisherman and wharf owner in Beverly. Glover was tough and dedicated. His regiment, expert in boating, later ferried the Continental Army under fire from Long Island to the New York mainland in August 1776, and would make history transporting 2,400 troops across the wintry Delaware River in Washington’s famous Christmas crossing. But his supervision of Washington’s schooners, though instrumental in getting them to sea, bore the same conflicts of interest and recriminations that soured other business-patriotic endeavors.

Glover leased his own
Hannah
, a sixty-foot vessel named after his wife, to the government at premium rates. He installed his son as the ship’s first officer and his brother-in-law as its sailing master. For captain he proposed a friend, Nicholson Broughton, who brought his son-in-law aboard as second lieutenant. Messages from headquarters grew tense. “The price you mention for bread is monstrous…cannot but think a desire to secure particular friends or particular interests does mingle in the management of these vessels…the General is much dissatisfied.”