The Lost Fleet (23 page)

S
UMMER
1690
R
HODE
I
SLAND

T
he great age of the buccaneers, the de Grammonts, the de Graffs, who plundered the Spanish Main was coming to an end. This is not to say that the curtain was falling on piracy in general. Far from it. The golden age of piracy would continue on for another forty years before piracy would dwindle to the point at which it was a rarity, an anomaly, in the history of merchant sail.

With the filibusters of old gone, the pirates of the Caribbean would rise in their place. There was, of course, a continuity, a thread that ran from the history of the old to the dawn of the new. There were men who spanned that historical gap. One of the most important was de Grammont's old lieutenant, Thomas Paine.

Paine was an odd figure, a shadow pirate, as often operating in the background as he was leading raids. He outlasted de Grammont, de Graff, and most of the others. He was a major link between the European buccaneers of the Spanish Main and the pirates that later
swarmed out of New England for the Red Sea, and later still the second wave of pirates of the Caribbean, following the War of the Spanish Succession. Paine was one of the few who lived to old age and genuine respectability in the colony.

After the legal close calls and active attempts to prosecute him in 1683 and 1684, Thomas Paine seems to have disappeared for a while. He might have been lying low, waiting for the storm to blow itself out. He could have returned to the Caribbean for another go at filibustering. Although there is no direct evidence that he was there, his old consort Bréha was active in the area, along with Yankey Willems. A couple of English sloops were reported to have been operating in company with those two notorious buccaneers. One of those might well have been commanded by Paine.

Whatever Paine was doing, it does not seem to have further damaged his reputation. By 1687, he turned up again in Rhode Island with little fanfare. There were no attempts to arrest him. That year or the next, Paine married the daughter of a prominent Rhode Island citizen, Caleb Carr, a judge living in Jamestown.

Paine and his bride, Mercy, also settled in Jamestown. Though he had not yet been made a freeman of the colony, that is, an enfranchised voter, Paine served on the grand jury in December 1688. He was becoming a respectable citizen. The government was now willing to overlook his past indiscretions.

A P
IRATE FOR
R
HODE
I
SLAND'S
D
EFENSE

One reason for governmental tolerance of pirates was the hope that these men would form a floating militia in times of crisis. In 1690, Rhode Island would have reason to be glad the former buccaneer was in their midst.

The War of the Grand Alliance, or “King William's War” as it was known in the colonies, had been going on for two years. The governors of New York and Massachusetts had already organized attacks against French colonies in North America. The towns along the seaboard were braced for a counterattack.

On July 22, 1690, a squadron of vessels, a bark and two sloops, appeared off Block Island. Immediately alarmed, the islanders hurried to the shore to determine the identity of the approaching ships. A boat
put off from one of the strange vessels, and a man identifying himself as William Trimming, or possibly Tremayne, came ashore. To the colonists' vast relief, he assured them that the ships were English privateers.

Unfortunately, he was lying, but the people of Block Island bought the story. Soon after, when more boats from the squadron came ashore, the people of Block Island made no effort to resist. They did not even realize they had been tricked until the boat crews snatched up hidden weapons and leaped ashore, taking many of the islanders prisoner and sending others fleeing into the woods.

Trimming turned out to be captain of one of the sloops, described by a witness as “a very violent, resolute fellow,”
¹
but he was not the leader of the expedition. That honor went to Pierre le Picard. Picard, like Paine, was a filibuster of long standing, one of the old-guard privateers of the Spanish Main.

Pierre le Picard first appears in the history of the filibusters in 1668, twenty-two years prior to the Block Island raid, an incredibly long career given the inherent dangers of the business. The existing record suggests that he first sailed under the command of another pirate, the Frenchman Francis L'Ollonais.

Though Picard seems to have begun his piratical career under the French madman, there is no evidence to suggest that he ever engaged in cruelty of L'Ollonais's caliber. Picard and his men took Block Island with virtually no resistance and occupied it for a week. Contemporary reports say that the privateers brutalized and maltreated the inhabitants, but that maltreatment did not rise to the level of what Exquemelin attributes to L'Ollonais.

When word of the privateers' presence reached the mainland, bonfires were lit up and down the coast as a warning to ships and coastal residents. A sloop was dispatched from Newport to determine the Frenchmen's whereabouts. On July 24, Picard and his men abandoned Block Island and made an attempt on Newport itself, but abandoned that plan when their intentions were discovered and the citizens of Rhode Island forewarned.

To drive the French off by force of arms, Rhode Island governor John Easton commandeered a sloop of ten guns, the
Loyal Stede
of Barbados, then at anchor in Newport Harbor. To command her he chose the Rhode Island citizen most experienced with naval warfare, Captain Thomas Paine.

Pierre le Picard and Thomas Paine had both been Brethren of the
Coast. They certainly knew each other from the old days on the Spanish Main. There is even evidence to suggest that Picard had once served under Paine's command. Now, because of an outbreak of war two thousand miles away, they were bound to fight one another.

Paine set sail aboard the
Loyal Stede
on July 30 with sixty men aboard, including his father-in-law, Caleb Carr, and two brothers-in-law, Nicholas and Samuel Carr. In company with the
Loyal Stede
was a smaller sloop under the command of John Godfrey. Thomas Paine was finally going out to “seize, kill, and destroy pirates,” seven years after Sir Thomas Lynch had issued him a commission to do so.

The two improvised men-of-war sailed for Block Island but found it abandoned by the Frenchmen, who had sailed off to try a quick raid on New London, Connecticut. The next day “Captain and Commodore Paine” got his small squadron under way, heading southward, and later in the day he caught sight of the French privateers sailing to the eastward. The Frenchmen, thinking the two sloops to be merchantmen and possibly valuable prizes, hauled their wind and came after them.

Paine was outmanned and outgunned, and he knew he was not dealing with a timid opponent. He brought his sloops into the shallows near Block Island and anchored them fore and aft so they would not swing. In that way Paine kept his broadsides trained on the approaching vessels and prevented the French from getting to either side of his own sloops.

Picard still did not know with whom he was dealing. He still believed that the two sloops were unarmed merchantmen. Rather than go after so easy a prize with his larger vessels, the Frenchman filled a piragua with armed men and sent her in after the anchored sloops thinking a few volleys of small-arms fire would induce the merchantman to surrender. And it probably would have, had the sloops been merchantmen.

In a sort of Bunker Hill don't-fire-until-you-see-the-whites-of-their-eyes strategy Paine and his men waited patiently while the piragua closed with them. Unfortunately, Paine's gunner was overly eager to have at them. He urged Paine to let him fire, arguing that he could put a cannon ball right down the length of the piragua, from bow to stern, doing terrible damage.

Paine argued that they were better off letting the enemy get closer still. With the kind of town hall atmosphere that could only exist among an ad hoc crew of Rhode Islanders, the gunner persisted in his
arguments. Finally Paine allowed him his shot, since the gunner was “certain (as he said) he should rake them fore and aft.”

The gunner fired and missed, and Picard realized that he was not dealing with an unarmed merchantman. The piragua turned on its heel and headed back to the large privateers, robbing Paine of his chance to dispose of a good portion of the enemy's crew with a single broadside.

The men in the piragua put their backs into their oars to flee the
Loyal Stede's
broadsides. Once out of range, they waited for the squadron of privateers to sail up to them and then reembarked. The battle would now be ship to ship.

Picard, in command of the bark, led the attack, as the three French vessels approached in line-ahead formation. The bark swept down on the anchored Rhode Island vessels. Coming up with them, the three ships exchanged murderous broadsides of great guns and small-arms fire as Picard sailed slowly past.

Next in line was Captain Trimming, in command of the larger of the two sloops. He went about his business like a true pirate and died the same way. Eyewitnesses reported, “He took a glass of wine to drink, and wished it might be his damnation if he did not board them [the Rhode Island sloops] immediately. But as he was drinking, a bullet struck him in his neck, with which he instantly fell down dead….”

 

The death of Trimming did nothing to quell the fury of the battle. The fighting was fast and furious. Samuel Niles, an eyewitness, reported:

The battle lasted for several bloody hours, but the English gunnery proved superior to the French. Picard lost fourteen men killed, including Trimming, which he considered a serious blow. He was
reported to have claimed that he would rather have lost thirty men than his valuable second in command.

In comparison, Paine lost only one man killed, a Native American, and six were slightly wounded. The French had aimed high, and a majority of their shot passed over the anchored sloops, so that the thrifty Yankees were able to collect musket and cannon balls on the shore beyond Paine's fleet.

As night fell, the French moved offshore and anchored for the night, not far from Paine. The English had nearly exhausted their powder and shot during the long engagement. Paine, expecting the battle to resume at first light, sent for whatever supplies might be found on Block Island.

Pierre le Picard, however, had no more stomach for the fight. Rather than engage the English again, his squadron weighed their anchors at dawn and sailed off, heading out to sea. Certainly the results of the previous day's fight would have been enough to discourage him, but Niles offers another possibility:

For once, Paine's unsavory reputation did him some good.

Seeing the Frenchmen making their escape, Paine and Godfrey went in pursuit of them, “with the valor and spirit of true Englishmen,” according to Niles. The privateers were fast and weatherly ships, however, and Paine could not overtake them.

Picard also had in his company a small prize he had captured during his attacks on Long Island Sound, a merchantman loaded with wine and brandy. This ship was a dull sailor compared to the privateers, and Picard knew that she would not be able to outsail Paine. Rather than let the English recapture her, the French blew a hole in her bottom with a cannon and allowed her to sink. It must have been heartbreaking for a French crew to see a cargo of wine and brandy go to the bottom.

When Paine reached the scuttled merchant ship, he found her hanging in the water. The bow had settled onto the bottom, but her stern was still held above water by a line made fast to a longboat that
the merchantman had been towing astern. With the ship in that odd situation there was no way to salvage any of the cargo. When the Englishmen cut the line, the ship sank immediately. The Frenchmen were heading for the horizon with no chance that they would be overtaken. Paine and Godfrey had only the longboat as a prize.

But prizes were not the issue here. Commodore Paine had attacked and beaten off a superior enemy, an enemy that had already caused tremendous harm to the coast and threatened to cause even more. Paine the “archpirate” was now Paine the hero, the savior of Rhode Island.

T
HE
G
OLDEN
Y
EARS

During the next decade, Thomas Paine continued to grow in wealth and respectability. Only two months after driving off Picard and his squadron, Paine and his father-in-law Caleb Carr were made tax assessors for their hometown of Jamestown.

Two years after that, in 1692, Paine was appointed by the general assembly to the rank of captain of militia. Generally such appointments are made by the town from which the militia is mustered. In this case Jamestown had failed to do so, letting the job fall to the assembly. The fact that it was the colonial government, not the town government, that selected him is evidence that Paine's reputation was not only good but also widely known, even at the level of the colony's general assembly.

Paine's reputation and notice were much enhanced in 1695 when Caleb Carr was elected governor of Rhode Island. Rhode Island politics was (and still is) raucous and colorful. Nepotism was an art form. Even by the standards of the seventeenth century, when nepotism was not nearly as frowned upon as it is today, Rhode Islanders were notorious for the practice. Having a father-in-law as governor could not have hurt Paine's community standing.