1775 (86 page)

As concern over defenses extended to vulnerable rivers, row galleys gained favor. The Americans invading Canada in September 1775 also used them for aggressive and patrolling purposes on the Richelieu River, and Rhode Island added two to its provincial navy. But the principal innovator was Pennsylvania, which during the summer of 1775 paired a squadron of thirteen row galleys with its iron-toothed chevaux-de-frise as obstacles to British penetration of the Delaware River.
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By the end of August, provincial navies were established in six colonies: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts (for the Machias region only), Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia. The scale was small, and except along the Delaware, schooners and sloops dominated. Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina added local navies in December.

Privateers and privateering had been so popular and financially rewarding during the French wars that proposals quickly reemerged in 1775. Massachusetts led on November 1, passing “An Act for Encouraging the Fixing Out of Armed Vessells, to defend the Sea Coast of America, and for Erecting a Court to Try and Condemn all Vessells that shall be found infesting the same.”
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George Washington opted for schooners in late August and September, employing the Massachusetts-built
Hannah
as America’s first regularly commissioned warship. In a sense, these schooners were quasiprivateers or government privateers because the arrangements gave the crews a share of the booty. The
Hannah
turned out to be slow and disappointing, but several of the other schooners in what has been labeled “Washington’s Navy” turned in impressive performances, especially in capturing transports carrying munitions.
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Not all of the small craft favored by Americans moved on the water’s surface. Early 1775 found David Bushnell, about to graduate from Yale, already at work in Connecticut on what he called a “submarine” and that he hoped to employ against the British men-of-war in Boston Harbor. By August, his associates were already in touch with Benjamin Franklin and Patriot pastor Ezra Stiles. That month, Stiles was informed that “the machine is so constructed that it can move rapidly 20 or more feet under water and attach to the hull of a ship two thousand pounds of gunpowder.”
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But no submerged attack took place until the following summer.

To return to politics, October’s British burning of Portland accelerated congressional interest. A few southern members of Congress, like South Carolina’s Christopher Gadsden, had been navalists from the start but more were enlisted as conflict spread to Charleston Harbor and the Virginia rivers were raided and plundered by forces under Lord Dunmore. As we have seen, the months of October, November, and December contain the momentous dates in the early history of the U.S. Navy: October 13 and October 30. On December 3, Lieutenant John Paul Jones ran up the United Colonies flag on the Continental Navy’s new flagship, the
Alfred.
Then on December 13, in a pretentious move doubted by George Washington and others, Congress voted to build thirteen frigates for the new navy.
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Perhaps the number thirteen brought the bad luck, but collectively, these ships compiled what can only be called a disappointing record. As they were completed and commissioned in 1776 and 1777, the increased number of ships and greater professionalism of the Royal Navy regained the North American reputation it had briefly lost in 1775. Half of the new American frigates were destroyed in their shipyards or quickly captured. The waterborne portion of the American Revolution took its laurels just as 1775 had hinted: from the achievements of relatively small vessels, and in later years from the growing importance of privateers.

The Whaleboat Warriors

Their capacity for a quick strike was widely appreciated. Whaleboats had been used in Rhode Islanders’ famous attack on the British revenue cutter
Gaspee
in 1772, and from late 1776 on, they played a prominent role in the ferocious raids across Long Island Sound mounted by both Connecticut Patriots and New York Tories. New Jersey Patriots took whaleboats down rivers like the Raritan and attacked locations around New York Harbor.

In 1775, though, Massachusetts was the epicenter. Just weeks after Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts Committee of Safety was ordering the collection of both boats and oars.
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The first whaleboat success came in Vineyard Sound in late April, when a single large boat of Naushon Islanders under Captain Nathan Smith, against considerable odds, captured the armed schooner
Volante,
tender to the British frigate
Scarborough.
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Six weeks later sailors from the British sloop
Falcon
stove in all of Naushon’s whaleboats.

Whaleboats made a mark in the Battle of Noddle’s Island in Boston Harbor on May 27. In this drawn-out confrontation, Patriots using them to remove livestock and hay from Noddle’s and Hog islands were set upon by British vessels and a marine detachment. Although estimates vary, the British force eventually included 700 or so marines, and the American force under Israel Putnam numbered between 1,000 and 2,000 soldiers, with several field pieces. Most of the livestock and hay were saved, and the Americans also disabled a British sloop and burned the armed schooner
Diana
—with fourteen four-pounders, the largest schooner in Britain’s North American Squadron. It was no more than a minor victory, but Congress was cheered enough to make a Continental major general out of Putnam for the part he played.
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Follow-up whaleboat expeditions to Pettick’s and Deer islands on May 31 and June 2 netted 1,300 sheep and at least 30 cattle. Again, the British could do little to stop the removals, and one man-of-war’s barge was taken with four or five prisoners.
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On July 11, another American raid with 136 men in whaleboats went to Long Island and burned the forage that British soldiers had bundled to bring back to Boston for army horses. An angry Admiral Graves noted in his journal that he did not have men or vessels enough to “secure all the Islands from Depredation.” Besides, “the rebels’ excursions were always conducted with such Secrecy and Dispatch that the Flames were generally the first notice of their intentions.”
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Soon after George Washington took command, he reported to Congress on July 20 that “I have ordered all the Whale Boats for many miles along the coast to be collected, and some of them are employed every Night to watch the notion of the enemy by water, in order to guard as much as possible against any surprize.”
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Now Patriots turned to destroying the lighthouses vital to British navigation in the tricky waters of Massachusetts Bay. The Cape Ann lighthouse was destroyed first, and then on July 21, a force of whaleboats under Major Joseph Vose raided Little Brewster Island, site of the Boston Lighthouse. After driving off the British guards, his men burned the wooden parts of the lighthouse and confiscated lamps, oil, and boats.
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Major Benjamin Tupper, now emerging as the army’s harbor raid commander, took 200 men in 25 whaleboats back to Brewster Island on July 31 to finish the job. They killed or captured 32 redcoats defending the island and took prisoner the ten carpenters doing the rebuilding. This time the lighthouse was burned and destroyed.
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By this point, captains of British ships in Boston had become fearful that the Patriots’ assemblage of nearly 300 whaleboats—Graves’s estimate as of July 24—might be aimed at their own captures. On July 31, John Tollemache, captain of the sloop HMS
Scorpion,
which Graves had stationed near the lighthouse, wrote to tell the admiral it seemed “certain” that he would be attacked. Worse, because his decks had no cover, the
Scorpion
might be taken by small arms alone.
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That very night a nervous Graves ordered Captain John Robinson of the man-of-war
Preston
to take nine barges of seamen and marines from his ship, as well as from
Boyne
and
Somerset.
They were to burn the 200 or 300 whaleboats reported to be in nearby woods along the Germantown River. However, the American pilots pressed into service refused to give directions, and Robinson turned back,
as Graves noted in his journal, because it was deemed “unadvisable to risque so many men and boats in a River totally unknown to all.”
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This happened on the same day that the lighthouse was being destroyed; whaleboats became the talk of the Royal Navy in Boston.

On August 4, Captain Edward LeCras, R.N., and Captain Broderick Hartwell, R.N., commanding officers of the
Somerset
and
Boyne,
respectively, wrote to Graves about their “very weak state of Defence” and potential vulnerability to the whaleboats and to rumored fireships. Hartwell thought it “far from being improbable” that the rebels would endeavor to burn the
Boyne.
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Another British officer mocked Graves: “instead of sending his squadron to protect the store-ships and transports from England, [he] has, with the utmost prudence, ordered the ships of war in this harbour to be secured with booms all round, to prevent their being boarded and taken by the Rebel whaleboats.”
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Whaleboat warfare in the American Revolution was far from finished in August 1775. But in Boston Harbor at least, its great days were winding down.

Row Galleys in the Rivers

Naval attention to row galleys was visible in major rivers like the Delaware, the Hudson, the Piscataqua, and Virginia’s four largest waterways—the Potomac, Rappahannock, James, and York. In July 1775, Massachusetts’s Josiah Quincy proposed to John Adams that Congress should build a fleet of row galleys along the coasts. They would be small, open oar-driven boats, mounting cannon to fight off British raiders. Congress that month had urged each colony to provide “armed vessels or otherwise…for the protection of their harbors and navigation on their coasts.”
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A few row galleys were indeed used for coasts, most notably along Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. However, Pennsylvania grabbed attention in the summer of 1775 by launching a provincial navy that soon included fourteen row galleys stationed on the Delaware River to protect Philadelphia. They were 80 to 100 feet in length, propelled by 20 oars, and also carrying two short masts rigged for lateen (triangular) sails. Each mounted an 18- or 24-pounder in its bow, save for a few with 32-pounders. Two swivel guns were also normal. Five of the galleys were named for leading American politicians (Washington, Dickinson, Franklin, Warren, and Hancock), but four were called after pro-Americans in Parliament (Chatham, Effingham, Burke, and Camden).
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John Adams of Congress’s Naval Committee was duly impressed after they turned back a frigate attack.
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In May 1776, the galleys, by then numbering thirteen, acquitted themselves surprisingly well against Captain Andrew Hamond’s
Roebuck
and its consort, the 28-gun frigate
Liverpool.
Men on the two frigates, heading northward up Delaware Bay under instructions to test Philadelphia’s defenses, must have been surprised to see the thirteen galleys approaching with the advantage of both wind and tide. The Patriots had been alerted by an elaborate signals system.

In terms of weaponry, the two frigates mounted 64 cannon to the galleys’ thirteen, and the British seamen were experienced where the Pennsylvanians were not. That day, though, the galleys had the weather gauge—they could choose at what distance to engage. Because they had the heavier cannon—the leading galley, the
Washington,
mounted a 32-pounder—they chose distance, a full mile. The galleys’ related advantage was that being low in the water, they were hard to hit, whereas the frigates, downwind and sitting high, were much easier targets.
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After two and a half hours of dueling, the
Roebuck
ran aground and stuck in soft mud. Luckily for the British, the galleys, about to run out of powder and shot, had to break off. That night, as one chronicler elaborated, was foggy enough that with a combined whaleboat and galley attack, the Pennsylvanians could probably have overwhelmed the still-mired
Roebuck.
Alas, they had not trained in offensive tactics. Captain Hamond later agreed that “if the commanders of the galleys had acted with as much judgment as they did courage, they would have taken or destroyed [the] ship.”
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Although the public’s reaction was to cheer the galleys, military leaders remained skeptical.

As we saw in
Chapter 17
, river-focused defense dictated the late-1775 organization of the Virginia Provincial Navy. The Virginia Convention had authorized eight shallow-draft vessels carrying about 40 men each—two for each major river—but carrying lighter cannon than those in Pennsylvania. The
Norfolk Revenge
and the
Hero
were not quite completed in the spring of 1776, or they might have been sent to attack Lord Dunmore’s mixed flotilla upstream on the Elizabeth River.
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In New York, when the Royal Navy ventured up the Hudson in the summer of 1776, the Patriots deployed row galleys on that river as well, and two of them—the
Washington
and the
Spitfire
—were borrowed from the Rhode Island Navy, which had put them into service on Narragansett Bay in 1775. Before reaching New York, the Rhode Island pair had recaptured two American vessels, the brigantine
Georgia Packet
and the sloop
Speedwell,
from the care of the frigate HMS
Scarborough.
In July, as thousands watched in Manhattan,
Washington
and
Spitfire,
with several other row galleys, fought credibly against a small British flotilla including the frigates
Rose
and
Phoenix,
albeit it was the Americans who broke off.
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