Patriot Pirates (6 page)

The army’s dire need for
Nancy
’s supplies left no time for an orderly appraisal before they were requisitioned and put into use. Bartlett and Glover clamored for funds to placate disgruntled petitioners. Washington had seen enough graft among businessmen and mariners to stipulate that they “make out abstracts for the amount of which warrants will be given them.” This red tape requirement was a delaying tactic necessitated by Congress’s slowness in directing settlement procedures and issuing payment. It also reflected the general’s shifting focus back to ground operations.

Powder voyages undertaken by American merchants had improved his army’s combat capability. In late January Henry Knox’s artillery pieces began arriving from Fort Ticonderoga, enabling Washington at last to threaten Boston with serious bombardment. By March, when the British conceded their untenable position and evacuated, his involvement with his little squadron of schooners had dwindled to rote communications of reprimand and encouragement.

Matters languished further with the appointment of Artemas Ward as Boston commander after the Continental Army marched south. Confronted with the backlog of prize claims, Ward threw up his hands on the excuse of “having received no instruction on this point.” Washington wrote from his new headquarters in New York that accounts must be settled and that warrants would no longer suffice. “They will have cash for the goods.” But five months had passed since
Nancy
was taken. Its cargo was long gone, and still no court had convened to apportion its value retroactively. “This procrastination is attended with very bad consequences,” Washington wrote.

He’d learned from experience with his armed schooners that patriotism carried only so far. Everywhere entrepreneurs were paying top dollar for weapons and offering big signing bonuses to Continental officers and crewmen as incentive to join privateers once their service terms expired. With any more delay in paying out prize money “it will be impossible to get our vessels manned,” he warned.

In this environment of growing discontent among Continental crews and the dynamic promise of civilian privateers, the continued aggressiveness of certain naval captains was remarkable. First among these was John Manley,
Lee
’s forty-two-year-old skipper. He’d captured
Nancy
out of pure luck; the 250-ton transport, after hailing them to approach, had surrendered to eight marines in a longboat. But luck played no part in Manley’s dogged pursuit of other prey despite pay delays and mutinous threats from his crew. On learning of Sion Martindale’s surrender, for example, he’d rushed his vessel to sea lest his men hear the news and lose heart.

A mysterious figure, the British-born Manley had changed his surname from Russell upon settling in America, and probably gained his skill in navigation and gunnery while serving in the Royal Navy. He captured nine supply ships in his first two months of operation aboard
Lee
. Two were larger than
Nancy
, though laden with food for the British garrison rather than arms. Another,
Concord
, carried a packet of official letters each of which, Washington informed Congress, “breathes nothing but enmity to this country.”

The discovery led to a significant change in policy regarding lawful captures. A stickler for diplomatic decorum, Washington had forbidden taking British ships not specifically engaged in military support. However, the inclusion of virulent government directives in an otherwise benign shipment of clothing and coal prompted his vow that whether
Concord
’s supplies were “made a prize or not, we must have them.”

Congress agreed. Deeming “any goods, wares, or merchandize” to be potential “necessaries” for the enemy, it ruled that British vessels and cargo “of what kind so ever shall be liable to seizure.” The edict greatly expanded the target list of prizes in American waters, a further incentive to sailors and merchants contemplating a move to privateering.

Manley’s success increased to thirteen the number of Continental prizes awaiting settlement; a like number of privateer captures had also yet to be tried. Unable to manage the process from Philadelphia, Congress finally tossed it to Massachusetts lawmakers, decreeing that all captures past and future be “libeled in the courts of admiralty erected in said colony.” Three prize districts were created, with the most active Middle District, comprised of Boston and the North Shore ports, under the jurisdiction of the Salem court.

Beginning in the spring of 1776, when the courts at last got underway, settlements of Continental and privateer captures were adjudicated together without distinction, a step welcomed by everyone involved in the still embryonic enterprise. Not least of these were the maritime agents in Salem, Beverly, Gloucester, Plymouth, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Taking their cue from Congress’s legal melding of Continental and civilian prize claims, agents began soliciting outside business to supplement their official duties. In exchange for commissions or partnership shares they helped outfit private warships, represented owners and investors during the settlement process, and kept accounts for mariners still at sea when their prizes arrived home for trial. And in the consideration, as one privateersman put it before embarking, of “the uncertainty of my life being continued and the chance of being captivated by the enemy,” agents also saw that a client’s family received his prize money should he be killed or captured.

Competitive rivalries grew. Jonathan Glover tried to poach a successful skipper out of Beverly, William Bartlett’s territory. “I am informed that Captain Waters has not employed any person as agent for him and his officers,” he wrote a mutual friend. “As I am agent for Captain Manley, I should be glad to serve them likewise.” Such tactics were a natural consequence of privateering’s rising stakes. In time they became cutthroat.

N
ancy
’s capture mortified Britons. Of the challenge of supplying a distant army by sea, a London newspaper conceded, “Providence militates for the Americans.” Publicly dismissing the loss as “a mere misfortune,” the admiralty quietly ordered transports to sail in armed convoys from now on and moved to replace Admiral Graves with the former governor of Newfoundland, Molyneux Shuldham.

Loyalists in America applauded the move. “What excuse can be found for a British admiral who tamely and supinely looks on and sees fishing schooners, whaleboats and canoes riding triumphant under the muzzles of his guns and carrying off every supply destined for your relief?”

Skeptical members of Parliament claimed Graves was a scapegoat for the navy’s administrative failings. They accused the Earl of Sandwich, whose inept leadership of the admiralty would benefit the American cause throughout the war, of giving orders so “artfully discretional” that any setbacks could be “laid upon the admiral.”

Graves maintained that his performance had been exemplary, that Shuldham, a vice rather than full admiral, lacked the stature for the job, and that his dismissal was unjust. Graves’s wife, on the other hand, welcomed their return to Britain, claiming that the pressures of foreign command had “rendered him good for nothing.”

Shuldham directed the naval evacuation of Boston and, in July, the one-hundred-vessel armada that landed the British Army at Staten Island, New York. With Boston no longer a British stronghold, much of the war’s maritime activity shifted south. Rebel merchants had been swapping commodities for European munitions at neutral islands in the West Indies for more than a year. Now Britain began funneling troop supplies to America through its colonies at Jamaica, the Bahamas, and primarily Antigua, where it maintained a shipyard and an admiralty court.

Waters from Trinidad to Canada teemed with warships and transports under opposing flags chasing or fleeing one another. Captured British prizes were sailed to Massachusetts for trial, American prizes to Antigua or Halifax. On the way, all were vulnerable to recapture and redirection to an enemy port; and all, quite commonly given the great distances involved, might be recaptured yet again, requiring courts to balance claims and counterclaims in order fairly to distribute prize money.

George III’s midwinter decree that any American vessel seized “during the continuance of the rebellion” would bring rewards to its captors further crowded the scene, invigorating Royal Navy crews and eventually tempting British sympathizers in New York and the West Indies to launch privateers of their own. The aggressiveness paid off. A loyalist crowed that rebel shipping was being decimated. “There is not one in ten that escapes, coming or going.” A patriot merchant concurred. “More than half the American vessels that have sailed since the middle of February are taken.”

Congress’s Robert Morris, a marine administrator and major arms merchant, was unfazed. “We must expect many more losses and think ourselves happy if a sufficient number does but return to keep the Continent supplied.” Meanwhile Massachusetts lawmakers continued to receive applications for privateer commissions and for “Letters of Marque and Reprisal,” the latter a permit for trade ships to mount heavy weapons in order to snap up any British transports encountered under sail. One man generously informed the General Court that he was preparing a fishing trip “for the good of the country and especially for the poor” but would appreciate a letter of marque and “eight swivel guns” just in case.

Joseph Reed, George Washington’s secretary, advised his boss that most American commerce raiders and the investors behind them remained confident in the wake of the king’s decree, but some were having second thoughts due to “old prejudices and new fears.” The prejudice stemmed from privateering’s seedy reputation, the fear from its newly manifest danger.

Forty-five American vessels fell to Shuldham’s North American squadron between January and April 1776. The admiral praised his men’s performance through “this long and severe winter” but warned his superiors that “however numerous our cruisers may be, it has been found impossible to prevent some of our ordnance and other valuable stores in small vessels falling into the hands of the rebels.” His candor wasn’t appreciated, and in June he was replaced by Richard Howe, brother of the army’s commander.

Admiral Howe was sympathetic to the colonists and as interested in conducting peace talks as in controlling the seas. The peace commission he immediately undertook with his brother lacked authority to speak for the crown and ultimately was spurned by Congress, but the combination of his diplomatic distractions and the continued shift of maritime activity to the south brought another commander, Vice Admiral James Young of Antigua, to the forefront of the Royal Navy’s interdiction efforts.

In a testament to the importance of Dutch and French islands as magnets for American powder voyages, Admiral Young’s mere eight warships captured thirty-one blockade runners in two months of operation that spring. The admiral perceived better than anyone the scale on which those supposedly neutral governments were tacitly allowing the sale of strategic supplies to the rebels. In March he presented French officials with detailed intelligence, including names and cargo lists, of multiple American vessels that had loaded up with munitions at the port of Saint-Pierre on Martinique.

Young challenged the island governor, “I cannot suppose a person of your high rank and equitable way of thinking would act with duplicity in a matter of such consequence.” The governor, “astonished” by the allegation, assured Young that Martinique merchants dealt in “grain, flour, and vegetables,” and that any suggestion of illicit arms sales could only have reached the admiral “through means which I flatter myself to believe that his delicacy would not permit him to make use of,” that is, by the vulgar tactic of spying. This exchange of archly polite charges about violations that were blatantly obvious to all sides would continue for two years.

On March 23, 1776, Congress issued a proclamation formally targeting “all vessels” belonging to Britain as fair game for civilian and Continental warships. After months of deliberation during which time New Englanders had leaped into privateering, leaders in Philadelphia finally embraced the enterprise in a big way, going so far as to distribute preprinted, preauthorized commission forms complete with blank spaces where names of ships, captains, and owners could be inserted with minimal fuss. John Adams was jubilant. “It was always a measure that my heart was much engaged in.”

This latest shot in the ongoing tit-for-tat signaled open season on British shipping. From Antigua, Admiral Young entreated his superiors for reinforcements, stressing the threat indicated by “intelligence from America that ships of force are arming there which are said to be intended to intercept the homeward bound West India ships both from these islands and Jamaica.”

His point, dismissed by the admiralty, was that rebel mariners no longer would limit themselves to powder voyages and hijacking inbound supplies to British forces in America. With the entire ocean now in play, they would prowl the European coast and the mid-Atlantic for British vessels bearing goods from anywhere in the world, further pressuring a British economy already squeezed by the loss of its American market.

In response to Young’s plea came a single armed sloop which carried word from London that no others were forthcoming. Blind to the impending onslaught, the admiralty informed him that that HMS
Shark
would be sufficient “to reinforce your squadron, intercept the ships and vessels belonging to the North American colonies in rebellion, and also to give proper protection to the homeward bound trade.”

By the time these orders arrived in May, more than a hundred privateers had launched from New England and set course for the West Indies. Young’s squadron had only four vessels on active duty due to maintenance breakdowns caused by heavy service.
Shark
brought that number to five.

His orders concluded with a stern warning to steer clear of “foreign islands” so as not to give “just cause of complaint” to France or the Netherlands, a condition the admiral can only have found exasperating given his knowledge of their flourishing trade in munitions meant expressly to spill British blood. But with its empire strained and its military overstretched, the crown chose to balance strategic and diplomatic priorities with the result that it fell short in both. Young in his Antiguan outpost sensed this early on. So did British merchants abroad and at home.