Give Me a Fast Ship Read online

  ALSO BY TIM McGRATH

  John Barry: An American Hero in the Age of Sail

  NAL Caliber

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by NAL Caliber, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC

  Copyright © Tim McGrath, 2014

  Maps by Ted McGrath

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  McGrath, Tim, 1951–

  Give me a fast ship: the Continental Navy and America’s Revolution at sea/Tim McGrath.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 9781101591574

  1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Naval operations. 2. United States. Continental Navy—History. 3. United States. Navy—History— Revolution, 1775–1783. I. Title. II.Title: Continental Navy and America’s Revolution at sea.

  E271.M445 2014

  973.3'5—dc23 2014008295

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Version_1

  To Ted and Courtney

  I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm’s way.

  —JOHN PAUL JONES

  Contents

  Also by TIM McGRATH

  Title page

  Copyright page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  MAPS

  CHAPTER ONE: “REBELLIOUS FANATICKS”

  CHAPTER TWO: “IF THE REBELS SHOULD PAY US A VISIT . . .”

  CHAPTER THREE: “I FEAR NOTHING”

  CHAPTER FOUR: “THAT REBEL IS MY BROTHER”

  CHAPTER FIVE: “HEAVEN HAS SUCCEEDED OUR ADVENTURES”

  CHAPTER SIX: “THE GANG OF PYRATES”

  CHAPTER SEVEN: “UNDER THE VAULT OF HEAVEN”

  CHAPTER EIGHT: “HER TEETH WERE TOO MANY”

  CHAPTER NINE: “IN HARM’S WAY”

  CHAPTER TEN: “DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: “FRESH GALES AND DIRTY WEATHER”

  CHAPTER TWELVE: “SEND THAT SHIP TO SEA”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: SHUBAEL GARDNER: EPILOGUE

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ENDNOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  PHOTO INSERTS

  MAPS

  Glasgow against Continental Fleet off Block Island, April 6, 1776

  Gustavus Conyngham’s Cruises Commanding the Revenge, 1777–1778

  Randolph and Squadron against Yarmouth off Barbados, March 7, 1778

  John Paul Jones’s Cruises in the British Isles, 1778–1779

  Penobsot Expedition, July–August 1779

  Bonhomme Richard against Serapis off Flamborough Head, September 23, 1779

  Siege of Charleston, February–May 1780

  Alliance against Atalanta and Trepassey off Nova Scotia, May 28–29, 1781

  CHAPTER ONE

  “REBELLIOUS FANATICKS”

  What can we do—if united? We only want a navy to give law to the world, and we have it in our power to get it.

  —MAJOR ADAM STEPHENS TO RICHARD HENRY LEE, 17751

  To begin with, they paid hardly any taxes.

  But it was not the amount that angered these New Englanders. It was the idea of the tax itself; the act of a governing body demanding revenue from fellow countrymen who, because they lived an ocean away, did not possess the right to be represented among the lawmakers who levied the tax.

  At dusk on Thursday, December 16, 1773, dozens of them stood along Griffin’s Wharf in Boston, huddled together against the wind and rain, a band of men and boys handpicked by Samuel Adams and the other leaders of the Sons of Liberty, a society of patriots united in their resistance to the policies of King George III and Parliament. The gang at the wharf ranged in notoriety from the well-known silversmith and sometime propagandist Paul Revere to fifteen-year-old Joshua Wyeth, a blacksmith’s apprentice. Most of them were dressed as Indians, wrapped in blankets and carrying hatchets. Their faces had been smudged with burnt cork by Mrs. James Bruce, whose husband was one of the ringleaders.2

  Some blocks away on Boylston Street, inside Old South Church, the most vocal faction of the town’s resistance to British taxation took turns addressing a crowd that filled the pews, packed the aisles, and spilled outside into the streets. Old South was a perfect venue for such a revolutionary meeting; one of its earlier members, Samuel Sewall, was among the first Americans that railed against the practice of slavery and later advocated women’s rights.

  For weeks, American ports had been abuzz over the latest affront from Parliament: a tax on tea. For ten years, Parliament had passed a series of taxes levied at the American colonies as part of its efforts to pay for the defense of the colonies. Each measure, from the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act through the Towns- hend Acts, was aimed at paying down this debt, and each one was vehemently resisted by many colonists. They were led by the merchants, who viewed any tax, even those ordained to pay for the victory over their French and Indian enemies, as an attack on their rights—or lack of them—by the Crown. Their resistance consistently bore fruit, for measure after measure was repealed.

  But the Tea Act was naked in its lack of any connection to colonial self-interest. Its purpose was to bolster the sagging fortunes of the East India Company, a pillar of the British economy whose stock had recently plummeted from £280 to £160 per share. Deeming “John Company” as too big to fail, Parliament, in passing the Tea Act, hoped to give it a virtual monopoly on the most popular drink in the British Empire. The East India Company could undersell everyone, including American merchants who smuggled the profitable leaves outright.3

  Those colonial merchants designated as agents of the East India Company anticipated a financial windfall, but quickly discovered that their appointments were more curse than blessing. Once news reached America of this latest tax, resistance quickly spread, growing from outcry to physical intimidation, especially when the ships bearing the tea—many of them owned by the agents themselves—entered port roadsteads from Boston to Charleston. By December news reached Massachusetts of the broadside delivered to Delaware River pilots, signed by “the Committee for Tarring and Feathering” and informing them of what awaited anyone who dared bring a tea ship into Philadelphia. One captain named Ayres did sail his ship, the Polly, into port, and was soon brought to the State House (later known as Independence Hall) by a crowd of hundreds while the
“committee” got their tar ready. After Ayres assured one and all that he would sail back to England with the next tide, they joyfully dispersed. Among them was John Barry, a young merchant captain who, at six feet four, was easy to spot. He went home that evening to regale his wife with the most recent events. The next morning he stood downriver aboard his merchantman, bound for the island of St. Eustatius, the Polly sailing just ahead.4

  Thus inspired, the speakers at Old South had made their plans days before they took turns at the pulpit on this dreary afternoon.

  Word of Philadelphia’s planned tea party also reached the home of the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchinson, whose two sons were among the agents awaiting tea shipments. Tension mounted daily as, one by one, the merchantmen, loaded down with hundreds of chests full of tea, made their way up the King’s Roadstead to Boston harbor. The first ship, the Dartmouth, dropped anchor on November 17, followed by the Eleanor and the Beaver. By law, no cargo could be unloaded for thirty days. If the Sons of Liberty were to act, they had until tonight to do so—hence this meeting inside Old South Church.

  Throughout the late afternoon, speakers urged Bostonians to stand united in opposition to Crown policy. Their oratory was a delaying action. Earlier, the Sons of Liberty sent the Dartmouth’s owner, Francis Rotch, to see Governor Hutchinson with a request to let the ship depart unloaded, and thus defuse the situation. Everyone in the church awaited Rotch’s arrival and word of Hutchinson’s decision.

  Shortly after six o’clock Rotch entered the church, jostling his way through the throng until he reached the altar railing, where he told Sam Adams of Hutchinson’s verdict: the Dartmouth would remain in port, to be unloaded in the morning.

  As everyone hushed, Adams again ascended the pulpit. Gazing over the crowd, in a clear, ringing voice, he said, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” The sentence, simply read, smacks of hyperbole, but it was not overblown oratory: it was a prearranged signal. Once he uttered the words, the shrill cry of a boatswain’s (bosun’s) whistle blew outside, calling the “Indians” at Griffin’s Wharf to action.

  The rain was tapering off as they manned three longboats, each assigned a commander and a bosun. Following orders from Adams and Revere, the men rowed to their designated ship, scrambled over the sides, and went to work with surety and speed. Carrying lanterns, several went below to the ship’s hold. With block and tackle, they brought the tea chests on deck, where their comrades attacked them with hatchets. Then the tea was poured overboard, followed by the empty chests. One of the hoists snapped violently and a chest struck one of the men, a carpenter, upside his head. His companions, believing him dead, rowed him to shore.

  At first, the tea leaves lapped against the hulls. But the tide was so low that, as the tea piled higher and higher, it began to spill over the gunwales. Sweeping it back as best they could, the “Indians” kept at their task until each chest was destroyed. Soon more than 90,000 pounds of tea floated in Boston harbor. By this time most of the Old South crowd had made their way down Mill Street to the docks, joyfully watching their fellow New Englanders at work.5

  Not all of the witnesses were amused. From a nearby house, Admiral James Montagu watched helplessly, later reporting to the British Admiralty that any intervention by his men to stop this destruction would have “endangered the Lives of innocent People.”6

  Two hours after the fake Indians boarded the ships, those “brave and resolute men,” as the Boston Gazette called them, finished their work. Years later, Joshua Wyeth (whose descendants include three generations of distinguished American painters) would chuckle about “making so large a cup of tea for the fishes.” As the tide rose it carried the tea from one end of the harbor to the other. The following morning, Montagu asked onlookers rhetorically, “Who is to pay the fiddler now?” and later informed the Admiralty that “the Devil is in this people.”7

  In the ensuing months other cities followed the example of Boston and Philadelphia, holding tea parties from New York to Charleston. In Annapolis, a mob forced agents to use the tea chests as kindling to burn the Peggy Stewart. In Charleston, demonstrators led by Christopher Gadsden, a former Royal Navy officer, escorted the agents aboard ship, handed them hatchets, and oversaw the pouring of tea leaves as “an oblation to Neptune.” Leave it to southerners to have owners destroy their own property, an eighteenth-century reversal of the time-honored tourist trap warning You bought it, you break it . . . and burn it for good measure.8

  The participants in the tea parties were an odd mix of backgrounds and vocations. They were doctors, lawyers, and merchants; politicians, carpenters, and laborers. A great number of them were sailors.

  That, as we shall see, was only fitting.

  One Bostonian did not partake in his town’s revelry but was nevertheless so captivated that he called it “the most magnificent Moment of all.” By 1773 John Adams was well-known as a lawyer consumed with the pursuit of justice, regardless of partisanship. In 1769, he was the hero of the hour after successfully defending several American sailors for slaying a British naval officer whose press gang boarded their ship looking for “recruits” to pad his muster rolls. One year later, Adams was villainy personified—at least to his cousin Sam’s followers—when his skillful defense won acquittal for the “Lobsterbacks” who killed five members of a mob in what was immediately called the Boston Massacre.9

  By the spring of 1775, much had changed for John Adams, just as much had changed for the thirteen colonies. The increasing hard-heartedness of king and Parliament, culminating in the closing of the port of Boston until every tea leaf tossed in the harbor was paid for, succeeded in radicalizing Adams and thousands of other colonists. Adams was now making his second pilgrimage to Philadelphia, to act as a delegate from Massachusetts to the second Continental Congress, just as he had served in the first. The lawyer who had championed reason while abhorring his cousin’s less dignified approach now led the open opposition to George III and his latest prime minister, Frederick, Lord North. Adams saw his personal rebellion as an extension of his devotion to justice. For him, these times were an “age of trial,” and he was determined to play a part regardless of the financial and emotional cost to both himself and his family.10 The world had not yet turned upside down, but Adams’s life certainly had.

  When he arrived in Philadelphia for the first Congress, he was fascinated by the largest city of the colonies, home to 30,000 souls. A century earlier, William Penn designed the city as a giant grid, each even, spacious, squared-off street a replica of the ones adjoining it. The redbrick houses of the rich frequently stood within a few feet of the modest homes of fellow Philadelphians—artisans, shopkeepers, printers, and the booming merchant class, whose work ethic was visible to all—aspiring to join them in wealth and position. Rich merchants and their wives, dressed in colorful clothes, presented a marked contrast to the dull black or gray cloth suits of the Quakers.11

  It was a bustling city. There were churches of every denomination and taverns for every taste. The waterfront hummed with the sounds of windlasses and stevedores weighed down with cargo from and for ships of all sizes. Blocks away, wagon after wagon carried fresh food along High Street, known to all as Market. Printing presses turned out more newspapers than were in London. Philadelphia was noisy and filthy, and reeking from the permeating stench of a tannery behind Carpenters’ Hall, the small jewel of a building off Chestnut Street that hosted the first Continental Congress in 1774. The city offered its distinguished visitors everything from the intellectual pursuits of the American Philosophical Society, created by Benjamin Franklin, to the new hospital on the outskirts of town (also founded by Franklin), where Adams discovered a former client locked in the “lunatick” ward. Other delegates found Philadelphia disconcerting. Adams admired it.12

  He was not so complimentary of the first Congress. After spending the fall of 1774 debating their proposals, Adams was “wearied to death.” New Engl
anders in particular sought decisive measures against the Crown, but as this session of Congress neared adjournment, the calmer and more conservative members held the upper hand. When Paul Revere galloped into Philadelphia with news that citizens of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, had issued a set of resolves declaring “no obedience” to the latest acts of Parliament, Adams and the other firebrands passed a series of economic sanctions against England. No goods would be imported from the British Isles and her West Indies territories after December 1. Beginning May 1, 1775, no goods would be exported from the colonies to the mother country.13

  In late spring, congressmen began returning to Philadelphia. Weeks earlier, when news reached Adams at his Braintree farm that Minutemen and Redcoats had murdered one another at nearby Lexington and Concord, he rode out to see the carnage firsthand. Talk of rebellion had become rebellion; threats of bloodshed were now a terrible reality.

  Adams soon departed for Philadelphia. Earlier he had written, “We have not men fit for the times.” The first Congress left him skeptical about his colleagues and their collective willingness to find common ground and unify. With each mile of his journey, he carried the knowledge that he had left his wife and children without an income and within reach of the British, too. That truth never left his mind. In fact, it would stoke each proposal he made. Francis Bacon called one’s family “hostages to fortune” in wartime. Adams understood that all too well.14

  Most of the delegates were returnees, though there were three notable exceptions. The diminutive John Hancock was now a member of the Massachusetts delegation. Well-known as he was for his patriotic zeal, he also suffered from the ignominious nickname “king of smugglers” for his success as a businessman and the enmity he aroused from British authorities for his political views. Virginia’s representatives now included a young red-haired lawyer, Thomas Jefferson, so silent during the sessions that he was conspicuous only for his height.