The wars of England with France and Spain spread turmoil upon the high
seas during the greater part of the eighteenth century. Yet with an
immense tenacity of purpose, these briny forefathers increased their
trade and multiplied their ships in the face of every manner of
adversity. The surprising fact is that most of them were not driven
ashore to earn their bread. What Daniel Webster said of them at a later
day was true from the beginning: "It is not, sir, by protection and
bounties, but by unwearied exertion, by extreme economy, by that manly
and resolute spirit which relies on itself to protect itself. These
causes alone enable American ships still to keep the element and show
the flag of their country in distant seas."
What was likely to befall a shipmaster in the turbulent eighteenth
century may be inferred from the misfortunes of Captain Michael Driver
of Salem. In 1759 he was in command of the schooner Three Brothers,
bound to the West Indies on his lawful business. Jogging along with
a cargo of fish and lumber, he was taken by a privateer under British
colors and sent into Antigua as a prize. Unable to regain either his
schooner or his two thousand dollar cargo, he sadly took passage for
home. Another owner gave him employment and he set sail in the schooner
Betsy for Guadaloupe. During this voyage, poor man, he was captured and
carried into port by a French privateer. On the suggestion that he might
ransom his vessel on payment of four thousand livres, he departed for
Boston in hope of finding the money, leaving behind three of his sailors
as hostages.
Cash in hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael Driver
turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he flew a flag
of truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing to the ruffian
who commanded the English privateer Revenge. He violently seized the
innocent Mary and sent her into New Providence. Here Captain Driver
made lawful protest before the authorities, and was set at liberty with
vessel and cargo--an act of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty Court
of the Bahamas.
Unmolested, the harassed skipper managed to gain Cape Francois and
rescue his three seamen and his schooner in exchange for the ransom
money. As he was about to depart homeward bound, a French frigate
snatched him and his crew out of their vessel and threw them ashore at
Santiago, where for two months they existed as ragged beachcombers until
by some judicial twist the schooner was returned to them. They worked
her home and presented their long list of grievances to the colonial
Government of Massachusetts, which duly forwarded them--and that was
the end of it. Three years had been spent in this catalogue of
misadventures, and Captain Driver, his owners, and his men were helpless
against such intolerable aggression. They and their kind were a prey to
every scurvy rascal who misused a privateering commission to fill his
own pockets.
Stoutly resolved to sail and trade as they pleased, these undaunted
Americans, nevertheless, increased their business on blue water until
shortly before the Revolution the New England fleet alone numbered six
hundred sail. Its captains felt at home in Surinam and the Canaries.
They trimmed their yards in the reaches of the Mediterranean and
the North Sea or bargained thriftily in the Levant. The whalers of
Nantucket, in their apple-bowed barks, explored and hunted in distant
seas, and the smoke of their try-pots darkened the waters of Baffin Bay,
Guinea, and Brazil. It was they who inspired Edmund Burke's familiar
eulogy: "No sea but is vexed by their fisheries. No climate that is not
a witness to their toils. Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the
activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of England ever
carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which
it has been pushed by this recent people--a people who are still, as it
were, but in the gristle and not yet hardened into the bone of manhood."
In 1762, seventy-eight whalers cleared from American ports, of which
more than half were from Nantucket. Eight years later there were one
hundred and twenty-five whalers out of Nantucket which took 14,331
barrels of oil valued at $358,200. In size these vessels averaged no
more than ninety tons, a fishing smack of today, and yet they battered
their way half around the watery globe and comfortably supported six
thousand people who dwelt on a sandy island unfit for farming and having
no other industries. Every Nantucket lad sailed for his "lay" or share
of the catch and aspired to command eventually a whaler of his own.
Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of incomparable
seamen destined to harry the commerce of England under the new-born
Stars and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the brink of actual war,
Parliament flung a final provocation and aroused the furious enmity of
the fishermen who thronged the Grand Bank. Lord North proposed to forbid
the colonies to export fish to those foreign markets in which every
seacoast village was vitally concerned, and he also contemplated driving
the fishing fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was to rob
six thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin among
the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from which sailed
hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners. This measure became law
notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one peers of the realm who
declared: "We dissent because the attempt to coerce by famine the whole
body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces is without
example in the history of this, or perhaps, of any civilized nation."
The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation without
representation but whetted their anger with grudges more robust. They
had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the Bay of Biscay to
Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental Congress ready to issue
privateering commissions and letters of marque than for them it was up
anchor and away to bag a Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled
his arrival with a deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than
he received orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for
mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred eager
privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern rendezvous. The
timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms and nine-pounders,
muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases, boarding-pikes, hand
grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and doubleheaded shot.
In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and Baltimore,
crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a strapping recruiting
officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and able-bodied landsmen who had
a mind to distinguish themselves in the glorious cause of their country
and make their fortunes." Many a ship's company was mustered between
noon and sunset, including men who had served in armed merchantmen and
who in times of nominal peace had fought the marauders of Europe or
whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar. Never was a
race of seamen so admirably fitted for the daring trade of privateering
as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail schooners, and smart
square-riggers, their sides checkered with gun-ports, and ready to drive
to sea like hawks.
In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both absurd and
sublime. Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men aboard, mounting one
or two old guns, sallied out in the expectation of gold and glory, only
to be captured by the first British cruiser that chanced to sight them.
A few even sailed with no cannon at all, confident of taking them out
of the first prize overhauled by laying alongside--and so in some cases
they actually did.
The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in winning the
war than has been commonly recognized. This fact, however, was clearly
perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The London Spectator" candidly
admitted: "The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of
assurances at that time will prove what their diminutive strength was
able to effect in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred
pennants were flying on our coast. Were we able to prevent their going
in and out, or stop them from taking our trade and our storeships even
in sight of our garrisons? Besides, were they not in the English and
Irish Channels, picking up our homeward bound trade, sending their
prizes into French and Spanish ports to the great terror of our
merchants and shipowners?"
The naval forces of the Thirteen Colonies were pitifully feeble in
comparison with the mighty fleets of the enemy whose flaming broadsides
upheld the ancient doctrine that "the Monarchs of Great Britain have a
peculiar and Sovereign authority upon the Ocean... from the Laws of God
and of Nature, besides an uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages
past as that its Beginnings cannot be traced out." *
* "The Seaman's Vade-Mecum." London, 1744.
In 1776 only thirty-one Continental cruisers of all classes were in
commission, and this number was swiftly diminished by capture and
blockade until in 1782 no more than seven ships flew the flag of the
American Navy. On the other hand, at the close of 1777, one hundred and
seventy-four private armed vessels had been commissioned, mounting two
thousand guns and carrying nine thousand men. During this brief period
of the war they took as prizes 733 British merchantmen and inflicted
losses of more than two million pounds sterling. Over ten thousand
seamen were made prisoners at a time when England sorely needed them for
drafting into her navy. To lose them was a far more serious matter than
for General Washington to capture as many Hessian mercenaries who could
be replaced by purchase.
In some respects privateering as waged a century and more ago was a
sordid, unlovely business, the ruling motive being rather a greed of
gain than an ardent love of country. Shares in lucky ships were bought
and sold in the gambling spirit of a stock exchange. Fortunes were won
and lost regardless of the public service. It became almost impossible
to recruit men for the navy because they preferred the chance of booty
in a privateer. For instance, the State of Massachusetts bought a
twenty-gun ship, the Protector, as a contribution to the naval strength,
and one of her crew, Ebenezer Fox, wrote of the effort to enlist
sufficient men: "The recruiting business went on slowly, however, but
at length upwards of three hundred men were carried, dragged, and driven
abroad; of all ages, kinds, and descriptions; in all the various stages
of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness to beastly drunkenness;
with the uproar and clamor that may be more easily imagined than
described. Such a motley group has never been seen since Falstaff's
ragged regiment paraded the streets of Coventry."
There was nothing of glory to boast of in fetching into port some little
Nova Scotia coasting schooner with a cargo of deals and potatoes, whose
master was also the owner and who lost the savings of a lifetime because
he lacked the men and guns to defend his property against spoliation.
The war was no concern of his, and he was the victim of a system now
obsolete among civilized nations, a relic of a barbarous and piratical
age whose spirit has been revived and gloried in recently only by the
Government of the German Empire. The chief fault of the privateersman
was that he sailed and fought for his own gain, but he was never guilty
of sinking ships with passengers and crew aboard, and very often he
played the gentleman in gallant style. Nothing could have seemed to him
more abhorrent and incredible than a kind of warfare which should drown
women and children because they had embarked under an enemy's flag.
Extraordinary as were the successes of the Yankee privateers, it was a
game of give-and-take, a weapon which cut both ways, and the temptation
is to extol their audacious achievements while glossing over the
heavy losses which their own merchant marine suffered. The weakness
of privateering was that it was wholly offensive and could not, like
a strong navy, protect its own commerce from depredation. While the
Americans were capturing over seven hundred British vessels during the
first two years of the war, as many as nine hundred American ships were
taken or sunk by the enemy, a rate of destruction which fairly swept
the Stars and Stripes from the tracks of ocean commerce. As prizes these
vessels were sold at Liverpool and London for an average amount of two
thousand pounds each and the loss to the American owners was, of course,
ever so much larger.
The fact remains, nevertheless--and it is a brilliant page of history
to recall--that in an inchoate nation without a navy, with blockading
squadrons sealing most of its ports, with ragged armies on land which
retreated oftener than they fought, private armed ships dealt the
maritime prestige of Great Britain a far deadlier blow than the Dutch,
French, and Spanish were able to inflict. In England, there resulted
actual distress, even lack of food, because these intrepid seamen could
not be driven away from her own coasts and continued to snatch their
prizes from under the guns of British forts and fleets. The plight of
the West India Colonies was even worse, as witness this letter from a
merchant of Grenada: "We are happy if we can get anything for money by
reason of the quantity of vessels taken by the Americans. A fleet
of vessels came from Ireland a few days ago. From sixty vessels
that departed from Ireland not above twenty-five arrived in this and
neighboring islands, the others, it is thought, being all taken by
American privateers. God knows, if this American war continues much
longer, we shall all die of hunger."
On both sides, by far the greater number of captures was made during the
earlier period of the war which cleared the seas of the smaller, slower,
and unarmed vessels. As the war progressed and the profits flowed
in, swifter and larger ships were built for the special business of
privateering until the game resembled actual naval warfare. Whereas,
at first, craft of ten guns with forty or fifty men had been considered
adequate for the service, three or four years later ships were afloat
with a score of heavy cannon and a trained crew of a hundred and fifty
or two hundred men, ready to engage a sloop of war or to stand up to
the enemy's largest privateers. In those days single ship actions, now
almost forgotten in naval tactics, were fought with illustrious skill
and courage, and commanders won victories worthy of comparison with
deeds distinguished in the annals of the American Navy.