With the Flag in the Channel; or, The Adventures of Captain Gustavus Conyngham

by James Barnes

It was much to his surprise that he found himself quite a hero among his friends and acquaintances, but, strange to say, Mr. Hewes, of the Naval Committee, to whom he reported, had heard nothing official in regard to him from either Dr. Franklin or Silas Deane, and his name had not as yet been placed on the naval list.

All this, of course, caused him more chagrin than uneasiness. He claimed that the Revenge was subject to the orders of the Naval Committee, and gained a point at last in that they accepted her as public property, and as such she was almost immediately offered for sale at auction. “Conyngham, Nesbit and Company” bought her in, one third being credited to Gustavus, to whom Mr. Nesbit and his cousin advanced the money.

So the further fortunes of the young captain were still bound up in the Revenge. Unfortunately, however, there were some enemies of his at work. Whether it was the tory lawyer whose designs he had thwarted in regard to his first command (by the way, he was now a most pronounced believer in the cause of liberty), or whether it was a discharged surgeon’s mate who had lodged complaints against him, Conyngham never found out. But suffice it, some one was working against him, and the letter of marque—the authority to “cruise, capture, and destroy”—was withheld by the Naval Committee and Congress. Perhaps they were waiting until they could secure some substantiation of his claim in regard to his commission—it may have been that; but, at all events, the delay grew more and more irksome to him and to his partner in the enterprise.

Good seamen were difficult to find idle in American ports; the few ships of the navy had hard work in recruiting their complement; almost every one who followed the sea for a living was already off privateering, and the Revenge was forced to complete her crew out of the riffraff of the docks, supplemented by numerous landsmen who, attracted by the rich rewards offered, dodged service in the army and flocked to the seaports. Out of the crew of one hundred men that Conyngham had hastily gathered together, only twenty-two had seen service on deep water, and more than half of these were men who had served with him in the Channel cruise. Owing to the delay in sailing, the Revenge’s people were almost in a state of mutiny, and for three weeks nothing but the young captain’s presence on board his vessel prevented wholesale desertions. One day there came a notice from Mr. Nesbit—the Revenge was anchored out in the river—informing him that the letter of marque was likely to be refused, and intimating that probably the Naval Committee would require his presence on shore, to be placed on waiting orders.

This was too much for Conyngham’s gallant spirit. The prospect of months of inaction galled him, and he replied that if he left his vessel the greater part of the crew would desert and the whole adventure be a failure.

It was while he was writing this in a note to be taken ashore to his partners that he remembered that the second commission, given him by Mr. Hodge in Dunkirk, was still in his possession. It had never been rescinded, and the vessel he commanded was the same! It was surely authority enough. Without hesitation he added a postscript—“Am sailing with the flood-tide in half an hour”—and sent the note off to Mr. Nesbit. So the deciding die was cast, and at the top of the flood the Revenge made out into the midstream and floated into the lower bay. The green crew, glad to be off, burst into a ragged cheer. Had they known what was before them they would not have felt so much like rejoicing.

It did not take the captain long to find out that his crew of farmhands and dock-rats was vastly different from the able lot of seamen that had contributed so much to the previous success of the Revenge. Before they were half-way to the capes a few had broken into the storeroom and a dozen were too drunk to pull a rope. The captain and the mate had their hands full, and the obstreperous ones were double-ironed and placed in the hold, to get sober at their leisure.

There was time found for one or two drills at the guns before the cruiser was out in the Atlantic, and here, as might have been expected, half of the crew were seasick and almost incapacitated from duty. Off the New Jersey coast, as the Revenge proceeded northward, she ran into thick and stormy weather. On the third day, the 26th of April, while the wind went down the fog increased, and when it cleared away at last the captain found himself some ten miles south of Sandy Hook. Dead ahead were two small square-rigged vessels that had the look of English transports or supply ships, and Conyngham made all sail in chase.

This was the year 1779—a dreary one for the struggling colonies. New York city was in possession of the English troops under Lord Howe, and the Revenge was in dangerous waters; but the captain was in a reckless mood, and boldness having served his purpose so well at various times, he disdained his old adage about “discretion,” and pressed ahead. Once more the fog closed down, the wind died completely away, and as night came on the Revenge drifted slowly along on the round, oily seas, her prow turning first this way and then that. All night she swung about, when, early in the morning, a slight wind sprang up that Conyngham took advantage of to work off shore. But it held only for an hour or so, and fell calm again. The fog was thicker than ever at daybreak—one of those opaque white mists that the sun finds it impossible to penetrate, and seems to give up trying in despair.

The captain had been on deck all night, and, tired out, was lying on the cabin transom half asleep when suddenly he was awakened by the shrilling of a boatswain’s pipe, so close that it seemed to come from his own forecastle. Then, as if it were the signal for the lifting of the misty shroud, the fog broke and there lay the Revenge under the stern of a huge seventy-four. Under her gallery there could be read plainly the word “Galatea.”