The prize was the ship Joseph. She was captured the third day out. Four days later (May 7th), while cruising off the coast of Holland, the Surprise fell in with the British packet brig Prince of Orange, carrying the mail to the north of Europe, and having a number of passengers on board.
It is likely that no ship’s company were ever more completely surprised than were the people on the Prince of Orange. It was early in the forenoon when the Surprise came alongside and carried the packet by boarding. Not a gun was fired, and so little noise was made that not a soul below decks knew that anything out of the usual course was occurring until the Yankee captain coolly walked down the companionway and found the captain of the Prince of Orange and his passengers eating breakfast very comfortably.
Because of the mails on board this packet Captain Connyngham decided to carry his prize into port at once.
It will be remembered that the capture of this mail packet happened but a few weeks after the capture of the Lisbon packet. So, as may be supposed, the arrival of the Surprise, with the Prince of Orange as a prize, created a tremendous excitement among the English. The British ambassador at Paris demanded that Connyngham and his crew be surrendered for trial as pirates, and threatened to leave the country if the demand was not complied with. As the French government was not yet ready for war, and the firm attitude of the English compelled seeming compliance with the demand, Connyngham was arrested and his commission taken away from him. The British ambassador sent for two sloops-of-war to come over and convoy the Surprise and the Prince of Orange across to England. For a time it looked as if the audacious Americans would really be hanged as pirates by the infuriated Englishmen.
But in those days much time was required for completing matters of diplomacy, and the American commissioners, with their agents, were working day and night not only to save Captain Connyngham, but to send him once more on a cruise against the enemy. Another swift cutter was procured and secretly armed with fourteen six-pounders and twenty swivels, while a crew of 106 men was shipped. The new man-of-war was very properly named the Revenge, and before the sloops-of-war had arrived from England Captain Connyngham had, “with some address and intrigue,” been released from prison and supplied with a new commission and sent away to sea.
It was on July 18, 1777, that the Revenge left port, and she was the fifth ship of the American navy to cruise in England’s home waters. If the Surprise had astonished the British seafaring folks, the Revenge astounded them. And it must not be forgotten that the little fleet of three vessels under Captain Wickes had already gone to sea on the same errand.
It is recorded that the Revenge “proved a remarkably successful vessel, taking prizes daily,” which were, for the most part, sent to Spanish ports and sold. The means so obtained were of the utmost value to the American commissioners already in Europe and to those who came after, while the damage inflicted on the British marine was, as already intimated, something to make the British merchant wonder whether, after all, his investments for the ruin of American rivals were likely to prove profitable. Nor was the injury felt alone by those British merchants whose ships happened to be captured. The insurance rates on all British ships rose at one period to twenty-five per cent., and ten per cent. was demanded for the simple voyage from Dover to Calais. Worse yet, the fear of the Yankee cruisers became so great that shipments in British vessels were so far abandoned that “forty sail of French ships were loading in the Thames on freight; an instance never before known.” An escort was asked for and received for British ships in the trade with Ireland, “something that had never been known even in the wars with France.”
But the best of the story of Captain Connyngham’s cruise remains to be told. Having been considerably injured by a gale, the captain felt obliged to go into port for repairs. To return to a French port was extremely dangerous because the whole French coast was closely watched and because even were he found safely in port he would be very likely delivered over to the English, so he sought safety in audacity and found it. Disguising his cutter as best he might with the paint and materials in store, he entered an English port (the name of which is not recorded), thoroughly refitted, and sailed away unsuspected. Some time later he entered an Irish port and got a full supply of provisions, paying for them with drafts on his agent in Spain. Later still he refitted at Ferrol, and then sailed for America.
It is not uncommon for people to speak in these days of such deeds as Captain Connyngham’s as if they were something of the past that might never be repeated. They do not realize that every class graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis contains men of equal bravery and resources—men needing only the opportunity to show their metal.
It must be noted here that the British ministry chose to make a distinction between the two ships fitted out wholly in the French ports (the Surprise and the Revenge) and those that had come over from America; they made a distinction in spite of the fact that these two were fitted out by the American commissioners of the American government that had maintained itself for a year. The Surprise and the Revenge were denounced as pirates, and Connyngham as a pirate commander.