"They met with great opposition there; but John Adams was very strongly in its favour, and did for it all in his power.
"On the 5th of October, Washington was authorized to employ two armed vessels to intercept British store-ships, bound for Quebec; on the 13th, two armed vessels, of ten and of fourteen guns, were voted; and seventeen days later, two others of thirty-six guns. That was the beginning of our navy; and it was very necessary we should have one to protect our seaport towns and destroy the English ships sent against us, also to make it more difficult and hazardous for them to bring over new levies of troops to deprive us of our liberties, and from using their vessels to destroy our merchantmen, and so put an end to our commerce.
"Rhode Island had bold and skilful seamen, some of whom had had something to do with British ships before the war began,—even as early as 1772.
"In that year there was a British armed schooner called the 'Gaspee,' in Narragansett Bay, sent there to enforce obnoxious British laws.
"Its officers behaved in so tyrannical a manner toward the Americans of the neighbourhood that at length they felt it quite unbearable; and one dark, stormy night in June, Capt. Abraham Whipple, a veteran sailor, with some brother seamen, went down the bay in open whale-boats, set the 'Gaspee' on fire, and burned her.
"The British Government of course wanted to punish them, but all engaged in the work of destruction were so true to each other that it was impossible to find out who they were; but three years later—in 1775, the year that the war began—the bay was blockaded by an English frigate, and in some way her commander learned that Whipple had been the leader of the men who destroyed the 'Gaspee.' He then wrote him a note."
"You, Abraham Whipple, on the seventeenth of June 1772, burnt his Majesty's vessel the 'Gaspee,' and I will hang you to the yard-arm."
"Whipple replied with a note."
To Sir James Wallace:
Sir,—Always catch a man before you hang him.