This handsome capture was achieved by an audacious “bluff,” but this cruise of the Protector was fated to have a less fortunate ending. A few days later another prize was taken and, lucky for Luther Little, he was put aboard as prizemaster. While he was waiting in company with the Protector for his orders to proceed, the cruiser sighted another sail and made off in chase. Prizemaster Little tried to follow her until night shut down, and then as she showed no lights he gave up the pursuit and shaped his course for Nantucket. At daylight next morning, the mate who was standing his watch on deck, went below to inform Skipper Little that two large ships were to the leeward. The latter climbed aloft with his glass and made them out to be British frigates in chase of the Protector. They took no notice of the prize a mile to windward of them but pelted hard after the Yankee war ship and when last seen she was in the gravest danger of capture.
Luther Little cracked on sail for Boston with his prize and upon arriving called upon Governor John Hancock and told him in what a perilous situation he had left the Protector. Ten days later the news came that the cruiser had been taken by the Roebuck and Mayday frigates and carried into New York.
Luther Little, having escaped with the skin of his teeth, forsook the service of the United States and like many another stout seaman decided to try his fortune privateering. Captain William Orme, a Salem merchant, offered him the berth of lieutenant aboard the letter of marque brig Jupiter. She was a formidable vessel, carrying twenty guns and a hundred and fifty men. From Salem, that wasp’s nest of Revolutionary privateersmen, the Jupiter sailed for the West Indies. Captain Orme went in his ship, but while he was a successful shipping merchant, he was not quite a dashing enough comrade for so seasoned a sea-dog as this young Luther Little. To the windward of Turk’s Island they sighted a large schooner which showed no colors.
“Our boatswain and gunner had been prisoners a short time before in Jamaica,” says Lieutenant Little, “and they told Captain Orme that she was the Lyon schooner, bearing eighteen guns. Our boatswain piped all hands to quarters and we prepared for action. Captain Orme, not being acquainted with a warlike ship, told me I must take the command, advising me to run from her. I told him in thus doing we should surely be taken. I ordered the men in the tops to take in the studding-sails. We then ran down close to her, luffed, and gave her a broadside, which shot away both of her topmasts. She then bore away and made sail and ran from us, we in chase. We continued thus for three hours, then came alongside. I hailed and told them to shorten sail or I’d sink them on the spot. Our barge was lowered and I boarded her; all this time she had no colours set. I hailed our ship and told Captain Orme I thought her a clear prize, and bade the men prepare to board her. But the captain hailed for the boat to return. I obeyed and told him she had a good many men and several guns. The captain said he would have nothing to do with her, as he feared they might rise upon us. Much to my reluctance we left her.”
After having thirty men of the crew violently ill at one time in the fever-stricken harbor of Port au Prince, the letter of marque Jupiter was freighted with sugar and coffee and set out for Salem. Dodging two English frigates cruising for prizes in the Crooked Island passage, she passed a small island upon which some kind of signal appeared to be hoisted.
“I was in my hammock quite unwell,” relates Lieutenant Little of the Jupiter. “The captain sent for me on deck and asked me if I thought a vessel had been cast away on the island. After spying attentively with my glasses, I told him it was no doubt a wreck, and that I could discover men on the island, that probably they were in distress. I advised him to send a boat and take them off. He said the boat should not go unless I went in her. I told him I was too sick, to send Mr. Leach, our mate. He would not listen to me. I went. We landed at the leeward of the island, and walked toward the wreck, when ten men came towards us. They were the captain and crew of the unfortunate vessel. They were much moved at seeing us, said they were driven ashore on the island and had been there ten days without a drop of water. By this time Captain Orme had hove a signal for our return, there being a frigate in chase. Going to the ship the wrecked captain, who was an old man named Peter Trott, asked me where our vessel was from. I told him we were bound to Salem, and he was quite relieved, fearing we were an English man-of-war. We came alongside and the boat was hoisted up and every sail set, the frigate in chase. She gained upon us and at dark was about a league astern. The clouds were thick and I told the captain we were nearly in their power, our only chance being to square away and run to the leeward across the Passage, it being so thick that they could not discover us with their night glasses. We lay to until we thought the frigate had passed, made sail toward morning, and fetched through the Passage.”
After this voyage Luther Little became captain of a large brig which had a roundhouse and was steered by a wheel which was uncommon for merchantmen in those days. He had one terrific winter passage home from the West Indies, fetched up off the Massachusetts coast with every man of his crew but one helplessly frozen, and his vessel half full of water. With his one lone seaman he was blown off to sea, and at length ran his waterlogged craft ashore on the Maine coast. Nothing daunted, he worked her down to Boston, after being frozen up and adrift in ice, and sending ashore for men to help him pump out his hold.
“Here at this era of my life, the wheel of fortune turned,” he makes comment. “The last seventeen years had been spent mostly on the wide waters. I had passed through scenes at which the heart shrinks as memory recalls them; but now the scene changed. Ill luck was ended.”
Thereafter Captain Luther Little continued in the West India trade until he had made twenty-four successful voyages, “always bringing back every man, even to cook and boy.” After this he shifted to the commerce with Russia, making six yearly voyages to St. Petersburg at a time when the American flag was almost unknown in that port.
“During one of these voyages,” he recounts, “when off Norway in a cold snow storm lying to, a man on the main yard handling the mainsail fell overboard, went under the vessel, and came up on the lee side. I was then on the quarterdeck, caught a hen coop, and threw it into the ocean. He succeeded in getting hold of it. I then ordered topsails hove aback, and to cut away the lashings of the yawl. The man not being in sight I ordered the boat to pull to windward. They succeeded in taking him and brought him on board. He was alive though unable to speak or stand. I had him taken into the cabin, and by rubbing and giving him something hot, he was soon restored to duty. I asked him what he thought his fate would be when overboard. He said that he tried the hen coop lying to and found that would not answer. Then he thought he would try it scudding, and ‘sir,’ he answered, ‘if you had not sent your boat just as you did, I should have borne away for the coast of Norway.’”