When his sea life ended at the age of forty-one, Captain Luther Little could say with a very worthy pride:
“In all my West India and Russian voyaging I never lost a man, never carried away a spar, nor lost a boat or anchor.”
In 1799, before the opening of the nineteenth century, this sturdy Yankee seaman, Luther Little, was ready to retire to his ancestral farm in Marshfield where his great-grandfather had hewn a home in the wilderness. In the prime of his vigor and capacity, having lived a dozen lives afloat, he was content to spend forty-odd years more as a New England farmer. And in his eighty-fifth year this old-fashioned American sailor and patriot still sunny and resolute, was able to sit down and describe the hazards through which he had passed just as they are here told.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] In the log book of the Protector Captain Williams described the engagement as follows: “June 9th, 1780. At 7 A. M. saw a ship to the Westward, we stood for her under English colours, the ship standing athaught us, under English colours, appeared to be a large ship. At 11 came alongside of her, hailed her, she answered from Jamaica. I shifted my colours and gave her a broadside; she soon returned us another. The action was very heavy for near three Glasses, when she took fire and blew up. Got out the Boats to save the men, took 55 of them, the greatest part of them wounded with our shot and burnt when the ship blew up. She was called the Admiral Duff of 32 guns, Comman’d by Richard Strang from St. Kitts and Eustatia, ladened with Sugar and Tobacco, bound to London. We lost in the action one man, Mr. Benja. Scollay and 5 wounded. Rec’d several shot in our Hull and several of our shrouds and stays shot away.”
Ebenezer Fox who was a seaman aboard the Protector related: “We ascertained that the loss of the enemy was prodigious, compared with ours. This disparity, however, will not appear so remarkable when it is considered that, although their ship was larger than ours, it was not so well supplied with men; having no marines to use the musket, they fought with their guns alone, and as their ship lay much higher out of the water than ours, the greater part of their shot went over us, cutting our rigging and sails without injuring our men. We had about seventy marines who did great execution with their muskets, picking off the officers and men with a sure and deliberate aim.”
CHAPTER VII
THE JOURNAL OF WILLIAM RUSSELL
(1776-1783)
An attempt to portray the seafaring life of our forefathers would be signally incomplete without some account of the misfortunes endured when the American privateersman or man-of-war’s-man was the loser in an encounter on blue water. During the Revolution, when privateers were swarming from every port from Maine to the Carolinas, scores of them were captured by superior force and their crews carried off to be laid by the heels, often for two and three years, in British prisons of war. Brilliant as was the record of the private armed ships of Salem, her seamen, in large numbers, became acquainted with the grim walls of Old Mill Prison at Plymouth and Forton Prison near Portsmouth.
They were given shorter rations than the French, Spanish and Dutch prisoners of war with whom they were confined, and they were treated as rebels and traitors and committed as such. Manuscript narratives of their bitter experiences as preserved in Salem show that these luckless seamen managed to maintain hope, courage and loyalty to a most inspiring degree, although theirs was the hardest part to play that can be imagined. Many of them shipped again in privateer or Continental cruiser as soon as they were released and served their country until the end of the war.
As recalling this prison life in a personal and intimate way, the subjoined journal of William Russell is quoted at considerable length although he was not a native of Salem. He sailed and was captured in a ship commanded by Captain John Manley, of Marblehead; however, he met many masters and seamen of Salem vessels during his years of confinement in Old Mill Prison, and his journal came at length into the hands of his grandson, James Kimball of Salem. What he suffered in prison and how heartily he hated his captors and their nation can be compactly concluded from these vitriolic verses of his: