Thos. D. Hewlings,
“D. C. M. P.
CHAPTER IX
RICHARD DERBY AND HIS SON JOHN
(1774-1792)
The first armed resistance to British troops in the American colonies was made at Salem and led by Captain Richard Derby of the third generation of the most notable seafaring family in this country’s annals. Born in 1712, he lived through the Revolution, and his career as a shipmaster, merchant and patriot covered the greater part of the American maritime history of the eighteenth century. Until 1757, when he retired from active service on the sea, his small vessels of from fifty to one hundred tons burden were carrying fish, lumber and provisions to the West Indies and fetching home sugar, molasses, cotton, rum and claret, or bringing rice and naval stores from Carolina. With the returns from these voyages, assorted cargoes were laden for voyages to Spain and Madeira and the proceeds remitted in bills on London, or in wine, salt, fruit, oil, lead and handkerchiefs to America.
Captain Richard Derby’s vessels ran the gauntlet of the privateers during the French War from 1756 to 1763, and their owner’s letters to his London agents describe them as mounting from eight to twelve cannon, mostly six-pounders, “with four cannon below decks for close quarters.” Accustomed to fighting his way where he could not go peaceably, Richard Derby and the men of his stamp whose lives and fortunes were staked on the high seas, felt the fires of their resentment against England wax hotter and hotter as her shipping laws smote their interests with increasing oppression.
In fact, the spirit of independence and protest against interference by the mother country had begun to stir in the seaport towns a full century before the outbreak of armed revolution. It is recorded in Salem annals that “when it was reported to the Lords of Plantations that the Salem and Boston merchants’ vessels arrived daily from Spain, France, Holland, and the Canaries (in 1763) which brought wines, linens, silks and fruits, and these were exchanged with the other colonies for produce which was carried to the aforesaid kingdoms without coming to England, complaint was made to the Magistrates that these were singular proceedings. Their reply was ‘that they were His Majesty’s Vice-Admirals in those seas and they would do that which seemed good to them.’”
The spirit of those “Vice Admirals” who proposed to do what seemed good to them continued to flourish and grow bolder in its defiance of unjust laws, and the port of Salem was primed and ready for open rebellion long before that fateful April day at Lexington and Concord. In 1771, four years before the beginning of the Revolution, the Salem Gazette published on the first anniversary of the “Boston Massacre,” the following terrific proclamation framed in a border of black in token of mourning:
“As a Solemn and Perpetual Memorial:
“Of the Tyranny of the British Administration of Government in the years 1768, 1769, and 1770;
“Of the fatal and destructive Consequences of Quartering Armies, in Time of Peace, in populous cities;