CHAPTER VII.
[THE NAVAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.]
BY THE REVEREND EDWARD E. HALE, D. D.
THE battles of the Revolution were fought on the sea as often as on the land, and to as much purpose. The losses inflicted on their enemies by the United States in their naval warfare were more constant, and probably more serious, than any losses which they inflicted elsewhere. At the beginning of the war, the mercantile class of England, even then a powerful element in her politics, were far more indifferent to the questions at issue than they became afterwards, when the rates of maritime insurance began to rise rapidly. These high rates had begun long before France and Spain entered into the struggle; and the captures which the English navy made by no means compensated England for the losses which she sustained. In such a contest, it generally proves that the richer combatant is he who pays the most. The loss of an English Indiaman or a Mediterranean trader on her voyage to "the Pool",[1222] or to Bristol, was but poorly compensated by the capture of even a dozen American schooners laden with salt fish and clapboards.
The men of New England, after the early exodus of the Tories, were almost unanimously engaged against England, and they were engaged with that intensity of purpose which belongs to Puritans and to republicans. They were then almost wholly a maritime race; and those ethnologists who think that New Englanders have a larger share of Norse blood than most Englishmen may well justify their theory by the fearlessness of the genuine Yankee upon the sea and his passion for maritime adventure. So soon, therefore, as the outbreak of hostilities began to disturb the natural course of their commerce, the seamen of the New England coast took up the business of cruising against their enemies, as if it were quite normal and something to which they had been born and trained.
New England was at this moment an important factor in the maritime interest of the world. She had special facilities for ship-building. In that essential department of maritime commerce her artisans excelled any in the world, and for three quarters of a century the export of ships, which were sold abroad, had been one of the most profitable features of New England commerce. It required two thirds of a century after John Winthrop built the "Blessing of the Bay" to persuade the masters of the royal ship-yards that there was any timber in America which they could use in preference to that which they received from Norway.[1223] But Lord Bellomont, as early as 1700, had urged that the king should not buy his spars in the open market in England, but should send his own vessels to New England for them. In the same letters he pointed out to his correspondents that the effect of the present regulations was that the Americans shipped spars to Portugal, which were then used in the navy of France. In point of fact, when at last, in 1778, all four parties were engaged in the Revolutionary War, the spars of most of the vessels of England, France, Spain, and America had all been cut in the forests of New England. It is, indeed, quite within the memory of men now living that in the wildernesses of Maine or New Hampshire some fine old monarch of the forest might still be found bearing the broad arrow of the king of England. He had been marked for the royal navy while King George yet reigned over half this continent, and he had been spared from the axe by the Declaration of Independence.[1224]
A people thus bred to the sea, and able to assert themselves upon it, lost no time, when they found themselves at war with England, in carrying their war upon the element to which they were born. They won their first naval victory over England on the 5th of May, 1775, scarcely a fortnight after the battle of Lexington. The "Falcon", a British sloop of war, had, under some pretence, seized one or more prizes from the people of Buzzard's Bay. Inspired probably by the success at Lexington and Concord, the people of New Bedford and Dartmouth fitted out a vessel, with which they attacked and cut out one of the "Falcon's" prizes, with fifteen prisoners, from a harbor in Martha's Vineyard. On the 12th of June the people of Machias, in Maine, seized the "Margaretta", a king's sloop, and two other vessels. The captain and his crew resisted, but he was killed, with one of his men, and five were wounded.[1225] Her armament was transferred to another vessel, which was placed under the command of Jeremiah O'Brien, who received from the government of Massachusetts a commission as marine captain. As early as the 2d of September, Washington, who was then in command at Cambridge, issued commissions, authorizing those who held them to cut off the supply-vessels of the English as they entered the harbor.[1226] The provincial congress at once legalized their capture, so far as its enactments could do so, and six vessels were commissioned by the province of Massachusetts Bay,—the "Lynch", the "Franklin", the "Lee", the "Washington", the "Harrison", and the "Warren."
On the 16th of October, Washington, acting under instructions from Congress,[1227] directed Broughton and Selman, captains in the Marblehead regiment of Continentals, to take their companies on board the "Lynch" (six guns) and "Franklin" (four guns), and attempt to intercept in the river St. Lawrence two English transports bound for Quebec, with military stores. They did not find these two vessels; but they took ten other prizes, attacked and took a fort on the Island of St. John, and brought off as prisoners of war the governor and one of the judges of that island.[1228] On their return in December to Massachusetts, both officers were reprimanded for exceeding their instructions, and both prisoners and prizes were released. The Congress and Washington were still maintaining a friendly attitude towards Canada and the other northern provinces, and gave up prizes and prisoners in hopes of conciliating them. Meanwhile, on the 29th of November, another Marblehead captain, John Manly, in command of the schooner "Lee", took the brigantine "Nancy" from London, as she entered Massachusetts Bay, laden with military stores for Howe.[1229] We have the contemporary records of the joy of the Americans at Cambridge, and the dismay of the besieged in Boston. The extemporized camp of the besiegers read with delight from the invoice of her stores such phrases as "two thousand muskets", "one hundred and five thousand flints", "sixty reams of cartridge paper", "thirty-one tons of musket shot", "three thousand round-shot for 12-pounders, four thousand for 6-pounders."
