If Washington was annoyed by his project’s delays and cost overruns, the performance of Captain Broughton almost caused him to abandon it altogether. It took several months to reach a breaking point; the general’s unfamiliarity with naval matters led him to show inordinate patience with those seemingly more informed. But Broughton was a mess from the start.
All too pleased to avoid battle with the Royal Navy, the fifty-one-year-old skipper ignored Washington’s other mandates of kind treatment of captives and respect for non-enemy vessels. Fearing to stray far from port, Broughton preyed on ships cruising near shore between New Hampshire and points south—the same routes favored by area merchants, many of whose ships he seized in triumph, including one whose American captain Broughton deemed “too polite” and thus certainly a traitor.
With prize courts yet to be formed, Washington handled each case, mucking through details he’d expected would sort themselves out under “rules which take place among private ships of war.” Broughton’s first capture showed how complicated those rules could get. Unity, a colonial transport, had been seized by the British and diverted to Boston when Hannah intercepted it. Unity belonged to John Langdon of the Continental Congress, and Washington directed that vessel and cargo be returned to him at once.
Recaptured prizes were common to privateering through the ages. There were legal criteria—how long the prize was in enemy hands, how difficult was its recapture—on which to base prize awards and paybacks from owners to those who’d recaptured their lost property. It’s understandable that Broughton’s men resented losing out on Unity’s spoils, but when thirty-six of them mutinied Washington wasn’t sympathetic. He had Langdon compensate Hannah’s officers $130, but on the mutineers he bestowed “a reward of a different kind,” thirty-nine lashes for the ringleader and reassignment to the trenches for the rest.
His headaches didn’t end there. Each of Hannah’s next seven captures had to be restored to its American owner with damages paid out of Continental coffers for goods pilfered by the crew. The schooner’s deployment ended when Broughton was chased into Beverly by HMS Nautilus. He beached his boat in panic and damaged the keel, incidentally winding up as the expedition’s sole casualty when he caught a cold leading an all-hands retreat through waist-deep October seawater.
Inexplicably promoted to “acting commodore,” Broughton next sailed north to Nova Scotia at the head of two newly outfitted schooners in search of the convoy John Hancock had reported. His scorecard improved insofar as only four of the seven prizes he captured had to be returned to their proper owners. But even his legitimate booty was lackluster—fish and firewood, mostly—so in frustration he anchored at Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island and began a two-day looting binge.
He took captive the mayor and justice of the peace and set off for Beverly laden with shoes, woolens, household silver, and forty tubs of butter. Expecting a glorious reception upon his return in December, he learned that most of the prizes he’d sent back earlier had been rejected as unlawful.
Orders came for Broughton and his second-in-command, John Selman, to report at once to Washington, who received them just after releasing the Canadian hostages with apologies for their mistreatment. “He met us on the steps of the door,” Selman wrote. “He appeared not pleased.” They were fired on the spot.
Broughton’s jaunt netted Congress a £500 loss once reparations to aggrieved merchants were tabulated (not counting a £2,000 damage claim from the Charlottetown mayor). Conceding that he was “not a competent judge” of these matters and “had no time to attend them,” Washington gave up trying to manage schooner operations. His plea to Congress to accelerate the creation of prize courts signified his frustration with finances and a fresh pragmatism about their importance: sailors needed to know they’d get their prize money.
Clearly no expedition led by such “indolent and inactive souls” as Broughton and Selman could succeed. This applied also to the general’s land commanders, most of whom had been appointed for political reasons of “sectional balancing” and who in their inexperience were as inept as they were overconfident. Till battle distinguished the true fighters, reputation and bluster were the main credentials recommending officers for leadership positions. Two men who possessed these qualities in excess helmed a pair of ships out of Plymouth that fall.
Rhode Islander Sion Martindale, a rumored participant in the Gaspee raid, complained about his boat from the start. More than 120 feet long with ten cannon and ten swivel guns, Washington was the biggest of the Continental schooners. Already far over budget, Martindale requested more firepower, a top surgeon, a fife-and-drum crew, and a last-minute refit of the ship from schooner to brigantine. Brigs carried square sails, schooners wedge-shaped sails in a fore-andaft rig; brigantines combined the two for a square-rigger’s speed before a favorable wind and a schooner’s maneuverability in contrary winds.
Washington wondered if these demands meant Martindale intended to take on enemy warships rather than stick to the mission of seizing unarmed transports. He needn’t have worried. Launched late in November after weeks of delay, Washington compiled a record of disputed captures, a brief refusal of the crew to sail until warmer clothing was issued, and much grumbling from its officers about payment for their one legitimate prize of a load of hay, all in a mere eight days of service that ended in capture by a British frigate a few miles outside Plymouth harbor.
Newspaper accounts of the battle were glorious. Readers took pride that Washington had been “attacked by a twenty gun ship which boarded them several times and was beat off” and that its heroic crew had succumbed to British attackers only when “overpowered by their great force but not before they had every officer on board killed and all the men to eighteen out of seventy-five.” The truth was less thrilling, however. Washington’s chief supply officer, Stephen Moylan, assessed the vessel’s legacy bluntly. “She was fitted out at enormous expense, did nothing, and struck without firing a gun.”
Chased down by HMS Fowey, Martindale had surrendered at once. It’s perhaps unfair to blame him. When his ship later was inspected for possible use by the Royal Navy, it was condemned as “totally unserviceable…unfit for war…not fit for sea.”
Martindale and his crew went to Britain as prisoners of war. There, the captain laid out Congress’s plans for a naval force and heartened his captors with testimony that his men had joined the rebellion only because they “would have been hanged as traitors to America for daring to refuse.”
He reappeared in Massachusetts the following June seeking nine months’ back pay and reimbursement for £80 in personal expenses. Most of his men wound up serving on British vessels, though whether under threat or by choice is uncertain. At least one accused Martindale of trading them for his own release, promising they’d serve the king “voluntarily, which was false and by that he was sent home to America again.”
Those left in Britain were eventually incarcerated at Forton Prison, not far from the Royal Navy dockyard at Portsmouth, or at Mill Prison in Plymouth. The facilities weren’t hellholes. The climate was tolerable, the townspeople generous with food and clothing. But American mariners would be jailed there by the thousands in the coming years, many already ill from prolonged confinement below deck on whatever ship had captured them. Overcrowding, neglect, mismanagement, and corruption led to shortfalls in rations and medical care that rapidly turned perilous.
And then there was an ominous letter from William Howe, the new British Army commander in Boston, written in December to a colleague back home. “Uncertainty about the fate of the crew of the Washington would deter others from privateering. Besides,” he continued, “I could wish a distinction to be made between prisoners taken on shore and on sea, which last mode of war will hurt us more effectually than anything they can do by land during our stay at this place.”
Fifteen months later, Prime Minister Frederick North would fulfill Howe’s wish by introducing before a lightly attended session of the House of Commons a
bill empowering the king “to secure and detain persons charged with, or suspected of, the crime of high treason committed in North America, or on the high seas, or the crime of piracy.”
This was the controversial Pirate Act, denying due process and prisoner exchange to captives charged with committing “piracy upon the ships and goods of His Majesty’s subjects.” Its passage in March 1777 would ignite “a fatal quarrel” between Britain’s pro-and antiwar factions over its potential to legitimize “oppression and tyranny through every part of the realm.” It also left the American inmates at Forton and Mill with only escape, death, or consenting to join the Royal Navy as their means of getting out.
William Coit was the second of Washington’s Plymouth skippers. Called “a humorous genius” by one contemporary, he joked that his ship’s cannon dated back to the Pilgrim era, “and never fired since.” Shooting more than one at a time “would split her open from her gunwale to her keel,” he said. With no lack of courage he engaged British warships on several occasions and tried to hijack a supply ship anchored in Boston Harbor in range of enemy shore batteries. He also ran aground his first day at sea and bagged a slew of prizes belonging to patriot merchants.
Dismayed by the rapacity of Coit’s men “in stripping the prizes of every little thing they could lay their hands upon,” Washington sacked the captain after a few weeks. “The plague, trouble, and vexation I have had with the crews of all the armed vessels is inexpressible. I do believe there is not on earth a more disorderly set.”
It was a bleak time. Short-term enlistments were due to expire at the end of the year. Continental soldiers were packing for home in alarming numbers. Washington criticized “the deficiency of public spirit,” but from their perspective the lack of arms promised a winter of only tedium. He’d hoped success at sea might encourage reenlistment, but his schooners’ performance so far was a bust.
The gloom lifted slightly when Hancock’s British convoy reached Boston missing its largest transport. Word went out that finding the straggler “would be the most fortunate circumstance that could happen for the public good as well as the captors.”
Three days later, Lee, a recently launched schooner of four guns and 50 crewmen, was hailed at sea by a lone British ship four times its size. Battered and disoriented after a stormy crossing, the ship’s crew thought Lee was a Royal Navy pilot craft come to guide them into Boston. Seized without resistance, the defenseless Nancy carried tons of ammunition, thousands of muskets and uniforms, and a three-thousand-pound mortar pronounced “the noblest piece of ordnance ever landed in America” when later deployed by the Continental artillery.
Washington’s manpower woes were far from solved; before long he increased enlistment bonuses and began admitting free African Americans into the ranks. But the Nancy windfall gave the campaign a much-needed shot of good news. “Surely nothing ever came more apropos,” he wrote. On delivery of the arms, “universal joy ran through the camp, as if each one grasped victory in his own hands.”
The surge of optimism was reflected a week later in one officer’s mockery of news that the loyalists in Boston had established a theater to entertain themselves during the bleak occupation. “They have opened with a tragedy. It’s very probable they may conclude with one.”
Meanwhile Nancy’s inventory was published under banner headlines throughout the colonies. Rumors of its value swelled from £10,000 to Thomas Jefferson’s giddy estimate of £30,000 two weeks later. Businessmen and mariners applauded Lee’s coup. “The men on board have made their fortunes in this adventure.” This was premature, however. Prize settlement was still a chaotic free-for-all in which everyone angled for a piece of the pie and few were satisfied.
The crew’s award was to come out of the net proceeds from the sale of the captured ship and cargo after all expenses were paid. Expenses on the front end of an expedition included fit-up, supply, and, in the case of Washington’s schooners, the initial government outlay to lease and arm the vessel. On the back end, bills were submitted from every quarter for services large and small relating to settling the prize: hauling and storing cargo; housing passengers from the seized transports; doing their laundry (2 pounds, 3 shillings); making crutches (3 pounds, 12 shillings); digging graves (6 shillings).
In the absence of prize courts, it fell to the government-appointed agents to reconcile the books. But since they too participated in the process, taking commissions and often loaning, at interest, their own money to resolve disputes and expedite voyages, they had trouble asserting authority over mistrustful merchants and sailors. Beverly agent William Bartlett, careening between exasperation at his job and dread he might lose it, begged Washington’s support “with regard to such vessels, for if I have no power to make such demands I make myself appear ridiculous to the eye of the world.” Neither he nor his Marblehead counterpart, Jonathan Glover, cleared a cent their first year. The wait was worth it, however. When Congress settled their accounts in 1777, payments totaled $70,000—more than $1 million in today’s terms.
The army’s dire need for Nancy’s supplies left no time for an orderly appraisal before they were requisitioned and put into use. Bartlett and Glover clamored for funds to placate disgruntled petitioners. Washington had seen enough graft among businessmen and mariners to stipulate that they “make out abstracts for the amount of which warrants will be given them.” This red tape requirement was a delaying tactic necessitated by Congress’s slowness in directing settlement procedures and issuing payment. It also reflected the general’s shifting focus back to ground operations.
Powder voyages undertaken by American merchants had improved his army’s combat capability. In late January Henry Knox’s artillery pieces began arriving from Fort Ticonderoga, enabling Washington at last to threaten Boston with serious bombardment. By March, when the British conceded their untenable position and evacuated, his involvement with his little squadron of schooners had dwindled to rote communications of reprimand and encouragement.
Matters languished further with the appointment of Artemas Ward as Boston commander after the Continental Army marched south. Confronted with the backlog of prize claims, Ward threw up his hands on the excuse of “having received no instruction on this point.” Washington wrote from his new headquarters in New York that accounts must be settled and that warrants would no longer suffice. “They will have cash for the goods.” But five months had passed since Nancy was taken. Its cargo was long gone, and still no court had convened to apportion its value retroactively. “This procrastination is attended with very bad consequences,” Washington wrote.
He’d learned from experience with his armed schooners that patriotism carried only so far. Everywhere entrepreneurs were paying top dollar for weapons and offering big signing bonuses to Continental officers and crewmen as incentive to join privateers once their service terms expired. With any more delay in paying out prize money “it will be impossible to get our vessels manned,” he warned.
In this environment of growing discontent among Continental crews and the dynamic promise of civilian privateers, the continued aggressiveness of certain naval captains was remarkable. First among these was John Manley, Lee’s forty-two-year-old skipper. He’d captured Nancy out of pure luck; the 250-ton transport, after hailing them to approach, had surrendered to eight marines in a longboat. But luck played no part in Manley’s dogged pursuit of other prey despite pay delays and mutinous threats from his crew. On learning of Sion Martindale’s surrender, for example, he’d rushed his vessel to sea lest his men hear the news and lose heart.
A mysterious figure, the British-born Manley had changed his surname from Russell upon settling in America, and probably gained his skill in navigation and gunnery while serving in the Royal Navy. He captured nine supply ships in his first two months of operation aboard Lee. Two were larger than Nancy, though laden with food for the British garrison rather than arms. Another, Concord, carried a packet of official letters each of which, Washington informed Congress, �
��breathes nothing but enmity to this country.”
The discovery led to a significant change in policy regarding lawful captures. A stickler for diplomatic decorum, Washington had forbidden taking British ships not specifically engaged in military support. However, the inclusion of virulent government directives in an otherwise benign shipment of clothing and coal prompted his vow that whether Concord’s supplies were “made a prize or not, we must have them.”
Congress agreed. Deeming “any goods, wares, or merchandize” to be potential “necessaries” for the enemy, it ruled that British vessels and cargo “of what kind so ever shall be liable to seizure.” The edict greatly expanded the target list of prizes in American waters, a further incentive to sailors and merchants contemplating a move to privateering.
Manley’s success increased to thirteen the number of Continental prizes awaiting settlement; a like number of privateer captures had also yet to be tried. Unable to manage the process from Philadelphia, Congress finally tossed it to Massachusetts lawmakers, decreeing that all captures past and future be “libeled in the courts of admiralty erected in said colony.” Three prize districts were created, with the most active Middle District, comprised of Boston and the North Shore ports, under the jurisdiction of the Salem court.
Beginning in the spring of 1776, when the courts at last got underway, settlements of Continental and privateer captures were adjudicated together without distinction, a step welcomed by everyone involved in the still embryonic enterprise. Not least of these were the maritime agents in Salem, Beverly, Gloucester, Plymouth, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Taking their cue from Congress’s legal melding of Continental and civilian prize claims, agents began soliciting outside business to supplement their official duties. In exchange for commissions or partnership shares they helped outfit private warships, represented owners and investors during the settlement process, and kept accounts for mariners still at sea when their prizes arrived home for trial. And in the consideration, as one privateersman put it before embarking, of “the uncertainty of my life being continued and the chance of being captivated by the enemy,” agents also saw that a client’s family received his prize money should he be killed or captured.
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