Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  For a year he traveled “incog,” then arrived in Fredericksburg, Virginia, where his brother William lived. He came ashore with £50 in his pocket and a new last name, Jones. His welcome was not what he expected. William was dead. Years earlier he had separated from his wife, leaving his estate to a sister in Scotland and leaving his brother completely on his own in the New World.

  The resourceful Jones now made the most of being a Mason, befriending every member he encountered, from young Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Hewes, a prominent North Carolina merchant with political aspirations. Jones took particular advantage of another new acquaintance, Dr. John Read, a fellow Scotsman and nephew of Benjamin Franklin. Read put Jones up at his country estate, where the two spent “Many sentimental hours” discussing literature, poetry, the Enlightenment, and the growing estrangement between the colonies and England. Like Washington and John Adams, Jones was smitten with Joseph Addison’s play Cato. The line “We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it” were words Jones was already living by.

  He also set his sights on a wife: the beautiful nineteen-year-old Dorothea Dandridge, whose favors were coveted by sea captain and country squire alike. She was the granddaughter of the beloved former governor of Virginia Alexander Spotswood and a cousin to Martha Washington. Dorothea was also way beyond Jones’s reach. How far he got in his wooing we do not know; Jones was in the Continental Navy years later when Dr. Read informed him that she had chosen a husband. Earlier, Patrick Henry had famously declared, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Mr. Dandridge gave him Dorothea.64

  Late in April 1775, word reached Virginia of Lexington and Concord. That was all the news Jones needed to hear to forget his heartache. He headed for Philadelphia and the Continental Navy.65

  By August 6, 1776, Congress had learned that 32,000 enemy soldiers—more than the population of Philadelphia—were disembarking from the countless British transports that glutted New York City’s harbor. Anxious to get its own navy out to sea, the Marine Committee issued Jones the orders he had been lusting after: a “Cruise against our Enemies . . . in & about the latitude of Bermuda” to “Seize, take, Sink, Burn or Destroy” enemy shipping. Jones had made the most of his time in Philadelphia. Joseph Hewes had introduced him to the rest of the committee, including the member who signed his captain’s commission, John Hancock, and the man who would become his greatest champion, Robert Morris.66

  Jones wasted little time loading provisions and munitions aboard. His crew of seventy-three included three boys (one fifer and two drummers), a master’s mate who had earlier deserted the Andrew Doria, and seventeen Philadelphia “landsmen.” Jones later called this hearty band the finest crew he ever commanded. Not even a duel between a marine lieutenant and the sailing master, fought just before the sloop departed, could diminish the esprit de corps Jones established between captain and crew.67

  Most Continental officers, like Barry and Biddle, had sailed sloops and schooners in their merchant days, but Jones was a square-rigged sailor from the first. Months of running errands between Rhode Island and Boston, New York, and Philadelphia gave him time to acclimate himself to the merits and foibles of the Providence. By now he was so enamored with her that he turned down the chance to command a captured brig, the Hampden (subsequently given to Hoysted Hacker).

  The Providence was 70 feet long, with a 20-foot beam and an 84-foot mainmast. Her bowsprit and jibboom extended another 39 feet. Her mainsail was monstrous, and she could carry a square sail above the main, along with course and studding sails (“stuns’ls”). The favorite of pirate and smuggler alike, sloops were built for speed, but were unforgiving during a sudden or unexpected jibe—a change of direction running before the wind that brought the long boom flying across the deck, causing her to “broach”—veer to windward and roll on her side; amateur sailors racing any boat from a Sunfish to a yawl can attest to such hazards. But master a sloop, and a captain can outrace a frigate. By August, Jones had mastered the Providence.68

  One week after she had cleared the Delaware Capes, the mastheader sighted five ships, one so large Jones could not determine if she was an “Old Indiaman” or a “Jamaica three decker.” She was neither.69

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “THAT REBEL IS MY BROTHER”

  The impartial World will Judge between us, whether a Salute deliberately returned by a Dutch Fort to the Rebel Brigantine Andrew Doria . . . be, or not, a Partiality in Favour of those Rebels and a flagrant Indignity offered to His Majesty’s Flag.

  —GOVERNOR CRAISTER GREATHEAD TO GOVERNOR JOHANNES DE GRAAF1

  The ship was the British frigate Solebay. Her captain, Thomas Symonds, was escorting four merchantmen, his journal filled with names of captured ships—although he, like Hamond, had failed to capture Barry’s Lexington. Upon sighting the Providence, Symonds left his convoy and stood for the sloop. In that instant, the Providence went from predator to prey; she was no match against a twenty-eight-gun frigate.

  Heavy air and cross seas sent high waves undulating across the ocean, conditions the Solebay handled better than the smaller, less forgiving Providence. Even so, John Paul Jones did not lose his nerve. The mere possibility of battle—and battle itself—lightened his mood. He found combat exhilarating. As his crew watched the enemy run out their guns, Jones took the Solebay on a stern chase. Four hours passed before the frigate got within musket shot (about two hundred yards) of the sloop’s stern quarter. Cannonballs from the Solebay’s bow chasers splashed alongside the speedy Providence; if possible, Symonds hoped to capture the rebel sloop undamaged.

  Throughout the chase, neither captain flew his colors—they sailed unidentified to each other. Now Jones ordered the Grand Union raised while his gunners fired their little 4-pounders, a terrier against a wolfhound. Symonds also flew American colors, but Jones laughed at the ruse—“the bait would not take,” he later joked. Once the Solebay was within fifty yards, Symonds ordered his marines aloft to the fighting tops. Suddenly, Jones ordered his helmsman to bear away before the wind. His topmen set the sloop’s studding sails while other hands let the mainsail fly. Furious, Symonds watched from his quarterdeck as the nimble Providence flew out of reach of the Solebay’s guns. Jones happily reported that “Our ‘Hairs breadth Scape’ & the Saucy manner of making it must have mortified [Symonds] not a little.”

  Jones’s good fortune was just beginning. One week later he had his first prize, the brigantine Sea Nymph, from Barbados to London, her hold packed tight with West Indies goods, a sea turtle, and the “best particular London Market Madeira Wine.” A prize crew took her back to Philadelphia. It was September 4, and the hurricane season was nigh. After a few days of cruising, Jones made for Nova Scotia to attack the fishing fleet.

  Before making sail, Jones sent an official report to the Marine Committee and a letter to Robert Morris, picking up where his correspondence with Hewes had left off—a thorough account of events, conditions, thinly veiled appeals to raise his station (he had learned that his commission was postdated and therefore put him behind later appointments), and his opinions of both the navy and how to run it. He included cogent suggestions as to how to improve the selection of officers, borrowing from any egalitarian aspects of the Royal Navy’s selection process while being careful not to dwell on another practice, promotion based on family and class connections as means of ascent—obviously not of use to Jones.

  Congress wanted regular reports from its captains. Some, like Barry, rarely wrote at all, often due to their lack of formal education. But Jones loved to write, viewing every addressee as a potential pen pal. After mentioning that the Sea Nymph’s turtle was earmarked for Morris’s dinner table “with Great Esteem,” Jones sailed up the Gulf Stream.2

  Three days after Jones sent Morris’s turtle to Philadelphia, a man-made turtle made history.

  David Bushnell was a Connecticut farmer who decided to try college at age thirty-one, attending Yale in 1771. Many of his c
lassmates were half his age. Bushnell aspired to be a great inventor like his hero, Benjamin Franklin. Water was Bushnell’s element and laboratory. While at Yale he made news, proving that gunpowder “could take fire underwater” (i.e., explode). With witnesses looking on, he attached a wooden pipe to a hogshead filled with gunpowder and stones, sank it in a pond, and dropped a match into the pipe. The ensuing explosion surprised everyone but Bushnell.

  Five years later, the arrival of the British army and navy in New York harbor gave Bushnell the chance to test his greatest invention, his “Submarine Vessel,” which

  Bore some resemblance to two upper tortoise shells of equal size, joined together . . . the opening, made by the swell of the shells . . . the inside capable of containing the Operator, and air, sufficient to supply him, thirty minutes . . . a quantity of lead for ballast . . . an oar, for rowing . . . a rudder for steering . . . two brass pumps . . . A Watergage . . . determined the depth of descent . . . a compass . . . & a ventilator.3

  Bushnell called his invention the Turtle. The entrance to the submarine was so narrow that only a small man could get inside. Three round doors let in air while the sub was on the surface, and small glass windows admitted light. A compass marked with phosphorous allowed Bushnell to read it when the contraption was submerged. Iron hoops, tar, and caulk sealed it. The Turtle submerged when a valve at his feet let in water and rose when a pump flushed her out; a tiller controlled the rudder, and cranks operated the paddles that sent her up and down, back and forth. She was pure Yankee ingenuity.

  What’s more, the Turtle carried a mine. It consisted of a wooden shell, loaded with 150 pounds of gunpowder, attached to the sub’s rear by a long bolt. Once the submerged Turtle got close enough to an enemy’s hull, the operator released the bolt, which activated a clocklike timer. A long wood screw ran atop the sub, with a stout rope connecting it to the mine. A rod inside the sub drove the wood screw into the planks of the enemy’s hull. The timer gave Bushnell up to twelve hours to set for an explosion. Simply detach the screw, let it bring the mine to the hull, fasten it, and paddle like hell away from the ships, and boom! Submarine warfare.4

  General Washington first met Bushnell during the siege of Boston. Calling him “a man of great Mechanical powers,” Washington gave him money and assistance, only to watch as one mishap after another foiled the inventor. By September 1776, Bushnell had set off enough successful explosions that he deemed his invention ready to face enemy ships in New York harbor.5

  Being small of stature was not enough to do the job well. The frail Bushnell, lacking the stamina for the dangerous task, handed it over to his brother Ezra. But as the appointed date drew near, Ezra was struck with the “indisposition” ravaging Washington’s army at the time. Bushnell turned to another Ezra: a volunteer, Sergeant Ezra Lee, and gave him a crash course in operating the sub.6

  Shortly after midnight on September 7, with the moon “about two hours high,” two whaleboats towed the Turtle from Manhattan towards the British fleet at anchor off Staten Island. Just before the whaleboats reached a point where they could be spotted they cast off the Turtle’s lines, and Lee was all alone.

  Immediately things went awry. The tide was running stronger than Lee and Bushnell had anticipated, sweeping the Turtle past the British ships and forcing Lee to keep the sub on the surface, paddling for nearly three hours before he reached his target. The Eagle, a sixty-four-gun ship-of-the-line, was Lord Howe’s flagship. Lee calculated it was about an hour until dawn; “I could see the men on the deck, & hear them talk,” he recalled. After submerging the Turtle, he turned the screw as hard as he could, but it would not penetrate the hull. Lee made several more attempts, with no success. When he surfaced before his last attempt, he found himself three feet from the ship, easy to spot by a British sailor on deck. Lee “thought the best generalship was to retreat,” and paddled as fast as he could towards the safety of Manhattan. He had four miles to go.

  Unable to read his compass, Lee had to rise every few minutes to make sure he was heading in the right direction. His crooked route attracted the attention of hundreds of British soldiers standing on the parapets of Governor’s Island. Dozens of them jumped on a barge and began chasing him. Had he escaped the British flagship and the surrounding fleet, only to be caught by a barge? Not Lee: when his pursuers got within fifty yards of the Turtle, he released the mine, hoping they would pick it up, “and then we should all be blown up together.”

  Seeing the makeshift mine, the soldiers panicked, rowing back to the island as fast as they had come. Eventually, Lee reached the rendezvous point, where a whaleboat towed him to safety. Minutes later, the mine exploded, throwing up a large waterspout. Watching the fleeing barge from his headquarters, General Israel Putnam cried out, “God’s curse ’em, that’ll do it for them.”

  Submarine warfare would have to wait for another war.7

  As fall followed summer in Philadelphia that year, it seemed that the only good news regarding the war effort came from the Continental Navy. On land, the New York campaign was a series of disasters. After a thorough thrashing by the British on Long Island, Washington’s army was spared capture in toto by his daring plan to ferry his men across the East River, from Brooklyn to Manhattan, in the dead of night. It would not have succeeded but for John Glover and his Marblehead “Webfooters,” rowing boats tirelessly all night long, back and forth across the East River. Once on Manhattan, Washington and his men were again routed in battle.8

  Farther west, at Lake Champlain, General Benedict Arnold hastily built a fleet of schooners, row galleys, and gondolas to stave off a British attack of superior ships and numbers, part of General Burgoyne’s offensive to take control of the Hudson River. On October 11 and 12, Arnold led a valiant action against the British. He lost fifteen of his nineteen vessels, but bought precious time, stalling the grand British invasion of New York and New England for nearly a year.9

  Admiral Richard, Lord Howe, called “Black Dick” by his men, once derided his cousin George III’s “intractable obstinacy” regarding his rebellious subjects. He possessed genuine affection for America and Americans. King George named the brothers Howe “King’s Commissioners for restoring Peace to his Majesty’s Colonies,” and they took this title seriously. The admiral was particularly interested in finding a way to bring the rebels—who he truly believed were fellow Englishmen—back into the fold.

  After General William Howe’s victories in New York, Richard clung to the hope that his peace feelers would bear fruit. They did not: a trio of congressmen—Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge—met the Howes in New York to discuss terms, but they could not negotiate with the “Independent States” of America. Days later, Washington’s departing Continentals put New York to the torch. Longboats from Howe’s fleet, including James Wallace’s Rose, were sent ashore to fight the blaze.10

  Offsetting such grim tidings from New York came dispatches delivered by naval officers, usually after docking their captains’ prizes along Philadelphia’s wharves. Continental captains succeeded in a series of independent cruises. Isaiah Robinson, commanding the sloop Sachem—Barry’s first prize, the Edward—captured the brig Three Friends, brought in by Joshua Barney. Among the captured goods was a large turtle with Lord North’s name on its back (yes, it was given to Robert Morris). Two more prizes from Barry and the Lexington arrived in port; among the captured goods were eight African slaves, resold on the auction block of the Philadelphia Coffeehouse, with the proceeds going towards the Lexington’s prize shares. Elisha Hinman and the Cabot made several captures, one carrying “a woman of Caractor” aboard, while Abraham Whipple’s cruise aboard the Columbus captured no less than five British vessels.11

  Lambert Wickes brought the Reprisal into Philadelphia after completing a successful cruise to Martinique (“Martinico” in the day) for gunpowder, picking off three prizes during the voyage. He also took part in an international incident that added
to the escalating distrust between England and France. Earlier in 1776 a French frigate captain delivered orders from the government of King Louis XVI to his West Indies governors. While the French king did not intend to “favor openly the Americans,” his officials were to give “all possible assistance” to American ships and their captains, even though France was not in the war.

  The governor of Martinique wasted no time in obeying. On August 1, the Reprisal was docked in St. Pierre’s harbor when Lambert Wickes accepted a challenge to combat from British captain John Chapman of the sloop-of-war Shark, the first battle between ships from the two navies in foreign waters. The Reprisal sailed out to meet her foe, her guns run out and her crew armed. A throng of dignitaries and islanders, including William Bingham, America’s newly appointed agent for the island, gathered on the beach to watch. The crowd openly rooted for the Reprisal.

  For two hours, the ships hammered each other, angling for position. After that, reports diverged—depending on whose reports one believed—as to who broke off the engagement. In any event, as the Reprisal made for the harbor, French guns from the fort fired a supporting salvo at the Shark, sending her out of range and sending Chapman into a rage over such a blatant act by a supposed “neutral.”

  The following day, Chapman came into port to protest the belligerent act. But the governor, le Comte d’Argout, did not agree: Wickes had “claimed his protection,” and had gotten it. Once Wickes put to sea, the governor tactfully added, he was on his own. Upon hearing of such a flagrant breach of neutrality, the British Admiralty was furious. “We shall now be very much pestered,” Vice Admiral Young complained to Philip Stephens, the Admiralty’s secretary.12