by Tim McGrath
One can see Philadelphia from Fort Island, but just south of it the river bends to the right and soon even the mastheader loses sight of the city. Biddle was not the kind of man to look back anyway, nor did his line of work allow him to think about the friends and family he was once again leaving behind. The Randolph continued southward, Biddle looking ahead.24
He left the merchantmen and smaller naval vessels at Reedy Island and took the Randolph on a quick shakedown cruise, sailing past the capes and into the open sea. For several days he sent his men up and down the ratlines, running the frigate with all sails set and then trimming her canvas, observing her handling in both light and heavy winds, and how she answered her helm. Without saying so, he was also testing his crew, giving the landsmen their sea legs and beginning their evolution from lubbers to sailors. Patience was at a premium in wartime—what knots and duties they did not learn the first time were subsequently taught by a bosun mate’s rope’s end. Gunnery practice not only provided training for the crew but also allowed Biddle to see how the Randolph handled the shock of a broadside. And he paid particular attention to the British “recruits,” not so much regarding their capabilities (almost all were able seamen), but their attitudes. Biddle and his officers remained ever vigilant.25
After a few days of sailing back and forth along Cape Henlopen, Biddle believed the Randolph “the very Best Vessel for Sailing that ever I knew.” His practice sessions were observed not just by the lighthouse keeper and Henry Fisher’s pilots. Three Loyalist officers, recent escapees from the Baltimore jail and sheltered by sympathetic Lewes Tories, paid particular attention to the Randolph, certain that so beautiful a frigate must be British. They made plans to abscond with a small boat, row out to the frigate, and report for duty. Just before making their getaway they were informed by their Tory friends of the ship’s true nationality.26
Biddle soon returned to the Delaware to convoy the tobacco ships to the Atlantic. Three days later, as the merchantmen headed out to sea, one captain watched as the Randolph changed course—heading not south but north.27
Morris had hoped that “Biddle will send us a Galatea, a Pearl, or a Camilla”—any of the frigates that had bedeviled American shipping. Biddle had the same idea, but a definite frigate in mind: the Milford. She had been as much a thorn in the navy’s side as the aforementioned ships. Before this week, no Continental vessel stood a chance one-on-one with any British frigate. Now America possessed a ship of equal might, commanded by a captain looking for action.28
In heading towards New England, Biddle missed dispatches from Morris—the Marine Committee had agreed with his original orders sending Biddle to Martinique. The long-anticipated supplies were too valuable to risk in a merchantman’s hold. Morris sent word to Elisha Warner to take the Fly and find Biddle. Poor Warner cruised the waters off the Delaware Bay for two weeks before giving up and returning the dispatches to Morris.29
Biddle meanwhile headed to the waters off Rhode Island, sure that the Randolph would pay her first compliment to the Milford there. Along the way, the mastheader spotted a sail too small for a frigate. Biddle gave chase, only to find her to be a Frenchman. He sent a boarding party under Lieutenant Panatiere de la Falconiere across the water to inspect her papers. Falconiere returned to the frigate with a large jug of wine taken from the ship’s master. To Biddle’s disgust, Falconiere sold the wine to his shipmates for a dollar a bottle. It was the first crack in the esprit de corps that Biddle was constantly at pains to maintain. More cracks were forthcoming as the Randolph continued northward.30
She did not get far: without warning, her foremast sprang. Held tenuously in place by stays and shrouds, Biddle had barely enough time to send his topmen aloft to remove the yards and topmast to keep it from cracking and going over the side. Once they finished, Biddle ordered the mast stepped back in place. It could not be done—the base was rotten. Biddle would have to jury-rig a replacement, using the longest spar available.
Bad luck now sailed with bad workmanship. As a gale pitched the Randolph through high seas, a loud crack was heard from bow to stern, topgallant to keelson. This time it was the mainmast, the same one that had loomed over Philadelphia at Humphrey’s shipyard. Sheared clean through right at the deck, it now staggered from side to side with each wave, held in place only by the rigging. To Biddle it was “as unpleasant a sight as ever I wish to behold.” The high winds and waves turned the mainmast into a pile-driver, threatening to sink the Randolph.
This time Biddle ordered the carpenter’s mates and topmen to cut it free of the ship. With deliberate swings of hatchets and axes, the carpenters severed line after line until the mast went over the side. In a split second, the navy’s pride and joy was a derelict, now at the mercy of nature and the enemy.
Biddle sent the mastheader to climb the mizzen—the only mast left—and scan the horizon for any sail, while the carpenter’s mates made two jury-rigged masts. Biddle and ship’s carpenter Richard Fordham inspected the stump of wood that had been the mainmast and found that it was thoroughly rotten. One of the hands, a Philadelphian, told Biddle he knew the frigate’s spars and masts had spent eighteen years lying in water at the mast yard—one of the first instances of shoddy supplies and chicanery in the American defense industry.
As the carpenters and other hands removed the stub and finished their makeshift replacements, Biddle went to his cabin. Until proper masts were stepped, the Randolph could not fight even a shallop effectively. But where to sail for repairs? The Atlantic was infested with British cruisers from Providence to Newport News, and possibly well south of Virginia as well. He decided to make for Charleston. The only ships Biddle wanted to meet were fellow frigates Warren and Providence, his orders having mentioned that they would also be cruising those waters. But there was no rendezvous—not because of the ocean’s vastness, but because the frigates had never left Newport: Sir Peter Parker’s fleet had them bottled up nicely.31
As the Randolph headed south, Biddle sensed that the British sailors would try to take the ship somehow, someday. His intuition was correct. One clear day several of them gave three cheers near the quarterdeck—a prearranged signal to revolt. But Biddle’s officers and marines were ready, and subdued the mutineers in no time.
Biddle did not clap the ringleaders in irons to await a court-martial. Instead, he ordered the marines to stand armed guard over them and put the Randolph into the wind. She came to a complete stop. “All hands to witness punishment!” cried First Lieutenant William Barnes, while the bosun’s mates took one of the hatch gratings and secured it to the gangway. The crew took their place on deck, with Biddle and his officers on the windward side, the breeze at their back.
At the order “Rig the grating!” the first of the mutineers was stripped of his shirt and trussed up, his bare back exposed for all to see. “Ship’s company: off hats!” Barnes bellowed. Seconds later, Biddle read the punishment for mutiny from the Articles of War, which were posted below deck for every man jack to read. One of the bosun’s mates approached the grating carrying a red baize bag. Inside it was a cat-o’-nine-tails. As the cat came out of the bag, Barnes said, “Do your duty.” The mate shook the nine tails free, their ends tied to bits of cut iron or nails. He took his stance several feet from the grating and brought his arm back waist high. Then he sent the cat forward. It whistled in the air for a half second, then everyone heard the violent slap as the first “stripe” laid open the mutineer’s back. The mate brought the cat back in the same motion for the second stripe, the beginning of a slow, unrelenting rhythm.
Unless he had been flogged before, the impact of the cat came as a horrific shock to the mutineer. One victim recalled how it “stung me to the heart, as if a knife had gone through my body . . . the time between each stroke seemed so long to be agonizing, and yet the next came too soon.” Another recipient of the lash said the pain in his lungs was far worse than the pain of his flesh being ripped off his back. Many had the
wind knocked out of them.32
The bosun’s mate worked methodically, producing a rhythm interrupted only when he wiped bits of skin off the metal ends of the cat. Twelve lashes were the official limit in the Continental Navy’s Articles, but mutiny was afoot, and Biddle paid no mind to the rules this day. Finally he said, “That’s enough,” and the man was cut away from the grating, to be replaced by the next mutineer. Once Biddle sensed that the British hands had seen enough to deter them from making another attempt to seize the ship, he dismissed the men.
As the rest of the crew returned somberly to their duty, marines took the mutineers below deck to the surgeon, Thomas Hore, whoses ministrations were nearly as painful as the flogging. After Hore washed their backs in brine and applied salt packs, the marines clapped the mutineers in irons.33
Biddle’s sailing master, Robert Johnson, got the Randolph under way, a daunting task with her two smaller and weak masts. Once turned into the wind, the Randolph was “in irons”—lying dead still in the water (sometimes a ship even began sailing backwards). The helmsman had to trim her through the wind skillfully enough to let the sails catch the breeze and propel her forward with enough speed to allow her to resume her course, and then it was on to Charleston.34
Luckily, she got there, sailing through high seas all the way and without being spotted by any British warships. But that was the extent of Biddle’s luck. While still at sea, a deadly fever swept the ship. Surgeon Hore labored round the clock, fighting to contain the disease while trying to make the sick as comfortable as possible as the frigate rolled over contentious waters. At least fifteen hands perished over two weeks. Neither Biddle nor Hore described the symptoms, but the contagion was likely brought aboard by one of the prisoners, infested with lice from his cell. It was called “jail fever” in Biddle’s day. Another name for it is typhus.35
On March 10, the Randolph was off Sullivan’s Island, site of the previous year’s American victory and gateway to Charleston harbor and its high sandbar. A storm prevented a pilot from guiding the frigate into port until the following day.
None of the South Carolinians knew the woeful condition of ship and crew as the Randolph entered the harbor. Only the experienced eye spotted her makeshift masts until she sailed closer. Most of Charleston was anxious about the city’s dwindling defenses, especially Brigadier General William Moultrie of the Continental Army. The troops that had repulsed the British a year earlier were now in North Carolina and Georgia. The Randolph might be dismasted and fever-ridden, but that was not what Moultrie and many others saw. In beholding Biddle’s damaged frigate “their fears were a little subsided, looking upon her to be a great additional strength to our batteries and protection to the harbor,” Moultrie declared.
With everything Biddle had contended with, the levelheaded captain was more relieved than frustrated at sighting Charleston. He informed his brother James that this had been “one of the most disagreeable Passages that ever I experienced.” Once in port, he sent his sick men to a hospital and got his ship to the careening posts. There he removed the Randolph’s guns and stores, thoroughly cleaned her from stem to stern, burned gunpowder and washed her between decks with vinegar, the eighteenth-century approach to sterilization.36
To Biddle, this was all part of his job. Unlike Jones, he did not dwell on his setbacks. Having “been very Healthy Myself,” he wrote to his brother James, and happy to have learned in Charleston that their brother Charles had escaped the British in Jamaica, he closed his letter sending love to the family and full of optimism for both a recovered crew and a repaired ship: “I hope soon to be out in Her again.”37
For all his difficulties, at least Biddle got the Randolph to sea. As of the spring of 1777, she was the only frigate to sail.
Just getting a frigate built and launched was a painstakingly slow process. From the creation of the navy through the end of the Revolution, Congress sanctioned the construction of more than three dozen ships. When the thirteen frigates were ordered, it was believed they would all see action in 1776. None of them did.
Such a daunting demand from Congress alone kept shipyards busy during the war years. Once a yard received the detailed draft of the ship’s design (as much a work of art as a blueprint), crews of sawyers, carpenters, joiners, caulkers, painters, and chandlers went to work—that is, once the supplies of live oak, hardwood, pine, and fir that were needed to construct the various parts of the ship reached the yard. Each ship required vast amounts of wood, a couple of acres’ worth for one frigate alone.38
Laying the keel came first. If available, live oak was used for the ship’s “skeleton,” being long enough, thick enough, and bent enough for a strong frame. Live oak still dominated America’s coastline from Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico, but transporting it to the northern shipyards was well nigh impossible during the war. White oak was more frequently used. The frame was supported by “knees,” stout L-shaped pieces that connected the beams to the timbers. Then planking the hull began. There were two layers of planking—inner and outer—with inner planking secured fast by treenails, wooden pegs that shrank over time, letting in water and incurring the risk of rot. Once the hull was planked, the decks were added and caulked. Since the funds to sheathe the hull in copper, as the British and French did, were lacking, an acrid-smelling tallow composite used after careening was applied, after which the master carpenters and their apprentices finished the fine work along with any filigreed designs and figureheads. Then the ship was ready for launching. The work took anywhere from months to years to complete.39
On May 21, 1776, the frigate Raleigh was launched in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, one of the first of the thirteen to have her coming-out party. Thousands of people came to the waterfront, perched precariously on rooftops, overflowing in the nearby streets, and in overcrowded small boats. A frigate’s launching was a major entertainment event, and the Raleigh’s was no exception.
It was also a dangerous one. The Raleigh stood high above the Piscataqua riverfront on her sloping ways—two giant rails of wood, tallowed with wax. The frigate rested on keel blocks. Her masts had not yet been stepped; to add to the festive aura of the day, Captain Thomas Thompson had festooned the gunwales with pennants and flags. Two anchors were sunk in the ground in front of the ship, with the cables run through the hawseholes in the bow. Other cables ran through the capstan, securing her fore and aft.
Some two dozen laborers, brandishing large mallets, were stationed beneath the ways, along the path of the ship’s descent into the river. Their task was so dangerous that prisoners were often enlisted and promised freedom if they were successful in hammering out the blocks, as the ship slid towards the water, inches over their heads. All that was needed was high tide, the safest time to send the Raleigh’s 697 tons hurtling towards the river. Thompson and his officers came aboard to supervise.
When the tide was about to peak, the signal was given, and the men beneath the ways drove out the blocks, the cables were eased, and the giant frigate descended, picking up speed as she slid down the tallowed ways and into the water, creating giant waves on either side of her that sent small boats in the river bobbing furiously. The multitude of onlookers cheered loudly.
Once the Raleigh was securely docked, the festivities began, with a meal presented to the shipyard workers, naval officers, and town dignitaries (as much as fifty dollars had been designated for the Warren’s launch in Rhode Island).
Small in numbers compared to those of England and France, the Continental ships were more than equal to the Europeans in design, ingenuity, and craftsmanship. Their seaworthiness was admired by enemy and ally alike. While Joshua Humphreys is still renowned for his talent and vision (thanks in great part to his 1790s “super frigates” like the Constitution), there were others, such as Jedidiah Willets and the Hackett brothers, whose innovations were admired across the Atlantic, especially when one of their ships came in view.40
Masts, spars, a
nd rigging did not come cheap, but at last they came to Portsmouth. What did not come were guns. In fact, the Raleigh got hardly any at all. There were more than enough foundries in the thirteen states, but only Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts had both iron foundries and iron itself. Getting the guns to other states’ harbors was a rare accomplishment during the war. Add to this the demand for iron by the army, privateers, state navies, and states themselves for defense, and one can see why the Raleigh would go to sea practically unarmed.
The proving of guns also slowed down deliveries. Guns were “proved” by loading them with an extra charge of powder and double shot. American ironworkers were inexperienced in casting cannons, and many of them cracked or burst. Most captains attended a proving session when they could, often refusing guns outright if the one beside it had failed. It was better to wait for a shipment of quality than risk the chance of a gun bursting in battle, frequently maiming its crew. Throughout his career John Barry was fastidious about proving guns, writing one politician that many sailors “were [more] afraid of their own Guns than they are of their Enemies.”41
The Raleigh’s and Randolph’s sister frigates were all idle that spring, for various reasons. The Delaware, Effingham, Washington, Montgomery, and Congress were unfinished; the Hancock and Boston lacked sailors; the Warren and Providence were bottled up by British cruisers; and the Trumbull and Virginia had their own particular issues.
The Trumbull had been built in Connecticut without any delays and launched flawlessly. Her captain, Dudley Saltonstall, sailed her to the mouth of the Connecticut River, where it became obvious that everyone from Saltonstall to the Marine Committee had forgotten to check one technicality—her draft. The frigate drew too much water to get over the sandbar at the Connecticut’s mouth. That spring, British forces were getting close to where the Trumbull lay defenseless, hoping to burn her.
