by Tim McGrath
One experienced mariner came up with a solution. He suggested stripping her of everything unnecessary and using “lighters” (large, empty barrels lashed to her hull to add buoyancy) to take her safely over the bar and down to New London, where she could be reunited with her guns, supplies, and the rest of her crew, and sail into the war. The sailor had made many suggestions during the war, as many ignored as heeded. Once again Benedict Arnold’s know-how was disregarded, even after he led the counterattack that drove the British away from the Trumbull. Saltonstall’s frigate would remain trapped by mud and bureaucracy for another two years.42
The failure of the Virginia to get to sea rested as much with her captain as with the British ships prowling the Virginia Capes. Once James Nicholson returned from Philadelphia after Trenton and Princeton, John Hancock grew adamant about getting the frigate and the navy’s top captain into action as soon as possible. Like the other captains, Nicholson lacked sailors, supplies, and guns, but Hancock, seeing the political as well as the military necessity, was determined to get everything needed for the Virginia—from the frigates in Philadelphia. He went so far as to order Robert Morris to send the anchors, cables, and rigging for the Philadelphia ships to Baltimore, as Morris could find replacements easier in Philadelphia than Hancock could in Baltimore.
The Marine Committee wanted Nicholson to sail to Martinique for those supplies from France that Biddle could not retrieve. All Nicholson lacked now was the usual: manpower. Bowing to Hancock’s pressure, Nicholson decided that, as senior captain of the navy, it was time he exerted some authority, and he began pressing sailors. He grabbed men from the jails, sailors from the Maryland state navy, and anyone else his press gangs found in Baltimore who even remotely looked like a seaman.43
In doing so he lost an ally. Maryland’s governor, Thomas Johnson, had so admired Nicholson’s services to the Maryland Navy while commanding the Defence at the war’s outset that he lobbied hard for the gallant officer’s appointment to the top of the Captains List. But with Nicholson’s recent actions “wrong to the Individuals” and “injurious to this town,” Johnson now warned Nicholson that he would not be an idle spectator to such depredations.44
Nicholson responded immediately. While he would not dispute Johnson’s authority, he assured the governor that impressments were practiced every day in Philadelphia, and that he flattered himself of his right to continue the practice. After all, every man jack he pressed was both “a proper person to serve his Country” and “Unmarried.” Now the Maryland Council weighed in, demanding that every pressed Marylander be discharged or, if Nicholson refused, that he be dismissed from the navy.45
Congress complied, but Nicholson did not—initially. It ordered Nicholson to return the men in question and “not to depart with the frigate until further orders.” While he did not hold his breath until he turned blue, he did not discharge his reluctant recruits until May 31, when a justice of the peace (at Congress’s behest) ascertained that they were set free.46
Nicholson did not forget this affront to his station. Nor did he fail to obey, for the next ten months, Congress’s orders “not to depart.”
Of the original Continental ships, only the Cabot had sailed in early 1777, departing in March with as many men as Joseph Olney, her new commander, could sign. She was accompanied by two armed brigs from the Massachusetts Navy, the Massachusetts and the Tyrannicide. Once at sea they were sighted and pursued for two days up to Nova Scotia. Convinced that he could not shake the British warship, Olney sent the state’s ships southward. Then he jettisoned his guns, his water barrels, his firewood, and his bower anchor in an effort to lighten the Cabot enough to shake his pursuer. Finally he ordered the gunwales to be sawed down, all to no avail. The Cabot became the first of the original Continental ships to be captured, taken as a prize by the dreaded Milford.47
News of the Cabot’s capture made quite a splash in the London newspapers, the Chronicle dutifully reporting that, while the Cabot “fell a sacrifice to the Milford,” the Massachusetts and Tyrannicide seized two British ships en route to France. The Englishmen, freed as the ships neared their homeland, informed the Chronicle that the muskets and cutlasses aboard the two American vessels were French made—just another sign of France’s sympathy for the rebels.48
It took most of the night of April 30 and a good bit of the morning of May 1 for the carriage and swivel guns Gustavus Conyngham had brought with him for the Surprise to be mounted and set in place. The former Peacock was not a ship of war, but once Conyngham was satisfied with the placement of the guns, he made all sail, heading for the English Channel and the Low Countries, looking for prizes.
At sunset on May 2 a sail was sighted. She was the Prince of Orange, a mail packet on her return run between Harwich (a small port fifty miles northeast of London) and Hellevoetsluis (about eighty miles southwest of Amsterdam). She was larger than the Surprise. Rather than run out his new guns, Conyngham turned on his charm (everyone who knew Conyngham said he possessed the Irish “gift of the gab”). He hailed the packet’s captain, William Story, and engaged him in a pleasant conversation across the water, asking if he was familiar with these waters, “how the Land bore,” and the packet’s destination. Story replied in kind, one British master “speaking” to another, while Conyngham continued the badinage, all the while assessing the Prince’s fighting capacity.
Convinced that the packet could be outfought, Conyngham sent the Surprise ever closer to her, coming up on the Prince’s starboard side. Alarmed, Story called for him to sheer off; instead, Conyngham raised the Grand Union and called on Story “to surrender to the Congress of America.” Story did. As a boarding party led by John Beach climbed aboard, a passenger—“one of His Majesty’s Messengers”—pretended to become violently ill. Beach let him return below deck, where he quickly threw his dispatches overboard. After an attempt by Story’s men to overcome the Americans failed, Beach took Story’s papers and letters, transferred ten of the British sailors to the Surprise, and placed the rest under armed guard.
The next morning the two ships encountered a Dutch schuyt, a flat-bottomed fishing boat. In an effort to make it clear that he was no pirate, Conyngham placed all of his prisoners aboard the Dutch craft, ascertaining that all of their clothing, jewelry, and other belongings were given to them. As they made sail, Conyngham paid them another nautical courtesy, firing a salute from the Surprise’s guns. The Prince of Orange had little in her hold, but according to the London papers, she was to have carried £50,000 in specie and a large quantity of diamonds that were not shipped, as the packet sailed on a “Jew[ish] Holiday.” What she did give Conyngham was an escort: the packet was perfect for fast raids.49
On May 3 another prize sailed into Conyngham’s lap—the Joseph, Captain Robert Kelly, bound for Hamburg, Germany, with her hold full of wine. Conyngham repeated exactly the previous day’s events, hailing a Dutch fishing boat bound for Nieuport, putting the Joseph’s officers and crew aboard her, and sending them to Holland while he made for Dunkirk with his prizes.
As the three ships approached the harbor they were met by two British ketches—sturdy two-masted vessels that the Royal Navy used for tenders. To Conyngham’s amazement, they brazenly collided repeatedly with his three ships, striking them hard and severely damaging their hulls. They were picking a fight, but Conyngham knew this was not the place to respond; he would file his protests once he was ashore, and insist that the British pay for the damages to the Surprise and his prizes.
He never got the chance. The subterfuge regarding the acquisition of the Peacock/Surprise was no longer secret. The English Channel was not an ocean; news of his seizures became known in England the very next day. The Admiralty wasted no time in sending the warship Ceres into the channel to capture Conyngham. In France, the usually bad-tempered Stormont was positively volcanic, raging at Comte Vergennes that the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 forbade Dunkirk from having anything to do with Conyngham�
�s activities. Stormont wanted him arrested—if not hung outright. Franklin and Deane rose to the captain’s defense, but Stormont won the French over: “There are some things too glaring to be winked at,” he insisted.
Stormont had won this round. Vergennes had no alternative but to return the prizes (the quick-thinking William Hodge did take Story’s documents from Con- yngham, and then headed directly to Paris). As a further official sign of French displeasure with their American guests, Conyngham and his crew were thrown in the Dunkirk jail, Vergennes ordered Conyngham’s commission seized by French authorties.50
The Surprise’s cruise had been to sea just a few days. Two small prizes were taken, then returned. No Englishman was killed, and the Americans involved were now behind bars. Any single victory by Biddle, Jones, Barry, Wickes, and others had cost the British government far more than Conyngham’s foray. But none of these warriors’ deeds yet matched the ramifications of the Surprise’s brief cruise. Why? Location.
The unwitting Conyngham did not realize that Dunkirk was the last port in the world to operate from, let alone return to with British prizes, being so curtailed by treaties (in many ways Dunkirk was run as much by the British as the French). Benjamin Franklin categorized Conyngham’s naiveté as “imprudent,” while Vergennes simply called it “stupide.” But it also showed British citizens that their government’s claims that the war was being won were not altogether true. One newspaper, the London Public Advertiser, said it best, excoriating the Admiralty’s Lord Sandwich in the process with a nickname he detested:
The Capture of the Orange Packet is a complete Refutation of what we have been told so often concerning the reduced state of the Americans. They have hitherto kept us in sufficient Play on their own Coasts, and now, in their Turn, they even venture to assail ours. Old Twitcher may blush for once at having suffered such an Insult so near our very Doors, after such repeated but impudent Boasts about the Number and Readiness of his Ships. But his Fleets seem to be literally Fleets of Observation only.51
Fear of another sortie by Conyngham or another American raider also hit England in the pocketbook. Insurance rates for shipping soared. For the first time since King Alfred, British merchants turned to merchantmen of other countries—including the hated French—to ship their goods and avoid the ravages of the American navy and privateers. “For God’s sake be carefull of your Packets,” one British spy in Paris warned William Eden, head of Britain’s intelligence service.52
And, while assurances were given to Stormont that such a breach of amity between France and England would never happen again, George III was not fooled. Writing to Lord North that Conyngham was in jail and the American ships were sailing home by orders of the government of Louis XVI, the king saw through the facade. Finding this “proof that the Court of Versailles mean to keep appearances,” he wanted North to inform Parliament. “The news deserves a place in the Speech You will make,” he decided. The king and his government were suspicious, and nothing fanned the flame of suspicion better than their spies in France.53
Great Britain, France, and the United States had spies operating in all three countries. Some, like Nathan Hale and John André, are well-known, mainly because they got caught. William Eden had a vast network of spies and double agents in France, including Edward Bancroft, Franklin’s personal secretary, who sent his reports in invisible ink concealed with letters to an imaginary lover. Franklin never suspected. When American ships were seized after departing France—and many were—it was in no small part thanks to Bancroft or, unintentionally, Franklin for trusting him. The Royal Navy found many a report from the commissioners to Congress to read along with ship’s manifests.54
By 1777 the American commissioners in Paris were plainly tired of their dispatches being read by the enemy and not Congress. That January they decided to purchase a packet to deliver their mail, just as England did. On the recommendation of Lambert Wickes, they reached out to Samuel Nicholson to find one.
In addition to being James Nicholson’s younger brother, Samuel was also a distant relative of Wickes and also another in the long line of successful merchant captains before the rebellion. Business at the war’s outset sent Nicholson to London, leaving him, in Wickes’s words, “Idle for Want of Employment.” He was not actually that idle, as he kept a mistress in the city, one Elizabeth Carter of Portland Street. Her neighbors called Nicholson “Mr. Carter,” and he did his best to act the part.
Nicholson met with the commissioners in Paris that month. Wickes’s high standing with Franklin guaranteed Nicholson’s appointment, and the commissioners sent Nicholson to comb the French ports to find a fast ship. If he had no luck in France, he was to go to Dover to possibly (and stealthily) purchase a ship there. He was also to contact Captain Joseph Hynson, another Marylander in England and Wickes’s stepbrother. With letters of credit in his bag, Nicholson took the coach for Calais on January 29.55
Weighing this mission for his country against his love life, Nicholson tried to satisfy both. After spending at least five minutes in Calais scouting possible sails, he booked passage on the Dover packet. Once there, neither the legendary white cliffs nor any maritime bargains held his attention; after a cursory stroll along the waterfront he boarded the coach for London. Before long “Mr. Carter” was in the arms of Mrs. Carter. With no documented flings by Nicholson in Calais or Dover, he may be proof that not all sailors have a girl in every port.56
Eventually, duty won out over rapture, and Nicholson sent a not-so-secret missive to Hynson:
D[ea]r Joe
I came to Town 12. O clock last Night, my Business are of Such A Nature, wont bare putt[in]g to Paper, Shall Say nothing more but expect to see you Immediately, I Shall leave Town early on the Morrow Morning, therefore begg You will not loose A Minute time in Coming here, as I have business of Importance for you w[hi]ch must be Transacted this day,
Yr Friend and Country Man
Sam Nicholson
P.S. I begg my Name or my being in Town may not be known to any one, to prevent w[hi]ch I shall not Stur Out of the House this Day, Pray take Coach & come off to me Imediately.57
“Joe” Hynson first encountered the Continental Navy in Nassau, where he sold some of his cargo to Esek Hopkins to defray expenses in repairing his merchantman while Hopkins was taking New Providence. Described as “a lusty and black looking Man,” Hynson was also labeled by one of Eden’s spies as “one of the most stupid but at the same time conceited fellows living.” He certainly merited the adjective “lusty” in his relationship with young Isabella Cleghorn, who resided at the same London boardinghouse at Stepney Street, run by Elizabeth Jump.58
Hynson had barely entered Mrs. Carter’s house when Nicholson announced that Franklin wanted him to command the new ship. Now all Nicholson and Hynson had to do was buy it. A mission of such importance demanded secrecy, and Hynson kept mum about it until he reached Mrs. Jump’s. But modesty was not one of his attributes. He immediately regaled her and Miss Cleghorn with details of his mission, his country’s plans, and his importance. The two ladies expressed their congratulations; whether they exhibited enough fawning for Hynson cannot be determined more than two hundred years later.
In any event, they were better actors than Joe Hynson. Once he left their company, they panicked. Here was a man under their roof, sharing a bed with one and jeopardizing them both, not by his furtiveness but by virtue of his big mouth. Deciding that it would be better to inform than to be implicated, they headed to Downing Street to see John Vardill, the twenty-five-year-old former assistant rector of New York’s Trinity Church.
Vardill had gone to London to be ordained just as war broke out; being a Loyalist, he elected to stay there. He wrote letters to his contacts in America, urging them to repent their treasonous ways. Among the addressees were Gouverneur Morris and a young man he once tutored—Washington’s stepson, John Parke Custis.
Promised £200 a year and a chair
at Trinity College if he would spy on his fellow Americans in London, Vardill was the perfect man of the cloth to hear Mrs. Jump’s confession. Her home was a favorite hostel for American seafarers; Vardill had cultivated this friendship. She poured out her heart about Hynson and her fears that his being under her roof could mean jail, or worse. Vardill allayed her fears and escorted her home.59
Once there, Vardill confronted Hynson with a wondrous performance as accuser, “brother” confessor, and dealmaker. Vardill “expostulated with Him & found him disposed to be made of any use that might be expedient.” Vardill had played Hynson perfectly; he did not blame his lack of discretion for getting him into trouble. Given the choice between prison or the noose for his treason and an ego-inflating job for the king, Hynson jumped sides quicker than he ever changed course, and handed over Nicholson’s letter.
The next day, in a meeting conducted in Vardill’s coach, Hynson was given his first mission as double agent: he was to accompany Nicholson and purchase a ship, sail her to France, obtain the commissioner’s dispatches, inform a British agent in France of his departure, and finally, sail into the waiting arms of a British cruiser. He took his mission so seriously that he actually obeyed Vardill’s instructions and kept his mouth shut in Mrs. Jump’s house.60
Hynson returned to Dover with “Mr. and Mrs. Carter,” and found a suitable cutter, the Rochefort. Hynson sent Isabella a good-bye letter. She replied, “Tomorrow is Valentine Day. You Are mine. I have chuse you among the rest, the reason is I love you best.” She gave it to Vardill to post; he took it to Eden and Lord North instead. The young minister was one step closer to that Trinity chair.
Nicholson had been called to France, so it fell to Hynson to finish the transaction. To make sure he did things properly, Vardill and a lieutenant under Eden’s command met him at Mr. Harvey’s Ship Tavern on the waterfront with Hynson’s final instructions.
