by Tim McGrath
No fewer than seven British warships would be waiting in the channel for the Rochefort, now called the Dolphin. “Hynson will pretend to be a passenger, and will answer his name,” their captains were informed. He was to be taken below, his letter bag confiscated, along with the dozens of gunpowder barrels laid in the hold. Once in England, Eden’s plan included letting Hynson “escape” to France, and do it all over again with other dispatches and another ship. At Le Havre, a northern French port, Hynson had the dispatches and a crew, with a trap waiting for him in the English Channel. One spy reported he was “at least as eager to betray his Sloop [sic] & Dispatches as we were to take them.”61
With all the machinations and characters in this tale it was ironic that a British king of German descent should be foiled by his German mercenaries—for that is how the plot unraveled. Just before the Dolphin’s departure, a schooner arrived from Baltimore “with News of the Hessian Misfortune” at Trenton and Princeton. The elated commissioners immediately sent a courier to Le Havre to retrieve their dispatches and postpone Hynson’s voyage for another month, to gauge France’s reaction to such heartening news.62
Over the coming months the British hoped to have more use for Hynson. But while Wickes continued to champion his stepbrother, suspicions grew about him in both Downing Street and Passy. Before long even King George “doubted whether any trust could be reposed in Hynson,” and concluded that Deane and Franklin fed him false information. While that was not true, the commissioners grew both wary and weary of Hynson. Deane summed him up best: “It is fortunate he knows nothing, but this will not prevent his pretensions to know everything.”63
In April 1777 John Paul Jones returned to Boston. He had gone to Philadelphia to right the wrongs cast his way by Esek Hopkins, have his seniority rectified by John Hancock, and wangle a command befitting a man of his accomplishments. But his mission was a failure: Hancock asked Jones to bring his commission with him, promising to move his appointment from August 10 to the correct date of May 10. He also asked Jones to propose suggestions to improving the Continental Navy.
Jones dove headlong into this assignment, producing a detailed vision of a well-run, serviceable navy. It was never acted upon. The day before he left for Boston he went to Hancock to get his corrected commission. It was revised, all right—to October 10, with the number “18” written across it. When Jones demanded the original, Hancock claimed it was mislaid. Jones took justifiable umbrage, which Hancock viewed as petulance. The captain let Morris know he had added Hancock to his enemies list; he was already convinced that Hopkins and other captains “who lately Envied me the Command of a Fleet” would now “Exult when they See me return to the Eastward to command a Single Sloop of War.” The Marine Committee sought to assuage Jones’s bruised ego, promising him the pick of the ships soon to be purchased in Boston. Jones returned there with no command, his commission befouled, and his future bleak.64
It had been a year since the British abandoned Boston, but the city had not recovered from hosting General Gage’s army. Redcoats had cut down nearly every tree for firewood; a forlorn stump was all that remained of the beloved Liberty Tree. Once the last British ship stood down the King’s Roadstead—called Nantasket after the British departure—Bostonians had returned en masse to find their homes vandalized. Hancock’s private wine cellar was empty. British officers and their prostitutes had destroyed houses; fires set along the waterfront had gutted warehouses. The docks that had carried the aroma of spices and fine wood now reeked of mold and rot. Within days the returning townsfolk were plagued by an epidemic of smallpox, another Lobsterback souvenir. With the exception of privateers, the Charles River was idle; few merchantmen ventured out to the capes lest they be pounced on by waiting enemy warships.65
Towering over this sad town were the high masts of the frigates Hancock and Boston, rising 160 feet above the decks. Bostonians were impatient to see the ships stand down Nantasket Road, escort the idle merchantmen, and return with prizes (and the much-needed supplies in their holds). As Captains John Manley and Hector McNeill blamed Congress for the lack of hands and money, the Eastern Navy Board, which reported to the Marine Committee, accused the captains. “There is Blame Somewhere,” the Reverend Samuel Cooper opined. In truth, there was blame practically everywhere.66
Manley and McNeill were trying everything possible to get their frigates out of Boston. They went heavily into debt to cover wages and supply expenses when the Navy Board had no funds. Sending their ships in harm’s way was a shared goal.
What they did not possess was the least bit of respect for each other. Friends? Not a chance. Throughout the war there were constant instances of dislike between the Continental captains. Jones did not like Saltonstall; Barry did not like Samuel Nicholson; no one liked John Hazard, and James Nicholson did not like anybody. But the loathing that Manley and McNeill felt for each other topped them all.
Hector McNeill had been raised in Boston but was living in Quebec when the Revolution started. He went over to the American rebels and fought in the noble but doomed expedition to Quebec, winning plaudits from General Benedict Arnold for his courage. Before the war he had an enviable record as a merchant captain. Like every true Scot, he was a devout Presbyterian.67
He also disliked Manley intensely. The enmity between the two captains was obvious to all. “Like the Jews and Samaritans,” James Warren told John Adams, Manley and McNeill “will have no intercourse . . . they will not sail together.” But sail together they did. After months of proving guns, raising crews, paying for slops and bonuses to sailors out of their own pockets, both men sent their frigates down Nantasket Roadstead on May 21, leading seven privateers assigned to them as a squadron. The frigates dwarfed the smaller privateers as they sailed away to the cheers of a midday crowd. “Farewell, to the sleepy Agents, dishearten’d Tradesmen and distress’d Seamen who frequent the Streets of Boston,” McNeill wrote the Marine Committee.68
The Boston and the other ships picked up speed as the city receded in the distance, the crew following a series of orders McNeill gave from the quarterdeck. “Set topsails,” McNeill said in a calm voice. Standing beside him, Lieutenant John Brown relayed the orders through his speaking trumpet for all hands to hear, as they rushed to their duties. At “Topmen lay aloft and loose topsails!” the topmen ascended the ratlines to the second top, then walked along the footropes to the middle of the sails and untied them. “Man the topsail sheets and halyards!” and other sailors grasped the lines controlling the sails. “Throw off the buntlines and ease the clew lines!” and the lines that helped unfurl the sails were loosened. “Sheet home!” and the lines controlling the sail’s direction were set to best fill the sail with wind. At “Run away with the topsail halyards!” the sailors manning the lines walked aft, lifting the yards (spars) and making them taut. Square-rigged ships usually left port with just the topsails and jibs set, letting the vessel stand downriver under controlled conditions.69
Aboard the Boston, McNeill was like a proud papa watching his child take her very first steps. At this moment, all of the headaches, frustrations, and financial stress in getting to sea vanished. Not even Manley’s presence on the nearby Hancock’s quarterdeck could dampen his mood.
In a nutshell, the squadron’s mission was to sweep the New England seas of the British menace. Lord Admiral Howe, with many of his ships in repair, feared that a squadron of this size, at this time, could tip the balance of power in the rebels’ favor. He need not have worried. To entice the privateers to obey Manley’s signals and orders, Congress had paid their insurance costs. But a privateer’s success was based on individual initiative. Sailing alone, one privateer could chase down all the merchantmen encountered until prize crews created a manpower shortage aboard ship, but a fleet of them—plus two large frigates—would send every merchantman sighted scurrying away. The squadron’s very existence was based on fighting the Royal Navy, and no privateer went to sea for that reaso
n.
Small wonder, then, that after a stormy night off Cape Ann just two days after leaving Boston, the privateers began deserting the frigates, beginning with the Sturdy Beggar—a common name for ships in those days. On May 25, another departed, her crew infested with smallpox. More storms battered the ships. This being the frigates’ shakedown cruise, McNeill wrote down every flaw, including how “the gundeck Leak’d so that most of the people were wet below as well as the officers.” This storm gave the remaining privateers their chance to go their freebooting ways. “Parted with the fleet all but one and that is the Commodore,” Midshipman Benjamin Crowninshield wrote from his dripping wardroom.70
The cruise of the Continental Navy’s odd couple officially began on May 29 when the frigates captured the Patty, a London brig loaded with iron, coal, and duck—part of a fleet of sixteen vessels escorted by the HMS Mercury and Somerset, the latter a sixty-four-gun ship-of-the-line well-known to Bostonians from the early days of the rebellion. Perhaps the frigates could trail the convoy and pick off some other prizes.71
At four a.m. the next morning, the Boston’s mastheader saw four large sail to windward. McNeill recognized one as the Somerset and the others as three transports under her escort—too big to challenge, in his eyes. Manley thought otherwise, and sent the Boston and Patty southward as he stood athwart the British ships’ course, almost begging for a fight. As the Somerset made straight for the Hancock, firing her bow chasers in the process, Manley realized his error. British cannonballs splashed harmlessly on either side of the Hancock as she, too, headed southward.72
With the Somerset thus occupied, McNeill set the Boston after the transports in an effort to divert the Somerset from overtaking the Hancock. The ruse worked. Once the Somerset’s captain saw the Boston closing in on her charges, he tacked and made for McNeill, who took him on a six-hour chase before nightfall put an end to the pursuit. “The Hancock’s heels,” McNeill recalled, “saved [Manley’s] Bacon”—thanks also to McNeill.
His cunning and daring did not go unnoticed by the commodore. “Capt. Manley came and dined with me,” McNeill wrote in his journal. “He told me he long’d to kiss me Friday last for my conduct regarding the Somerset—a great fav[o]r.” Manley’s newfound affection did not last long, however.73
The two frigates sailed northward, seeking prey that was more valuable than the fishing boats they encountered. They were off the Great Banks between Nova Scotia and Newfoundland when, at dawn on June 7, a more formidable ship was sighted: the Fox, a twenty-eight-gun British frigate. Being closer, the Hancock exchanged broadsides while McNeill sent his men aloft, making all sail in such haste that one topman, James Taylor, fell to his death. Seconds later, the Fox sheered off, desperately trying to escape the two Americans, both of them in hot pursuit, with the Hancock in the lead.
By midday the Boston was closing in, and fighting between the other two ships had resumed in what McNeill called a “Spitefull Short Action,” resulting in damage and casualties to both sides. Once the Boston got in range, McNeill unleashed a devastating broadside. Suddenly he took up his speaking trumpet—not to call for surrender but to warn the Fox’s captain, Patrick Fatheringham. A burning wad from an American gun was lodged in the Fox’s rigging chains; it could easily start a fire if not doused. Whether McNeill did this out of gallantry or in hopes that a potential prize would not burn, he did wait until the fire was extinguished before resuming the fight. Minutes later, Fatheringham struck his colors.
McNeill might have been late to the ball, but he wasted no time claiming the dance, sending Lieutenant Browne to the Fox as prize-master. Seeing this, Manley lost any newfound regard for his rescuer from the Somerset. He had lost eight men in the fight; McNeill later reported the Fox had “Pegg’d [the Hancock’s] ribs so well” that Manley had his pumps going afterwards day and night. While McNeill despised Manley’s predilections for “titles and honors,” his own blatant reach for victory’s laurels more than evened the score for hubris.74
The battle over, both ships flew English colors to entice the large fishing boats to come out. They did, accompanied by another brig which Manley took for a cartel, to carry his prisoners back to Newfoundland under a flag of truce, to be exchanged for a similar number of captured Yankee tars. June 8 brought squalls and high seas; the change in the weather and the nagging concern that the Somerset could tip other British cruisers off about the two frigates prompted McNeill to suggest to Manley that they abandon the North Atlantic and join up with Nicholas Biddle and the Randolph in Charleston. At first, Manley agreed, provided that his lieutenant assumed command of the Fox. For the sake of peace, McNeill agreed.75
Over the next two weeks, sighted sails invariably proved to be French or Spanish. Manley also changed his mind and course: he wanted to return to Boston. McNeill disagreed, but followed “as the Jackall does the Lyon, without Grumbling except in my Gizard.” His habit of following the Hancock instead of sailing alongside her also nettled Manley. After the frigates narrowly missed ramming each other on a foggy night, each captain accused the other of not making the proper signals. Manley snapped. Angered at their near miss, he sarcastically offered to sail behind his junior captain. The Fox sailed close enough to the Hancock that Manley could make out her bell from his hammock every evening—why couldn’t McNeill do the same? By June 29, both captains were befouled: McNeill with a bad leg from a fall and Manley “upon my beam ends,” so sick he could “drink neither, Punch, Wine, nor Grog.” The three ships continued towards Boston.76
Fog so cloaked the ships off Cape Sable, Nova Scotia, that the captains fired rockets to give each other an idea of their whereabouts. The sky was a brilliant blue on July 6, when the Hancock took a coal sloop, which Manley decided to tow. Later that day, the Fox’s mastheader saw two sails standing straight for them: the frigate Rainbow, a forty-four-gun two-decker (similar to the Roebuck) and the brig Victor, eighteen guns. They were under the command of Commodore Sir George Collier. Surprisingly, their looming presence on the horizon did not deter Manley from continuing to tow the sloop, forcing both the Boston and the Fox to shorten sail.
At sunrise on July 7 another ship appeared over the horizon, the frigate Flora, thirty-two guns, Captain John Brisbane, sailing right for Manley’s squadron. Realizing his folly, Manley had the coal ship burned and signaled Prepare to engage. All three frigates stood for the Rainbow. By this time the Rainbow and the Victor were only five miles off. One of Collier’s men, recently held prisoner in Boston, recognized the Hancock by her bright blue and yellow colors, and told his captain that her commander was Commodore Manley. Collier, a proven warrior, never needed an incentive to fight, but here were two good reasons nonetheless. He raised St. George’s colors and tacked, making all sail as his gun crews ran to their stations.77
The Boston and Flora were the first to exchange broadsides. As usual, the British gunners were unerringly accurate, their cannonballs passing through the Boston’s hull at the waterline. McNeill had to temporarily sheer away to plug the holes. Believing the Boston too damaged to sail away, Brisbane headed straight for the Fox. At the same time, Manley could see the Rainbow closing in. Her high poop deck led Manley to believed she was a ship-of-the-line—a very fast ship-of-the-line—and he decided once again to show his heels. He ordered some men to go below and shift the ship’s water barrels forward, hoping that would increase his speed. The Rainbow and Victor made for the Hancock, pursuing her throughout the night.
Manley’s first error was continuing to tow that sloop. His second proved to be shifting his water casks forward, for it had the opposite effect, slowing the Hancock’s speed precipitously. By four a.m., shots from the Rainbow’s bow chasers were just missing the Hancock’s stern. Four hours later, Collier was close enough to fire a deadly broadside, but first he hailed the rebel frigate: Manley could expect quarter, but only if he surrendered immediately. When Manley made one last try at flight, Collier unleashed a salvo at the Hancock. M
anley struck his colors, ending the thirty-nine-hour chase.78
If everything does happen in threes, Manley’s last mistake became obvious when he boarded the Rainbow and found she was not a ship-of-the-line but a two-decker, which he might have beaten had he decided to fight earlier and not flee. “Manley seemed much chagrined” at this discovery, Collier reported to the Admiralty, adding that capturing Washington’s commodore “will be entirely dispiriting to the Rebels.” But Collier waxed poetic over his prize. “The Hancock is exceedingly fit in every Respect for His Majesty’s Service,” he informed Admiral Howe. Congress had intended her to be a terror of the seas, and she would be—as the HMS Iris, she would plague American shipping for years.79
While the Rainbow spent the night overtaking the Hancock, the Flora pursued the Fox, her bow chasers peppering her throughout the chase. Once she came alongside, a short action settled the account in Brisbane’s favor. With no ship nipping at the Boston’s heels, McNeill sailed her away from the action, although he and his crew could hear the sound of the guns into the night.
Casualties aboard the Boston had been light: one sailor killed outright while Quartermaster Henry Green suffered a badly wounded leg. Surgeon Joseph Linn did the best he could to save it, but that evening it became obvious it would have to come off. Green was brought to “the cockpit,” the surgeon’s dark, cramped room located on the lowest deck—the orlop. After Linn gave him a pannikin or two of rum, several of Green’s strongest shipmates held him down on Linn’s operating table: a raised platform covered by a bloodstained canvas.80
There was not enough rum aboard to dull the agony Green went through once Linn made two swift cuts through the leg with his amputation knife, a scimitar-like blade. Immediately he sawed through Green’s leg before shock could set in and kill Green on the table. Linn did everything he could to stop the bleeding, dressing the wound with bandages and lint. Green never made it home.81
