Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  Once Conyngham finished defending himself, the Marine Committee sent letters to the European agents, asking for any papers regarding the captain’s prizes. Conyngham was willing to die for his country, but he was not about to fall on his cutlass for Arthur Lee—or Congress, for that matter. He believed he had vindicated himself.83

  But there is no clear horizon in politics, and once again Conyngham did not see what was coming. Having been jailed in France and exiled by both the French and the Spanish for his efforts on behalf of his country, he now had the deck of his ship pulled out from under him. With no money in its coffers (and inflation running almost 100 percent), Richard Henry Lee ordered the Revenge decommissioned and sold at public auction. The sale would take place at the London Coffeehouse on St. Patrick’s Day.84

  There was a sizable crowd at Front and High Streets that morning, not just curious onlookers, but a host of potential buyers—the Revenge’s reputation saw to that. Even the Pennsylvania Assembly dispatched an agent to buy her for the state navy. The bidding was fierce until the firm Conyngham & Nesbitt raised the price well past the cutter’s worth. They believed they had the ideal captain for the Revenge. With no Continental ship available, and Congress’s assurance that he would not lose his commission (technically the French had already done that), Gustavus accepted. He turned privateer.85

  It took a few weeks to refit the Revenge, but the combination of Conyngham’s reputation and the quick pay sailors received from serving in a privateer made for a successful rendezvous. It would be a short cruise; after a sweet farewell with Anne and his children, Conyngham sailed down the Delaware, bound for New York waters. After three years of risk mixed with political chicanery, he would be cruising in American waters with no diplomatic tempests awaiting his return.

  On April 27, the Marine Committee, still wading through the morass of paperwork regarding Conyngham, wrote the American commissioners in Paris and their agents in France and Spain, chastising them for being “at a loss for want of [the Revenge’s] accounts and the many Prizes she took in the European Seas.” Further, when advances were paid to naval officers, Congress expected to be informed of what was paid and to whom. This included monies loaned to those sailors who had escaped to France from Mill and Forten Prisons in England.86

  That same day, Conyngham “went round to New York,” he wrote, and “laid in the roads”—the shipping lanes to New York City. He sent a lookout aloft, scanning the horizon for potential prizes. Pick off one or two merchantmen or a privateer, and Conyngham and his men could sail home considerably richer men than when they departed. Suddenly the lookout alerted Conyngham of two sails that appeared to be Loyalist privateers. After trying every nautical trick but failing to lure the ships closer to the Revenge, Conyngham gave chase.87

  The ships were fast. For once, the Revenge could not close the gap. Nonetheless, Conyngham was confident of overtaking them and maintained pursuit. Then, suddenly, the unthinkable happened: another sail was sighted—a large and foreboding one. “As the devil would have it,” Conyngham reported, the two privateers “led me into the teeth” of a British frigate. She was under full sail, making straight for the Revenge. The master of trickery at sea had been tricked himself.

  She was the HMS Galatea, Thomas Jordan, one of the most feared and despised British warships on the American coast—the very frigate that Robert Morris had wanted Biddle and the Randolph to capture two years earlier. Quickly, Conyngham ordered, “Wear Ship!” and the Revenge turned through the wind, the hunter now the hunted. Necessary as the turn was, it only gave the Galatea more time to close the distance between the two ships. Soon the Revenge was within range of Jordan’s bow chasers, manned by expert gunners of the King’s Navy—better than a privateer’s gun crew, to be sure. The low, vicious song of cannonballs whirred through the air until they splashed perilously close to the Revenge.

  For the first time, Conyngham was beaten, and he knew it. “I made every effort to escape, but in vain,” he reported. “Her teeth were too many.” His crew, still stunned at his sailing into a trap, watched in disbelief as Conyngham did the unthinkable: haul down his colors. A British boarding party brought him to the Galatea.88

  Captain Jordan had spent most of the war in the western hemisphere, but his ears pricked up when he heard his prisoner state his name. Every man jack in the Royal Navy knew who Gustavus Conyngham was. Jordan asked for his papers, and Conyngham presented everything except what he did not have—his captain’s commission, signed by Hancock, given him by Franklin, now pigeonholed in some clerk’s desk in France. Conyngham was sent below and put in irons.

  Once in New York, his men were transferred to one of the rotting prison ships on the East River. Conyngham was taken to the provost’s prison, where he was weighted down with fifty-five pounds of chains, fastened to his ankles, his wrists, and by a solid iron ring about his neck. When the turnkey finished shackling him, Conyngham tried to walk to the prison door, and found it an impossible task. Only by dragging one foot and then another could he move—barely.

  For weeks he was given filthy water and “Went without the least Morsel of Bread from the Jailer.” His two fellow prisoners—one accused of being a thief, the other a spy—slipped him bits of rotten food through the keyhole.

  He was brought before Commodore Sir George Collier, the officer who had captured Manley and the Hancock. Collier decided Conyngham was nothing more than a pirate, and suggested he prepare for the end that awaited all captured freebooters. Conyngham would later describe Collier as “that tyrant.” He was returned to his cell, not knowing what would happen next and convinced that all he could expect from his captors was “Nothing but Deceit and falsehood.”

  One morning he was roused from his cell, taken out into the yard, and ordered to climb—as best he could—into what was called “the hangman’s cart.” It was led by “A Negro called George Washington, decorated as usual with ropes [for] taking deserters & others to the gallows and executed.” As a fife and drum played “The Hangman’s March,” a detail of Hessians plodded alongside the cart. In broken English, one of them told Conyngham, “You vill go next.”

  Instead he was trundled to the waterfront, subjected to the insults and garbage thrown his way by jeering Loyalists. At the docks he was pulled from the cart, put in a longboat, and transferred to a packet bound for London. Collier gave orders to confine Conyngham in “the coal hole”—the dark, filthy space where coal was stored. King George did not want Conyngham hanged in New York, Collier told him.

  He would be hanged in London.89

  CHAPTER NINE

  “IN HARM’S WAY”

  A tale could be told that would if possible for the heardend rocks to hear would Melt them Asunder.

  —GUSTAVUS CONYNGHAM1

  Before the Sandwich packet raised sail and departed New York on June 12, Captain Bull gave Gustavus Conyngham permission to write his wife, Anne. After weeks of inhumane confinement, he was filthy, lousy with vermin, and starving. For a man so used to being in charge of ship and crew to write the following words must have been as heartbreaking as they were humiliating:

  Sorry I am to inform you that I am on board [the Sandwich] and to be sent to England. I have in part lost my health and cannot live long in this manner. If it pleases God to call me to himself out of this troublesome World, I live in hopes to meet you in Paradise. I am not able to write more. If possible rest contented. I would leave this western world easy if I had you with me. I must once more for the last time to recommend you to God, and live as contented as possible.

  Your loving affectionate husband ’till Death,

  Gustavus Conyngham2

  Convinced that he had just written a farewell to his wife, Conyngham turned the letter over to Captain Bull, and the Sandwich stood down the East River, the first leg in her long voyage to England: home to many of her crew, and hell to her famous prisoner. Once at sea, Bull released Conyngham from the coal
pit in disobedience to Collier’s orders. “Had he not, I must have perished,” Conyngham believed. Although kept in his burdensome irons, he was at least allowed to occasionally see daylight. Several weeks passed before the Sandwich docked in Falmouth, the deepest harbor in all Europe, at the southwest tip of Cornwall, midway between Plymouth and Penzance.3

  Once word reached the docks of the packet’s prisoner, a crowd of curiosity seekers gathered as the debilitated Conyngham, limping under the weight of his irons, was transferred to a cart that took him to Pendennis Castle: the massive, stone-walled construction featuring a wide circular tower. Built in 1539 by Henry VIII to protect the Cornwall Roads and Falmouth from the French and Spanish, it now served as fortress, barracks, and prison. The Admiralty’s plans for Conyngham were simple—keep him at Pendennis until he was tried (and certainly convicted) of piracy.

  Before departing Falmouth, Captain Bull called on Conyngham “and very politely asked if I wanted money, or any thing,” the prisoner wrote. Conyngham said no—there was nothing Bull had the power to give him that he wanted.4

  For the most part Captain Thomas Tidd, commandant of Pendennis, followed Collier’s written orders to the letter. Conyngham bore his punishment bravely. Some days he was relieved of his irons only to be placed back in them at nighttime. His cell was so confining that he begged for the door to be left open. Remarkably, the jailer agreed, as long as Conyngham remained in chains. One visitor’s offer of books brought Conyngham to tears. Others passing by the cell would inquire, “Is that the pirate?” and were abusive to him. Slowly, Conyngham’s mental state was beginning to deteriorate along with his physical condition.

  Tidd began gathering evidence against Conyngham for his trial as some of the prison’s visitors were converted to “witnesses.” One British sailor attested that Conyngham was with John Paul Jones at Whitehaven. But false testimony was at this point only a secondary problem for Conyngham. “My room being so full of fleas it is really a torture to lay down,” he wrote, “my hands confined [I] cannot rub or scratch.”5

  Several weeks after his confinement in Pendennis the turnkey opened Conyngham’s cell door, and a British officer informed him that he was being transferred to Mill Prison. Much had happened on his behalf an ocean away, thanks to Anne.

  First to act on his behalf was actually the Marine Committee. Its members had learned of Conyngham’s capture in May; Silas Deane and William Carmichael provided them with affidavits certifying that Conyngham “was duly commissionated” to command the Surprise and the Revenge. Thus armed, they ordered Commissary General for Prisoners John Beatty (a former prisoner himself) to notify his British counterpart that Conyngham was, in fact, a Continental captain. Further, if he was being mistreated, a captured British officer would face the same dire hardships. Weeks passed before Beatty learned of Conyngham’s dastardly treatment and his being taken to England; warnings of unspecified reprisals were not enough to tell George III the rebel he loathed most was not to be hung.6

  On the morning of July 17, Anne Conyngham arrived at the State House on Chestnut Street. A nearby pit dug by the Redcoats during Philadelphia’s occupation used for garbage and animal carcasses had been filled in for over a year, but a faint stench still caused congressmen to keep the doors closed, especially on an airless summer day. Anne carried with her a letter to John Jay, the president of Congress. It was a brilliantly written combination of a wife’s heartache and a stirring call to action:

  As these Extraordinary and (in the present Stage of War between Britain & America) Singular Cruelties exercised upon the Person of my Husband have been inflicted in consequence of his Zeal and successful exertions against the common Enemy in the English Channell where he first hoisted the American Flag, I take the Liberty of calling the Attention of Congress to his distressed situation . . . To have lost a worthy and belov’d Husband in Battle fighting for the honour & Liberties of his Country would have been a light affliction. But to hear of a Person thus connected being chained to the Hold of a Ship, in vain looking back towards the belov’d Country for which he had fought, wasting his health and spirits in hopeless Grief, and at last compleating the measure of his sufferings by an ignominious Death under—Good God my heart shudders! At the thought. Forbid it Heaven, Forbid it Hon[or]able Gentlemen the Guardians of the Lives and Happiness of the good People of these States . . . the Delay of a single Hour may fix my Husband’s fate for ever . . . the safety of your numerous officers, and soldiers, by Sea and Land is connected with that of my Husband . . .7

  Anne presented the letter, accompanied by both her husband’s note to her and a petition signed by eighty-one prominent Americans, among them naval officers Seth Harding and Thomas Read, and privateer owners like Mathew Irwin. Merchants, shipbuilders, and clergy added their names, along with congressmen, including the almighty Robert Morris.8

  Faced with such a panoply of the influential, Congress acted with dispatch, referring the affair to a committee comprising Gouverneur Morris, William Whipple, and John Dickinson. They wasted no time deliberating, presenting their report to their colleagues that afternoon, along with a drafted letter to Commodore Collier, accusing him of treating Conyngham “in a manner contrary to the dictates of humanity and the practice of civilized nations” while demanding that Conyngham “be immediately released from his present rigorous and ignominious confinement.” Congress also threatened that it would “cause to be confined in close and safe custody such, and so many persons as they think proper in order to abide the fate of the said Gustavus Conyngham.” A post rider carried the letter to New York that day.9

  Collier, deeming a personal response to the rebel government beneath him, had his secretary respond. The commodore, “not holding himself accountable for his conduct to any of His Majesty’s subjects in this country”—meaning Congress—was “still less induced to answer demands when they are made in the uncivil way they appear to him in your letter of the 17th instant.” Further, Conyngham had not been treated “contrary to the dictates of humanity,” and

  As it is the practice of civilized nations to punish criminals in the usual course of justice, Gustavus Conyngham, whom you enquire after, stands in this predicament, and is therefore sent to England to receive that punishment from his injured country, which his crimes shall be found to deserve.10

  Such haughty disregard of Conyngham’s treatment, coming from the officer who ordered it, did not play well in Philadelphia, Paris, or Continental Army headquarters. Congress no sooner reviewed Collier’s letter than it ordered that three captive British officers be placed in close confinement to show Collier they meant business. One of them, Lieutenant Christopher Hele of the recently captured HMS Hotham (and a favorite of Admiral Gambier), was in a Philadelphia jail. Earlier, Gambier had personally written Jay requesting that Hele be paroled, and Jay had agreed. Now Jay informed Gambier and Collier that Hele was receiving similar treatment to Conyngham’s. For weeks Hele protested the drastic change in his luck, but Congress was not bluffing.11

  From Passy, Benjamin Franklin wrote to David Hartley, a member of Parliament who knew Franklin before the war, assuring him that Conyngham was a Continental officer, adding

  I cannot believe that mere Resentment, occurred by [Conyngham’s] uncommon success, will attempt to sacrifice a brave Man, who has always behaved as a generous Enemy, witness his treatment of his Prisoners taken in the Harwich Pacquet, and all that afterwards fell into his hands. I know I shall not offend you in recommending him warmly to your protection.12

  Franklin also wrote Thomas Digges, a Maryland merchant living in London, to look into Conyngham’s situation. From his headquarters, General Washington sent the simplest yet most threatening letter. Hang Conyngham, he promised Collier, and Washington would hang six British officers he held in custody.13

  On July 24, an unfettered Gustavus Conyngham was brought out of Pendennis Castle. It was hot and humid, thanks to a balmy land breeze. Conyngham was taken
aboard the tender Fanny, joined below deck with a group of impressed sailors, and bound for Plymouth. During the short passage, the Fanny’s captain gave Conyngham the same liberties the pressed men had as the tender sailed under constantly threatening skies. Once in Plymouth harbor, the reluctant tars found berths awaiting them on British warships. Conyngham would find his at Mill Prison.14

  To his surprise, Conyngham was listed as “an exchangeable prisoner”—he was not yet aware of the diplomatic ruckus his treatment had caused. Back in Philadelphia, Lieutenant Hele’s harsh confinement was taking its toll. He became so desperately ill that Dr. Benjamin Rush considered his recovery “doubtfull unless speedily indulged with a private Lodging.” Once Congress learned that Conyngham was not to be executed, Hele was transferred and his parole again approved.

  Conyngham arrived at Mill Prison with one goal in mind: escape.15

  As grim as the news was for Conyngham and his family, 1779 had begun optimistically for the Continental Navy, although some of its captains were conspicuous by their absence on familiar quarterdecks. Boston’s bickering couple, John Manley and Hector McNeill, now commanded privateers, as did John Barry. After the loss of the Raleigh, Barry was considered for command of the Confederacy, but she was denied him. Throughout 1779 and 1780, Barry led two privateers on several successful cruises, allowing him to make good money after three years of experiencing Congress’s woeful track record in paying its naval officers.16

  Command of the Confederacy went instead to Seth Harding, a Norwalk mariner whose political connections got him this command but whose capable service in the Connecticut Navy justified it. He terrorized British shipping. Governor Trumbull sent the forty-two-year-old with the hawk-like profile to Philadelphia to lobby for his own appointment. Harding informed Henry Laurens, then the president of Congress, that he was the right man for the job. He got it.17