Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  Jones did not know it, but he had just fought his last battle in the Continental Navy. Barry did not know it, but for all his years of action, his greatest adventures were just beginning.

  Months earlier—on September 10, 1780—Barry mounted a horse and began the long ride from Philadelphia to Boston. The Board of Admiralty had given him command of the Alliance, but first, they wanted him to preside over the court-martial of her last captain, Pierre Landais.3

  The twin assignments would be character building for the tall Irishman. At thirty-five, he had already spent a quarter of a century at sea, acquiring a reputation for courage, maritime skills, and as a captain who could be trusted by congressman and sailor alike. He did not seek this appointment. The past two years he had gone privateering and enjoyed it. His cruises were profitable for him as well as for the shipowners lucky enough to employ him.

  Yet he was also burdened with the ramifications of his brother-in-law William Austin’s activities. After fleeing Philadelphia for New York with the other Loyalists accompanying Clinton’s army in 1778, Austin left an entanglement of financial woes in his wake for his brother, Isaac, and his sister, Sarah Barry, to settle. Because of Austin’s treasonous actions, the Pennsylvania Assembly confiscated the family estate, seizing everything from the Arch Street Ferry and the family mansion to the square block of rental properties and slaves owned by the family, leaving only the family pew at Christ Church. Rumors that William was now an officer aboard Loyalist privateers did nothing to aid Barry, Sarah, and Isaac in their attempts to recover the family holdings. Now called back to duty, Barry asked Robert Morris to help clear the family’s name and restore their fortune.4

  Barry had company on his ride to Boston: his second-in-command, Hoysted Hacker, recently paroled after surrendering at Charleston; and Congressman William Ellery, who traveled as far as Rhode Island, where he was to seek both money and men for the Alliance. Barry and Hacker reached Boston on September 19, and reported to John Deshon and James Warren of the Eastern Navy Board. A short stroll down the waterfront gave the Alliance’s latest captain a chance to see his new command. She was beautiful to behold, but no one was aboard to greet him. The captain’s cabin was in shambles. Practically everything, including the furniture, linen, and plate, were gone. Barry needed everything from a crew to dishware.5

  Among his orders from Philadelphia was the news that James Nicholson had turned his covetous eyes on the Alliance. As senior captain, he believed the frigate should be his. But Barry’s old friend John Brown defused the issue, citing that Nicholson was at sea when the vacancy arose and that Barry’s “popularity with Seamen” made his appointment an easy decision.6

  Warren and Deshon had filled most of the officer vacancies, including assigning aged mariner Hezekiah Welch and young Patrick Fletcher as second and third lieutenants. Mathew Parke returned as captain of marines. But Barry’s rendezvous for sailors was a failure for several reasons: privateers had a monopoly on sailors in Boston, Barry’s last New England venture ended with the loss of the Raleigh, and he was still considered a “foreigner” by Boston standards. Besides, everyone believed the Alliance was “unlucky.”

  Barry was on deck one morning when a gaunt youngster came up the gangway. Barry instantly recognized him: it was John Kessler from the Delaware. After his escape from Jamaica, Kessler wound up in Salem, “an utter stranger, penniless and wretchedly clad.” Upon hearing that Barry was in Boston, Kessler headed there, hoping for a berth. Happy to see a friendly face, Barry appointed him a midshipman on the spot.7

  Although still occupied with recruiting sailors, Barry began Landais’s court-martial on November 20. The court, including Hacker, Fletcher, and Sam Nicholson, conducted business behind the guarded doors to Barry’s cabin, where his hot stove provided some warmth against the stiff winds along the Charles. For four weeks, accusations from Arthur Lee, Lieutenant Degge, and other witnesses were heard, often laced with profanity. While Barry at times joined in the laughter that some testimonies provoked, he maintained a steady hand over the daily proceedings, ensuring that the unstable Landais was treated courteously by the court. When the Frenchman requested two weeks to prepare his defense, Barry acquiesced.8

  The trial resumed on January 2, 1781. After four days of Landais’s melodramatic defense, including several theatrical outbursts, the court went into closed session. After a short deliberation, they found Landais guilty of everything: leaving Washington’s badly needed supplies on the l’Orient dock, his aberrant behavior aboard ship, and his histrionics in the Navy Board hallways, where he had been sleeping for weeks, “courting persecution.” Landais was broken, removed from ever serving in the navy again.9

  Once this court-martial ended another began, reviewing Degge’s conduct. He, too, was dismissed from the navy—a case in which the court sanctioned the mutiny but broke the officer leading it. For Barry, the biggest villain was a man the court could not touch: Arthur Lee, whose machinations Barry summed up as “repugnant.” The trials over, he turned his full attention to his new orders from Congress and, indirectly, General Washington himself.10

  The year 1780 had not been a good one for Washington. With Clinton’s successful capture of Charleston, the land war shifted to the south. In August, General Gates’s forces were shamefully routed by Cornwallis at Camden, South Carolina. To make matters worse, Washington learned in September of Benedict Arnold’s attempt to turn West Point over to the English. Shocked to his soul, Washington called Arnold’s betrayal “Treason of the blackest dye.”

  Now, as 1781 began, Washington watched his dreams of victory and independence unravel in his own camp. Having gone without new clothing and unpaid for a year, a thousand Pennsylvania soldiers mutinied at Morristown, New Jersey, Washington’s winter base. He had two of the ringleaders shot. The winter of 1780–81 made the Valley Forge encampments look enchanting. In Philadelphia, Congress was out of money. “We are at the end of our tether,” the general wrote.11

  In an effort to rally support for the Cause, Thomas Paine wrote The Crisis Extraordinary, hoping this sequel to The American Crisis would succeed in creating a public groundswell to raise new taxes. Paine argued that if the rebellion was defeated, King George would waste no time in having his vanquished subjects pay for the war that subjugated them. After heated debate, Congress decided to ask France for 25 million livres. They chose Colonel John Laurens, one of Washington’s dashing young aides, to go to France. Laurens, whose father, Henry, was still imprisoned in the Tower of London, took Paine and Lafayette’s cousin, the Viscount de Noailles, along with him to Boston. The Alliance would carry them to France.12

  The trio arrived on January 25, and Laurens presented Massachusetts governor John Hancock with instructions from Washington (ghosted by Laurens himself) to give every assistance in getting the Alliance to sea. In a meeting with Barry the following day, Laurens learned that Barry’s crew thus far was an unattractive mix of poor sailors unfit for privateers and British prisoners. Some of Barry’s Yankee hands recently engaged in a barroom brawl with some French tars. One American died from knife wounds, giving Barry one less name on the muster rolls.13

  Initially, Barry did not want to sail at all, telling Laurens that the “ancient connexions” his British prisoners had to their homeland would come to the surface either when they sighted a Royal Navy ship or once the Alliance got closer to England. However, Laurens would not be dissuaded from his mission, more out of love for Washington than duty alone, and Barry reluctantly agreed to continue trying to round up enough hands.14

  But no approach brought appreciable results. Another rendezvous also failed. When asked to provide soldiers to serve as marines, General Benjamin Lincoln, now commanding the land forces in Massachusetts, permitted Barry and Laurens to recruit only from the “invalid corps.” Hancock let them approach guards from Castle William, but few volunteered. Barry, who had notably thwarted Seth Harding’s attempt to impress his privateer sailo
rs one year earlier, now asked the Massachusetts General Court for permission to use press gangs to round up hands. The court said no. When approached by prospective passengers, Barry would take only those who signed affidavits that they would fight if the Alliance was attacked. He and Laurens even knocked on sea captains’ front doors, begging them to release hands—another fruitless idea.

  Finally, on February 5, Laurens went before the Massachusetts General Court to appeal, with passionate eloquence, for a “sum of specie to raise volunteers” from Lincoln’s Continental forces. His request was approved, and two days later, he wrote Congress that the Alliance, “barely in condition to go to sea,” would sail that day for France.15

  But only Barry’s British sailors were more disgruntled than their Irish-born captain. Most of his 236 hands—about 75 percent of the number he needed—consisted of these British prisoners, army rejects, inveterate castle guards, and invalids. “Alliance is a fine ship,” he reported, but “there was not ten men who could steer her.” As best he could, he distributed his seasoned tars and British sailors equitably among the watches. Landsmen were usually whipped into shape with a rope’s end; Barry feared that John Lewis, his bosun, would run out of rope.16

  Once at sea, Barry found “there are no seamen aboard . . . but disaffected ones.” He was heading into the Atlantic aboard the finest ship in the navy with the worst crew he would ever command.17

  John Paul Jones had been absent from the United States for more than three years when the Ariel reached Philadelphia on February 18. The contents of his ship’s hold—437 barrels of gunpowder, 146 chests of arms—were a help to Washington’s army, but far short of the munitions and supplies promised months earlier: 1,000 pounds of gunpowder, 15,000 arms, and hundreds of bolts of uniform cloth. Congress, pressured by Jones’s adversary Arthur Lee, handed the captain a forty-seven-question inquiry to learn why so much was guaranteed by the French and so little arrived. While some questions were easy lobs (“What prizes did you take when you commanded the Ranger?”), others were clearly Lee’s handiwork (“Did any private property come in the Ariel?”).18

  If the Lee-Adams faction sought to trip Jones up (and in so doing, skewer Franklin), they were disappointed. Jones navigated his way through the questionnaire with a mariner’s sure hand and a sea lawyer’s guile (and maybe the help of Barry’s confidant and amanuensis, John Brown). Tacking through them as he did, Jones steered to one answer whenever possible: Landais. Ignoring his own decision to disobey Franklin’s orders to sail the Alliance home, he stressed the frigate’s wretched condition, Landais’s motley crew and dysfunctional officers, while Jones himself only wanted to “stop the savage burnings and wanton cruelties of the enemy.”

  Despite this attempt by Lee to undercut Franklin through Jones, Congress was still supportive of the top American in Paris. Barry’s report on Landais’s court-martial had readily been accepted by Congress, and Jones’s answers only corroborated Barry’s findings. Jones was not only exonerated but extolled for his “zeal, prudence, and . . . intrepidity.” Even before Congress’s findings were released, they had already tipped their hand. They approved the request of the Chevalier de la Luzerne, France’s minister to America, that Jones be permitted to accept the gold sword and chevalier’s rank bestowed upon him by King Louis.19

  The captain was once again the hero of the hour; Luzerne gave a reception for Jones attended by congressmen and Philadelphia notables (even Washington sent a complimentary letter). When Congress passed the Articles of Confederation, Jones had the Ariel festooned with brilliantly lit decorations and fired a salute in its honor. Since his disobedient inaction at l’Orient, Jones had survived a tempest from Franklin, a tempest from God, and a tempest from Lee. All was going well—Jones just needed official command of the ship-of-the-line America and the title of “Admiral” to go with her. That spring, he began campaigning for both.20

  Five days out of Boston, the Alliance was making good progress. To John Barry, the only threat to a safe passage thus far was still in the fo’c’sle, where those British prisoners he found necessary to take on kept to themselves—a perfectly natural occurrence, but one that only further aroused Barry’s suspicions.21

  His landsmen, invalid soldiers, and castle guards were just getting their sea legs when the Alliance was attacked on the night of February 16, two hundred miles southwest of Newfoundland—not by the British but by ice. It was a moonless night; Barry had turned in hours earlier but was awakened by a loud thud, followed by an unnatural lurch from the ship. Instantly alert, he came on deck to a situation more perilous than a fleet of enemy warships: icebergs dead ahead, to port, and to starboard, looming so high above the Alliance that they blocked out the sky. There was no way to gauge how wide, or how close, they were to the frigate’s wooden hull. Barry called for all hands.

  Thomas Paine, among the first on deck, could not believe his eyes. Laurens, given a cabin near the Alliance’s larboard gallery, soon joined him. The bergs were so immense that they robbed Barry of a “true wind”; his ship was a captive of the current. All the helmsman could do was steer, guessing as best he could what the men at the bowsprit could relay to him about the ice heading their way.

  Barry summoned his leadman. Once by the rail, the man swung the weight in a circular motion. His shipmates heard the familiar whoosh above the lapping sound of the Atlantic before he cast out his line, long enough to descend twenty fathoms. The wax on the weight’s bottom caught a berg, yanking the line through his hands, taking some skin from his palms and fingers before he could grab it again. Barry ordered the line heaved a second time. This attempt gave them the fathoms, but no bottom.22

  By now the wind, coming from behind the Alliance, turned into a gale. Barry ordered his topmen aloft to take in every sail just as one was “torn in two from top to bottom.” He sent other hands along the rails, armed with spars, bags of cork and canvas used as fenders, even rammers and sponges from the cannons, all to be used in an effort to keep the Alliance from any approaching mountain of ice. Barry told Paine, “Nothing could be done but to lay the Ship to and let her take her chance.” Against such an adversary the formidable frigate was a fragile construction of wood.

  Barry sent the crew off-watch below. Laurens and Count de Noailles joined them, but Paine remained on deck; nothing could keep him from seeing what might happen. “The Ice became every moment more formidable . . . the Sea, in whatever direction it could be Seen, appeared a tumultuous assemblage of floating rolling Rocks, which we could not avoid and against which there was no defence,” he recalled. Yankee and Englishman alike, united by a common fear of nature’s power, obeyed Barry’s orders without question. Their only cause, for the present, was getting safely past this armada of ice.23

  At eleven p.m., Laurens was just leaving his cabin—or perhaps, the adjoining head—when the ship struck a large iceberg by the gallery. The falling shards of jagged ice slammed through the gallery’s roof and just missed killing him. As all hands watched fearfully, the berg passed the Alliance with no further damage.

  For an excruciating five hours, the flotilla of bergs floated past the Alliance. At daybreak, the gale subsided. With unfettered joy, every man aboard watched as the last threatening mass glided by; Barry estimated the ship had sailed twenty miles through the ice. Paine spoke for everyone from captain to cabin boy when he wrote that the harrowing ordeal would not “be easily worn from our memories.” Since her maiden voyage, the Alliance had been considered by superstitious salts to be an unlucky ship. Perhaps her luck turned that night.24

  For several days, the Alliance made the most of “a glorious breeze.” Only an inconsequential duel, fought between Paine and de Noailles for no documented reason, was noteworthy. (For Paine, his pen was mightier than any sword, and de Noailles did not share his countryman Landais’s skills with a blade—both parties were unscathed.) But soon the British hands returned to their sullen ways above deck.25

  Be
low deck, they were hatching a plot to take over the ship. Their ringleader was John Crawford, whom Barry, short of officers as well as crew, had made a quartermaster. With such responsibilities, Crawford freely roamed the decks, sounding out his fellow countrymen along the way to see who might fall in with his scheme.

  Once he had enough willing conspirators, Crawford summoned them to the bowels of the fo’c’sle. Under the dim light of a couple of lanterns, he laid out a murderous plan. On a prearranged signal, the mutineers would seize what weapons they could, subdue the Americans, and kill every officer save one, spared on condition that he navigate the Alliance to England or Ireland. Before concluding his meeting, Crawford passed around a “Round Robin”—a paper on which each sailor signed or made his mark in a circular pattern, making each man equal in guilt.26

  Barry had seen enough surly behavior to warrant extra precautions. He told his officers to keep a weather eye open for any sign of treachery and to keep him informed of any suspicious activity. He put the marines on round-the-clock patrol, moved every padlocked chest of arms aft, and posted a marine on each watch at the locked storehouse door.27

  The Alliance was now off Belle Isle and entering the Bay of Biscay when two ships were sighted; after a quick chase, warning shots brought them to. One was a Scottish privateer, the Alert, from Glasgow; the other was her prize, the Buona Compagnia, a neutral ship from the Republic of Venice, her hold full of glass bottles, pepper, and indigo—along with her captain and crew.

  Barry disregarded the lure of taking the Venetian without a second thought: as a neutral, she should not have been seized in the first place. He ordered captain and crew freed and “left at liberty to pursue [their] voyage.” He did place a prize crew aboard the Alert, with orders to accompany the Alliance to France. Laurens and Paine were elated at Barry’s statesmanlike common sense regarding the Buona Compagnia, Laurens calling it proof of “the determination of Congress to maintain the rights of neutral powers.” Barry’s action would later be gratefully acknowledged by the Venetian government.28