Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  The Alliance picked up two more prizes before reaching l’Orient on March 8, just twenty-six days after leaving Boston—a fast passage, especially for wintertime. Three days later, Laurens and his companions were off to Passy to meet with Franklin and prepare their plea for more money. Laurens also carried a dispatch from Barry to Franklin.

  With this letter, Barry began a two-year correspondence with Franklin. It was a detailed report of his passage, requesting that he be allowed to take the American sailors in l’Orient aboard the poorly manned Alliance, and permission to have his frigate’s hull sheathed in copper. He anticipated a quick reply.29

  He did not get one. After Barry was asked by American agent James Moylan to escort the French Indiaman Marquis de Lafayette—under charter of Franklin’s grandnephew, Jonathan Williams, and carrying munitions and clothing for Washington—Barry sent another letter Franklin’s way (Moylan, impressed with Barry’s demeanor, invited him to stay at his home—an act of trust after Moylan had been cuckolded by Jones.)30

  Mathew Parke had also written to Franklin, appealing for the money due the members of the Alliance’s crew who had also served—and were still unpaid—on the Bonhomme Richard. Parke informed Franklin that all of the Americans aboard the Alliance were “exceedingly happy in our present Commander”—a comment he did not believe fit Jones nor, obviously, Landais.31

  Barry’s impatience for an answer to his letters was temporarily forgotten due to breaches of conduct by three of his sailors: one for “Gitting Drunk Abusing the Officers & Dam[n]ing the Congress,” the other two for merely “Gitting Drunk & Fighting.” From his first day as a Continental captain Barry had rarely, if ever, let the cat-o’-nine-tails out of its red baize bag; this was the first documented entry of his taking such action. With substantial concern regarding his British hands, he decided to use the misconduct of the three miscreants as a chance to show what awaited them too if they got out of line.

  The grating was placed at the gangway, and the bosun’s mate did his duty. But instead of cowing the mutineers, the floggings only hardened their resolve. By now Crawford had decided they would strike once the Alliance returned to sea.32

  Sometime after March 20 Franklin’s letter arrived. Barry read and reread it: a pleasant, commiserating note that agreed with Barry about copper sheathing for the Alliance and that Barry’s request for more American sailors was a grand idea. But it offered neither approval nor assistance.33

  It is not known if Barry and Franklin ever met. Before the war, while Barry’s career as a merchant captain was ascendant, Franklin was serving as the Philadelphia’s agent in London. Their ensuing correspondence shows a sea captain looking for answers and a diplomat who rarely gave him any. Whereas Conyngham, Wickes, Sam Nicholson, and Jones all paid visits to Franklin in Paris, falling under both the city’s spell and his own, Barry never did. Polite salutations were as friendly as they ever got with each other.

  The captain was further encumbered with the Marquis de Lafayette. As far as Barry was concerned, her captain, one Monsieur de Galatheau, seemed intent on picking up where Landais had left off regarding Franco-American relations. In addition, Jonathan Williams informed Barry that he suspected de Galatheau was carrying a large quantity of smuggled goods along with Washington’s supplies. Barry promised Williams that he would inspect the ship before anything was unloaded in Philadelphia.34

  Days later, Barry was ready to sail when another letter arrived from Franklin, asking him to delay his departure until a courier reached l’Orient with Franklin’s personal and official correspondence for Barry to take to Philadelphia. Citing the supplies for the army in the Marquis de Lafayette’s hold, Barry refused. Landais had left Washington’s much-needed goods on the l’Orient dock the year before, and Barry did not want to let the general down. Someone else could carry Franklin’s letters.35

  The two ships were no sooner past Île de Groix when de Galatheau stopped obeying Barry’s signals. This would never do; Barry ordered the Alliance’s pinnace lowered and was rowed over to the Marquis. Whether de Galatheau spoke English or Barry had his unsubtle orders translated, he did not depart the French ship until de Galatheau acknowledged—at least for now—who was in charge. After some small storms, the Alliance was homeward bound.36

  The frigate was making eight knots in the black of night on March 29 when the watch heard a splash from the stern. “Man overboard!” came the cry, and all hands raced up the hatchway. As Barry turned the Alliance into the wind, all eyes scoured the dark water, looking for some sign of their shipmate. But the sea had swallowed him up. It began raining when Barry gave orders to make sail. “Lost a man over Board,” Barry wrote in the log, “named Patrick Duggan.” Barry was unaware the man was one of the mutiny’s ringleaders.37

  Duggan’s fellow conspirators, however, were mightily spooked. They hastened below to the berth deck, where, hidden by some stored hammocks, they spat out their whispered fears that Duggan’s death was a bad omen and the game was up. None admitted having any hand in his death, but more than a few wanted out, and told Crawford to destroy the round-robin; Crawford insisted that the mutiny be carried out, but tore up the incriminating paper round-robin before throwing it into the sea.38

  The Alliance was sailing through the Bay of Biscay when, at dusk, one of the fo’c’sle hands—an American Indian from one of the New England tribes—asked to see Barry. Once in the captain’s cabin, he revealed everything he knew of the plot to seize the ship. Sitting in his chair, Barry asked him question after question, pulling the story out of the man until he “Pointed out 3” leading the murderous plan: Crawford and two “Able Seamen,” Patrick Shelden and William McEllany.39

  Barry dismissed the sailor and called for his officers. In a low voice, he laid out his own ruthless plan to quell the mutiny before it could start. The ensuing discussion was carried on in the same hushed, desperate tones as the mutineers’ meeting the night before, taking on the feel of a council of war. After determining who among the Yankee hands was capable of joining the marines in bearing arms—Barry could thank the stars he had those castle guards, after all—he sent his officers out to their tasks.

  Once on deck Parke armed his marines, sending a detail below to arrest Crawford, Shelden, and McEllany and clap them in irons. Next, Parke assigned the marines in shifts to patrol the deck. Back in his cabin, Barry entered in his log that the three ringleaders were arrested for “Mutity Mutiny,” the crossed-out misspelling the only betrayal of his anxiety.

  Neither American nor Briton slept well that evening, aware that whatever Barry planned for these three men—and God knew who else—would take place in the morning. Throughout the night, they heard his footsteps as he paced the quarterdeck, while the ship’s bell tolled ominously with the change of each watch.40

  At daybreak, Barry brought the Alliance into the wind as Bosun Lewis’s shrill pipe summoned all hands. The crew scrambled up the hatchway. Hacker ordered them to assemble on the forecastle deck. Once it was filled, sailors took places along the rails. The marines stood at attention, their muskets loaded and bayonets fixed. As Barry descended the quarterdeck, he ordered Parke to bring up Crawford, Shelden, and McEllany. The sound of their clanking chains preceded them as they dragged themselves up the steps, while their British shipmates exchanged silent, worried glances.

  After marines unshackled the three, everybody expected that Barry would call “hats off,” and read what regulations the men had violated of the Articles of War. To everyone’s surprise, he did not; instead, he called out all three names, telling them they were charged with mutiny and that their punishment would be lessened if they named their accomplices.41

  Barry’s offer went unanswered. For an interminable moment, the only sounds came from the Alliance, rocking “in irons” on the water, the wind whipping at the lifeless sails. Finally, Barry nodded to Lewis. As his mate took the cat-o’-nine-tails out, the Alliances noticed that the grating was no
t set up for a flogging.

  Lewis and some others grabbed Crawford forcibly, stripping him of his shirt while they dragged him to the mizzen stay. Once there, they knotted small cords around Crawford’s thumbs, securing them high enough on the stay that, no matter how hard he tried, he could not touch the deck. As he hung there, the bosun’s mate began laying bloody stripes to Crawford’s back, as Barry roared angrily at him to name names.

  “Twelve stripes” was the maximum sentence in John Adams’s Articles of War, but neither Barry nor the bosun’s mate bothered to count how many times the cat whistled through the air. Crawford was in agony. As his back was being laid bare, the ligaments and tendons in his hands were pulling away from his bones. And he screamed, and he moaned.

  But he did not talk.

  Whether Crawford’s will was fueled by hatred, courage, or both, Barry could see he was not breaking, and ordered Shelden and McEllany trussed up and whipped as well. At first, their resistance was equal to Crawford’s, but eventually they broke, naming one accomplice after another (two of them flogged days earlier for “Gitting Drunk & Fighting”). By eleven a.m., eight more British tars were implicated, but the bosun’s mate was so exhausted that Barry gave him a rest, then resumed the flogging until twenty-five more names were whispered or cried out. Barry knew he was violating the articles he had signed on to five years earlier, but this was not an issue of infractions. Lives were hanging in the balance, including his own.

  By three o’clock, Barry was convinced that not a man jack aboard would give a split second’s thought to a mutiny aboard his ship. He sent the ringleaders below, with orders that they remain in irons and on a diet of bread and water. Next, he approached the eight other scourged principals in the plot. “On their solemn declaration to conduct themselves well,” they were returned to their duties—as best as they could perform them with their lacerated backs. The lucky unharmed twenty-five pledged the same. “Pleasant weather and Clear. The Marquis in Company” was how the Alliance’s log concluded that day.42

  Once in the Atlantic, the Alliance and the Marquis pursued and captured two privateers, the Mars and the Minerva. Still suspicious of de Galatheau, Barry allowed him to place a prize crew from his hands aboard the Minerva and ordered their commanding officers to make straight for Philadelphia should the ships be separated. Over the next two weeks the vessels sailed through heavy squalls, in which Barry lost another man overboard. The storms also forced him to burn false fires so that the Alliance could be seen and followed by the three ships.43

  His hunch about de Galatheau proved correct. First the Minerva disappeared one stormy day (de Galatheau had ordered her back to France); then, on April 25, the Marquis took advantage of the Alliance’s split foresail to shoot ahead of her, disappearing over the horizon. For days, Barry sailed his frigate back and forth, burning false fires and firing signal guns until, convinced of de Galatheau’s duplicity, he sent the Alliance westward.44

  At sunrise on May 2, the mastheader sighted two sail on the weather bow, and Barry gave orders to “make chace.” By late afternoon, his bow chasers brought them both into the wind: a brig, the Adventure, and a snow, their holds carrying more than five hundred hogsheads of sugar. Even better, in Barry’s eyes, were four new recruits: three sailors and a boy who preferred duties on the Alliance’s deck to the crowded confines of the Alliance’s hold.45

  Barry’s prisoners told him they were part of the Jamaica Fleet, “Ab’t 65 sail convoyed by ten sail-of-the-line.” Shortly after that, the Alliance’s mastheader spotted them all, heading west. Barry kept his distance, slipping away in the night, not knowing that the Marquis was not as lucky, having been taken after a three-hour battle with the ship-of-the-line Egmont and the frigate Endymion (the British towed the Marquis to Scotland, her goods assessed at £300,000 sterling).46

  The Alliance had escaped the Marquis’s fate, but now horrific weather dogged her passage. “Ruff Seas” and severe gales beset the frigate on almost a daily basis. On May 16, the Alliances were battling another storm when a bolt of lightning split the main topmast in two, flying down the cleaved timber to the deck, where it struck at least a dozen sailors, burning the skin off them. Fighting fire, wind, and water, Barry sent for Surgeon Joseph Kendall. Finding “several much burnt,” Kendall took them below to the orlop deck. Miraculously, they all recovered. “I thank God all of them have done well,” Barry wrote.47

  During repairs, Barry assessed his situation. It was grim at best. While a new topmast was stepped in and a new foremast was fished, there was no spar long enough to replace the main yard the lightning had destroyed. Barry was now frightfully short of hands: he had left l’Orient with 241 men, and had taken on eight more from his four prizes. But after three dozen were delegated to prize crews, two lost overboard, three mutineers in irons, twenty others at liberty but under suspicion, and fifty in sick bay from illness and injury, he had 138 hands—fewer than half of what he needed to adequately man the frigate. And there were more than 100 prisoners from his prizes locked in the hold.48

  Small wonder, then, that when his mastheader spied two unescorted merchantmen just begging to be taken, Barry did nothing. Had he had even twenty more hands, he would have had two more prizes. Instead, he watched them sail unmolested to England, while the Alliance sailed as best she could for home.49

  The frigate was about four hundred miles south of Nova Scotia on the evening of May 28, when the lookout again hailed the quarterdeck—two sail on the weather bow. Seeing the Alliance, the ships hauled their wind, tacking to sail parallel to her. Looking through his spyglass, Barry saw they were “an armed Ship & a Brig about 1 League distance.” He ordered his helmsman to maintain his course and speed. Soon the “armed Ship” was flying signals that Barry could not understand. He already sensed that the ships were British; now he knew they were unafraid of his larger frigate’s “superior force.” The wind was slackening; what Barry would have given for one more storm, to shake these wolves.

  His pursuers were the sloop-of-war Atalanta, Captain Sampson Edwards, sixteen 6-pounders, and the brig Trepassey, Acting Captain Smyth, fourteen 6-pounders. Edwards came from a distinguished naval family (his uncle Richard was the admiral so well thought of by New Englanders for his humane treatment of American prisoners). Only in his thirties, Edwards had fought the French at Pondicherry, the Spanish at Manila, and the Americans across the Atlantic. While the Alliance had both ships outgunned by number and weight, Edwards believed the light winds more than evened the odds.50

  As senior officer, it was Edwards’s decision to fight or flee. The Atalanta and Trepassey maintained their course; as they got closer, Edwards saw that Alliance was “a large ship, but not a two decker.” That made his choice easier. “Night coming on,” he later reported. “We hauled our wind and sailed in sight of her all night.”51

  As the sun rose, Midshipman Kessler watched as the two ships hoisted their colors and beat to quarters. He was not surprised to see Barry do the same.

  One witness to Philadelphia’s lionization of John Paul Jones in the spring of ’81 was neither impressed nor happy about the accolades bestowed upon the hero of the Bonhomme Richard.

  Once Jones began angling for the ship-of-the-line America and to be the navy’s first admiral, James Nicholson went to work to undermine him. Having already tried to wrest command of the Confederacy from Seth Harding and the Alliance from John Barry, he now turned his in malevolent focus on Jones. Nicholson had little else to do; lack of both funding and sailors kept him from taking the Trumbull to sea.52

  As 1780 came to a close, the press gang practices of Nicholson and Harding were being applied to “any privateer or merchant vessel” in Philadelphia by the Saratoga’s captain, John Young. On December 7, he stopped a shallop heading down the Delaware. His boarding party found five deserters from the Trumbull. Young had them transferred to the Saratoga. Two days later, William Will, Philadelphia’s high sheriff, was rowed
out to the ship. Young met him at the gangway, where the sheriff demanded the return of the deserters, who had signed on with a squadron of privateers owned by influential local merchants. Young refused, and would not let Will come aboard. The indignant Will told Young he was under arrest, promising to return with a warrant for Young, a writ of habeas corpus for the deserters, and a boatload of deputies to back him up. Before leaving, Will added that Young’s bond would be set at £500,000—roughly two and a half million dollars. Where there was a way to make the matter worse, there was Will.53

  Young, in turn, went ashore to tell Francis Lewis of the Board of Admiralty, who saw this altercation as a tipping point for the navy. He went to Congress to seek support for Young and any other captain against any other such “litigious suits” that were also delaying Young’s departure for a cruise ordered by Congress. While the representatives did not act immediately or officially, they did order the Navy Board of the Middle Department to work round the clock to assist Young on his departure.

  Days later, the Saratoga was ready to accompany the Confederacy and escort a fleet of merchantmen to Hispaniola, where Young and Harding would hopefully find Sam Nicholson and the Deane. After saying good-bye to his wife, Joanna, Young left Philadelphia on December 17, joining the Confederacy at Reedy Island.54

  Had James Nicholson been one of the two captains, there might have been an issue over seniority. Young, commanding the smaller ship, actually outranked Harding in the larger one, but they sailed amicably together. After gunnery exercises—and pressing six hands off an incoming schooner—the two ships began their escort service.55

  Once in Delaware Bay, the ships encountered high seas and stiff winds. Harding’s pilot, not wanting the embarrassment of damaging one of the few remaining Continental frigates, proceeded so slowly that Young took the merchantmen out to the Atlantic alone. He had redistributed the Saratoga’s ballast after her shakedown cruise, and now she responded superbly, overtaking a Loyalist privateer off Cape Henlopen.