Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  Nor could the financially strapped Congress help defend the waterway. Admiral Digby’s blockade of northern ports was strangling rebel trade; the prowling British cruisers off the Delaware had little to prey on, thanks to these Loyalist letters of marque. The precipitous drop in trade gave Robert Morris fits, both publicly and personally. The new Bank of North America—his brainchild—stopped lending money, and the amount of his own fortune being lost to enemy raiders was so high that he feared merely mentioning the total would be “an appearance of ostentation.”27

  But while the public Morris could not help, the private Morris could and did. He engineered a loan from the Bank of North America to purchase and convert a small merchantman, the Hyder Ally, into a warship, arming her with four 9-pounders and twelve 6-pounders. Morris even found the perfect captain for the venture. “Lieut. Barney is just returned from Captivity,” he noted, and had not yet left for Boston and a berth aboard the Deane. Joshua Barney’s return to Philadelphia was circuitous: he had served on the South Carolina on her voyage from Texel Island to La Coruña, then with the privateer Cicero to Boston, finally by sleigh to Philadelphia.28

  Anxious to get back in the fight, Barney signed on 110 men, including a contingent of backwoodsmen to serve as marines. By April 5 the guns were aboard, the bulwarks pierced, and orders delivered. Barney was to escort seven merchantmen down the Delaware and safely out to sea. As the ships approached the capes on April 7, they were spotted by three enemy ships, led by the frigate Quebec, which had helped take the South Carolina in December. Her captain sent his two consorts up the bay. They were both former American privateers: the Fair American, sixteen guns; and the General Monk, twenty guns—the former General Washington commanded by Silas Talbot until his capture in 1780. The General Monk had been present when the Trumbull was taken.29

  Barney immediately ordered the convoy back to Philadelphia. In seconds, the merchantmen were changing course, trying not to foul one another as they came through the wind, their captains desperate to avoid capture and get home. One captain hailed Barney; as the American ship was armed, he would not depart but “stick by him”—which he did, until he ran aground trying to avoid the traffic jam caused by his colleagues. The Fair American flew past the Hyder Ally to get to the fleeing merchantmen, firing a broadside at Barney’s vessel for good measure as she passed.

  Barney did not return fire. Instead, he sent the Hyder Ally after the General Monk, which appeared equally anxious to engage. Sizing up his foe, Barney saw she had enough firepower “to blow us into atoms.” But he was not about to surrender.30

  As the General Monk closed in, Barney ordered his helmsman and officers to pay attention: the next command he gave was to be obeyed “by the rule of contrary”—they were to do exactly the opposite of what he called for. Then he stood atop the binnacle—the box that held the compass beside the helm—so that everyone, including the enemy, could easily see him.31

  The General Monk was within range and fired her bow chasers. Once the gun’s report died, Barney, roaring in a voice the enemy could easily hear, ordered “Hard a-port your helm!” Hearing this, the General’s captain, Josias Rogers, also changed course, tacking to port—no different than when two daysailers approaching each other try to avoid a collision in a sailing race.

  But as the General Monk turned to port, the Hyder Ally turned to starboard. In seconds, the two were afoul of each other, the General Monk’s jibboom enmeshed in the Hyder Ally’s fore rigging. Just before impact, Barney cried, “Fire!” A devastating broadside slammed into the General, just as Barney’s frontier marines fired a withering volley across the water. Barney’s next order was “Grappling hooks away,” and the flying barbs further secured the General Monk. In seconds, Barney had neutralized her superior firepower, and she was not going anywhere.

  For the next half hour, the Hyder Ally’s guns fired twenty broadsides into the General Monk, while Barney’s marines put on a lethal show of frontier firepower, as well as ignorance of how to address their commander. As they were clearing the enemy tops of Loyalist marines, one American sang out, “Captain! Do you see that fellow with the white hat?” Before Barney could reply, the frontiersman shot the man dead. “Third fellow I’ve made hop,” he continued, calmly ramming another musket ball down the barrel. Nor were Loyalist marines the only ones felled by American volleys. Rogers and all of his officers were soon dead or wounded on the General Monk’s quarterdeck.

  Barney remained unharmed. Still standing on the binnacle, he turned to watch his cook angrily come after one of his men who had deserted his post, raising his meat cleaver to cut the man down. Just then, a Loyalist cannonball smashed into the binnacle, destroying the compass but only knocking Barney to the deck. The cook paused to see if Barney was hurt; finding the captain stunned but alive, he turned to find his cowardly colleague fighting the enemy with rediscovered nerve—or fear of the cleaver.32

  One Loyalist sailor described the scene aboard his ship: “The deck full of killed and wounded . . . our rigging so much shot as to render it impossible to haul off.” Minutes later, Rogers ordered a midshipman—the only unharmed officer aboard the General Monk—to strike the colors. Seeing this, the captain of the Fair American made for the capes, running aground in the process.33

  Rogers had twelve killed and twenty-eight wounded; Barney four killed and eleven wounded. Remarkably, he was not one of them. In addition to his near miss atop the binnacle, he had one bullet hole through his hat and part of his coat shot off. As Barney began the short passage home he made another capture, a schooner with the oddest of names, the Hook ’em Snivey. He left the Hyder Ally at Chester, along with the wounded Captain Rogers, who was taken in and cared for by a lonely Quaker woman, who told passersby of her good deed for the next fifty years.34

  Barney sailed the battered but still seaworthy General Monk into Philadelphia with the cheers of onlookers ringing in his ears. As a reward for his gallantry, the Pennsylvania Assembly presented him with a gold-hilted sword. Robert Morris provided an even better reward, persuading a reluctant Congress to purchase the General Monk for the Continental Navy (her copper-sheathed hull was a selling point). After renaming her once again the General Washington, Morris gave her to Barney, with orders to sail to Havana and fill her hold with what the United States needed most: money.35

  What Barney did next is one of the overlooked accomplishments in the age of sail: a round trip to Cuba, complete with two battles with Loyalist privateers, several captures, and a safe return to Philadelphia with his hold full of Spanish milled dollars—all in thirty-five days. And he was not yet twenty-three years old.36

  On his passage southward, Barney learned of a battle that dashed any hopes of a forthcoming end to the war.

  Since Yorktown, British and French fleets had based themselves in the Caribbean and West Indies, taking each other’s island colonies like so many checkers pieces. The British navy was operating without its curmudgeonly genius, Admiral Rodney, whose capture of St. Eustatius was followed by the seizure of 130 merchantmen from different countries, destruction of private property, and the expulsion of all Jews and French nationals on the island—measures so draconian they drew stinging rebukes from Edmund Burke in Parliament. Rodney sent Governor de Graaff, the Dutchman who first recognized the American flag flying atop the Andrew Doria, as a prisoner back to England.37

  Rodney, who suffered daily from the gout, came down with a urinary tract infection that only added to his normally miserable countenance. His return to England for surgery in September 1781 meant that Admiral Graves, and not Rodney, would be Admiral de Grasse’s opponent at the Chesapeake Capes. Rodney was under the surgeon’s knife as the French and American pincers were closing in on Cornwallis by land and sea. Had Rodney been in command, things might have turned out very differently.38

  But in April 1782, the sixty-four-year-old Rodney—still in pain and every bit as irascible—was again commanding a large fleet of
His Majesty’s ships. On April 12, Rodney and de Grasse sent their fleets against each other in the passage between the islands of Guadeloupe and Dominica, called the Saintes, in the war’s last great sea battle between the British and the French. Rodney won, capturing de Grasse and his flagship, the Ville de Paris, for good measure. Casualties were high on both sides, but especially for the French. Even those ships that got away met with disaster. Aboard one, the crew broke into the rum and wine, knocking over a lit candle in the process. The small fire soon swelled into a conflagration that consumed the ship. All four hundred aboard were either burned to death, drowned, or eaten by sharks. Like Clinton’s victory at Charleston, Rodney’s triumph at the Saintes gave heart to American Loyalist and British Tory alike.39

  After the Battle of the Saintes, and with Admiral Digby’s stranglehold on northern ports, Robert Morris, John Brown, and Morris’s friend Gouverneur Morris began soliciting ideas from politicians, naval officers, and merchants regarding what to do with America’s diminished navy. After a long conversation with his friend John Maxwell Nesbitt of the Conyngham-Nesbitt firm, Morris presented a “State of American Commerce and Plan for Protecting It”—an appeal to both Congress and France to cooperate in guarding American merchantmen.40

  It was long, detailed, and visionary. “The importance of American commerce, great as it is, will appear still greater when compared to the cheap and easy means of affording it protection,” he argued. To rally support from southern as well as northern states, he stressed the importance of the tobacco trade, considering it equal in value to lumber, iron, and foodstuffs from New England and the middle states. He asked France to provide ships-of-the-line and frigates to patrol the American coastline and escort American merchantmen, and for Congress to build six frigates a year, until there were enough to do the job themselves. With the sale of American goods in France from merchantmen protected (at first) by French warships, Morris’s plan would pay for itself.41

  Congress did not see it Morris’s way. With more than enough battles being fought over inflation, the army, and the infamous “Morris Notes” issued to prop up America’s teetering treasury, the Agent of Marine dropped his bold idea. Only two other Americans carried equal burdens—Washington and Franklin. No others could fathom their stress, or their reluctance to complain about it. In a letter to Washington, Morris wrote of his “extreme Reluctance to wound your Mind with the Anxieties that distress my own.” The first casualty of his abandoned dream for a renewed naval force was the largest Continental ship, and the most famous Continental captain.42

  As John Barry was sailing the Alliance to France, Sam Nicholson was getting the Deane ready for sea.

  Of the Nicholson brothers it was Samuel, the middle one, who saw the most action during the Revolution. Unlike his older brother, James, Sam was stocky, and more inclined to enjoy himself than to put on airs.

  The Deane put to sea in March 1782 for a two-month cruise to the West Indies. To replace the men John Barry had taken for the Alliance, Nicholson signed on a dozen guards from Castle William.43

  Throughout the war, Samuel had basked in the kind of success that James never knew. This cruise was another rewarding one, and he returned to Boston with the Deane’s hold crammed with goods taken from five different prizes. But Nicholson’s winnings came at a price: the Deane’s hull was damaged from storms and fighting, and his sailors were fever-ridden. To John Brown, it looked like the frigate would be laid up for months with repairs and getting a new crew, but at least this Nicholson had done his job.44

  Maybe it was the long layover, or bad luck, or just two navy officers who simply did not like each other. But the haughty aura that surrounded James Nicholson now infected Sam. The high morale the crew displayed during their productive cruise was already tempered by rampant fever and the usual lack of pay, but now Lieutenant Michael Knies brought the festering ugly mood to a head.

  It happened this way: on a fine June night, Knies was senior watch officer while Nicholson was ashore. According to Nicholson, Knies could be seen on deck from the captain’s longboat on his return, smoking his pipe. Nobody had been stationed at the gangway to announce the captain’s return. Nicholson hailed the Deane for a rope to secure the longboat. Knies ignored him and continued smoking. According to Knies, he did not hear Nicholson. After being berated by his captain and losing his shore leave, Knies wrote Morris that Nicholson had ridden him hard throughout the voyage with “a great variety of Insults and Injuries.” Knies wanted a court of inquiry held to present his side. He considered Nicholson’s conduct “a stretch of Arbitrary power unknown to the regulation of the American Navy.”45

  Nicholson was equally indignant, telling Morris “I never experienced such Treatment” at the hands of a junior officer. Knies then wrote Morris that Nicholson had “damned [him] for a Bugger” and threatened to throw him overboard. Whether Morris thought this whole affair a waste of his valuable time, or at least a distraction from his trying to save his country from financial implosion, we do not know, but he did order that a court of inquiry be convened. Words matter, and being called a sodomite was the ultimate insult in any navy.

  The inquiry gave several idle Continental captains, including Abraham Whipple, Samuel Tucker, and Hoysted Hacker, something official to do. During the proceedings, the other junior officers confirmed Knies’s accusations. To Nicholson’s horror, he—and not Knies—was found guilty, not just of belittling his officers but also of leaving his ship without a sufficient number of men to guard his prisoners still aboard her. At Knies’s subsequent court-martial in August, the lieutenant ably defended himself with a sea lawyer’s skill.46

  By this time, Morris had removed Nicholson from command of the Deane. He soon removed the name Deane from the frigate as well. For some time, Silas Deane’s reputation and career had been in a downward spiral. The man who first championed American liberty at Versailles and gave aid and advice to Gustavus Conyngham, Lambert Wickes, and John Paul Jones had recently called for Congress to seek a rapprochement with George III. His letters had been found on a ship captured by the British and published in every Loyalist newspaper. To call one of the last Continental ships the Deane any longer was ridiculous; she was renamed the Hague, honoring Holland’s recent loan to Congress, engineered by John Adams.47

  Nicholson, distraught over the damage to his reputation from his officers and by being relieved, went to Philadelphia to plead his case to Morris, who agreed with him and voided the proceedings—an action taken too late to restore Nicholson’s command. While Morris entertained Nicholson’s request for a loan, the Agent of Marine had already replaced him with an astute choice for a ship docked in Boston: John Manley.48

  If John Barry hoped that his return voyage from l’Orient would be better than his passage to France carrying the Marquis de Lafayette, he was disappointed.

  The Alliance was still off the French coast on St. Patrick’s Day when she encountered a series of storms, ripping the bowsprit from her rigging and bashing in two longboats. Once repairs were completed, Barry sent his frigate westward. Soon concerns about his crew returned, not about their poor mood but their poor health. As more gales forced Barry to sail southward, an outbreak of fever killed five sailors in thirty days. When the mastheader spotted a large fleet standing south, Barry, lacking enough men to fight, sent the Alliance northward without waiting to see the fleet’s nationality. Those sailors healthy enough for duty returned to their foul humor: not only had they enlisted under the new, improved Continental pay scale and prize distribution, but they had determined to serve under the captain who captured six prizes the year before—and now, the marquis was in France.49

  Barry sent the Alliance up the River Thames to the port of New London, Connecticut. In the fall of ’81, the town and the ships in the harbor had been sacked and burned by Benedict Arnold’s forces. Its citizens were still rebuilding when the Alliance came upriver.50

  He found New London cold, dam
p, and utterly inhospitable. He requested a meeting with Thomas Mumford, the Continental agent, seeking supplies and money to pay his men, who were anxious to spend it in the waterfront taverns and brothels. Mumford sent his twelve-year-old son and nothing else. The Alliances had grown from surly to hostile. If Barry rode to Philadelphia to ask Morris for help, he would be leaving old Hezekiah Welch in command, an officer he deemed “superannuated” and lacking in authority. But, doubting that another officer could get from Morris what Barry needed, he decided to risk it.51

  He was barely out of New London when a boat carrying beef for the frigate bumped against her. When Lieutenant Nicholas Gardner ordered hands to bring it aboard, they refused, cursing and shouting “Liberty and back allowance!” Gardner went to Welch and found him too fretful to take charge. Soon the other officers, led by Gardner and Mathew Parke, were armed and on deck. After their threatening presence at the hatchway stopped a rush up the ladder by the mutinous sailors below, they spent the day guarding the opening, ducking the occasional iron stand and plank thrown through the hatchway along with threats to rush the quarterdeck again, spoken between shouts of “Damn the officers.” Gardner sent a midshipman to town, with orders to get mounted and ride like fury until he found Barry.52

  As the afternoon sun began to bake the Alliances below deck, their tempers, ironically, began to cool. Those hands from the frigate’s 1781 cruise began telling the tale of that year’s attempted mutiny. Their chilling narrative, coupled with the fact that the men had no weapons, while their officers were waiting above with loaded firearms, did much to bring their tempers down to a simmer.

  At dusk, two lathered horses, an exhausted midshipman, and one red-faced captain, his uniform soaked in sweat, approached the Alliance. Once at the hatchway, Barry ordered the Alliances on deck, one at a time. He reprimanded each sailor in a low voice that belied his anger, as he sized up what to do with each one by the man’s manner and responses. After the last tar came on deck, Barry put sixteen in irons, sent others below to contemplate their actions, and ordered the rest to unload, in the dark of night, those barrels of beef, still on board that boat.53