Give Me a Fast Ship

by Tim McGrath

  Once Barry sent the ringleaders to the harbor guard ship, and those men too sick for duty ashore, he was given yet another diplomatic scenario to resolve—this one courtesy of Robert Morris. The French frigate l’Emeraude, under command of Chevalier Lieutenant Louis-Alexandre de Quémy, was off Connecticut. A dispatch arrived from Robert Morris, ordering Barry to assist de Quémy in a mission “of both secrecy and dispatch.” Further, he was to obey de Quémy’s signals and be “under the Orders” of the chevalier.54

  Rumors circulated that the young chevalier was neither a captain nor even a lieutenant, but actually a midshipman in the French navy (he was a lieutenant). After Barry’s years of service to his country, long absences from his wife, getting shot in battle, and being long unpaid, this turned out to be his breaking point. Serve under a junior officer, and a rumored midshipman to boot? And by orders from a man Barry considered more friend than boss? No more of this.

  Words flew across the parchment as fast as Barry’s quill could write them. He told Morris of his difficulties with Mumford, his mutinous crew, and that he would take de Quémy’s orders, provided he was at least a captain. After all, Barry’s rank was “all I have got for Serving my Country.” He followed that with a tactful letter to de Quémy that the Alliance’s “Want of a Boatsprit” kept her from joining l’Émeraude. There was also the issue of hands: a rendezvous in New London netted exactly one sailor.55

  As if a contentious crew, international issues over rank, and a perceived snub by Morris were not enough, Barry next heard from the New London Commissary that his brother-in-law, William Austin, was confined aboard the ship Bonetta off New York, with a host of other Loyalist prisoners taken at Yorktown. Having learned from the commissary that only Washington had the authority to release any prisoners, Barry wrote the general, asking for his intercession for his “Particular Friend” while omitting Austin’s services under Benedict Arnold.56

  When another letter arrived, this one from Governor Hancock about Ephraim Wales—a bullying Massachusetts sailor Barry had brought back from France—demanding that Barry release him to his family, Barry fired back at the man who signed his captain’s commission. Wales was a thug, considered by Franklin “a public nuisance,” and Barry would release him when he no longer needed him.57

  Once he wrote the reply to Governor Hancock, Barry returned to the latest missives from de Quémy and Mumford. The French lieutenant’s last letter dismissed the idea of their serving together; Mumford’s consisted of promises of food, but no money or bowsprit. Instead of answering their letters, Barry wrote a straightforward one to Morris about his time in Connecticut (“I was never in such a Damb country in my life”), telling Morris he “wood not trust [Mumford] farther than I can see him,” and that he would not serve under de Quémy if his rank was superior. Another letter to his friend John Brown was even more frank; after a litany of his woes in New London, he summed up his mood and situation in six words: “I serve the country for nothing.” Then Barry went to Philadelphia.58

  A visit to Philadelphia first meant a visit home. Barry found that his wife, Sarah, had “grown very fat”—a colonial euphemism for being pregnant. The war’s impact, and the Austin family’s financial and political troubles, was evident in her expression and carriage, putting every other issue Barry was dealing with in a far different perspective than he had brought with him from New London. A visit that evening from Brown, who was as good a friend to Sarah as to John, was a tonic for both of them—especially when Brown told Barry he could muster up a crew for the Alliance right there.59

  Barry’s visit with Morris the following day was equally pleasant. He greeted Barry warmly, showing him into his office. Barry noticed he was both heavier and, like Barry, grayer. The two spoke plainly with each other. Morris had already written Barry, apologizing for any miscommunication regarding de Quémy—of course Barry should never be subservient to a junior officer. As far as Barry’s rank was concerned, Morris assured him, “It will always afford me particular pleasure to support it to the utmost of my power.” Further, Barry was at liberty to ask for anything he needed, there or in New London, to get the Alliance back to sea. Relieved, Barry left for New London after celebrating his fifth anniversary and the seventh Fourth of July with Sarah, taking with him fifty seasoned sailors from a Philadelphia rendezvous—Brown was right, after all.60

  En route to Connecticut, Barry paid a courtesy call on Washington at his headquarters on the Hudson. After reviewing Barry’s voyage with Lafayette and the state of the American and French navies, Washington informed him that “Some Disputes” over prisoner exchanges made Austin’s release unlikely.61

  Once in New London, Barry was not surprised to see that Mumford had done nothing about refitting the Alliance, but that changed when Barry presented him Morris’s orders. A pile of correspondence waited for him, including a letter forwarded from Boston but posted in County Wexford, telling Barry his parents were both dead. And, while no document exists, he also learned that if Sarah was indeed expecting, she had suffered a miscarriage. He immediately sent her a touching, loving letter, suggesting ever so gently that she not be depressed and withdrawn from life. “It is clever to visit ones friends now and then,” he wrote, “besides it is helpful to good health.” His personal world shattered, Barry returned to his duty.62

  On July 27, Elisha Hinman, Seth Harding, and several other officers arrived in New London to take part in the three mutineers’ court-martial. Found “Guilty of Mutiny and Sedition,” they were sentenced to between twenty and ninety lashes. Punishment was carried out the next day. “I sail tomorrow with a Good Ship’s Company,” Barry wrote Morris on August 2. That hot, airless night, the crew slept aboard the Alliance, woken by the occasional mosquito or gnat that came to say good-bye. Barry’s orders were to go on a prolonged cruise (thanks to the Alliance’s copper bottom). With his ship refitted, and a contingent of loyal and willing Pennsylvania sailors, he intended to do just that.63

  To fill his muster rolls, Barry took two of the guilty mutineers back. Several other men also made their marks on the sheets: local slaves, whose owners were promised their wages and prize shares when the Alliance returned.64

  Of all the ironies during the Revolutionary War at sea, the disparity regarding black men, both free and slave, American or British, stands out all too clearly.

  After the General Monk’s colors fluttered to her deck, Joshua Barney sent a boarding party from the Hyder Ally to take command of his prize. They found two slaves, William Brown and Isaac Ball. Only five feet three, Brown was stocky and quite a fiddler. At five seven, Ball was slender, his face “marked with the smallpox.” Both wore the ship’s issued uniform of tow-linen shirts (made with rough, short fibers) and blue sailor jackets.

  It is not known who owned them, or if their service aboard ship began when she was the General Washington or after she became the General Monk, but by this time they were, at the very least, fairly seasoned hands. But whether their owner was a patriot or a Loyalist had no bearing on their future. As slaves they were contraband of war. Once Barney brought the General Monk into Philadelphia they would be resold as slaves, and the proceeds of their sale would become part of the prize money shared by Barney and his men.

  On April 9, Barney’s prize nestled against other ships along the docks, flying the American flag atop the British ensign as was the victor’s custom. Somehow, either that evening or early the next morning, Brown and Ball slipped off the General Monk. They crossed the Delaware to New Jersey, where (they hoped) it would be harder for the bounty hunters, who made their living capturing runaways, to find them (after the war, Lieutenant Luke Matthewman, who served under John Barry, among others, took on “the disagreeable business of transporting free Negroes from [New York] to their respective homes,” and thus “incurred the appellation of Kidnapper.”)65

  They found refuge with one Whitehead Jones of Hog Point, Cumberland County. Three months later they left,
perhaps upon learning that their hiding place had been discovered. Shortly thereafter, they were apprehended, still wearing their blue sailor jackets, and turned over to Nathan Johnson, the county jailer. Johnson posted a notice in the Pennsylvania Gazette that “Their masters (if any they have) are requested to come within four weeks” and “pay their charges,” before Johnson sold them.66

  When John Adams and Samuel Chase were debating the worth of “an American fleet,” there was already an established presence of black sailors serving on both colonial and British ships. A U.S. Navy estimate states that 10 percent of the sailors who fought the British during the Revolution, be it in Continental or state navies and in privateers, were African Americans. One Royal Navy admiral noted that black seamen shared “the same fate as the free-born white man.”67

  To an extent, this was true, but life at sea was not color-blind. Black sailors were commonly looked down upon by their white shipmates, although when a sailor needed assistance aloft in a storm, the only thing that mattered was the hand offered him and not its color. But a white sailor, whether enlisted or pressed into service, need not fear shore leave in American or West Indies ports, whereas a black seaman could be as easily shanghaied into slavery on land as shanghaied into service at sea. When the Howe brothers came to Head of Elk in 1777, two deserters from the Isis, a British two-decker, jumped ship and were captured by Maryland militiamen. After sharing information on the British plans for invading Philadelphia (if such low-ranking gentlemen had any knowledge), they told of how British tars bragged “they would make their Fortunes by selling them in the West Indies,” and how these prisoners “were kicked and cuffed on every Occasion.”68

  Brown and Ball might have—might have—been better off had they been aboard the Loyalist privateer Regulator, captured by Sam Nicholson and the Deane on his recent cruise. The privateer’s crew consisted of seventy slaves and five white officers. The Regulator was one of the five prizes Nicholson brought back to Boston. As with the Hyder Ally in Philadelphia, the Maryland-born Nicholson fully expected the slaves to be sold and the proceeds divvied up among officers and crew per Morris’s latest percentages.

  Imagine Nicholson’s surprise when he learned that no such sale would take place. The Massachusetts Provisional Congress had barred the sale of slaves captured at sea, and there was nothing Nicholson could do about it (save take his frustrations out on Lieutenant Knies). The Massachusetts Court offered the slaves a choice: freedom in Massachusetts, or return to Bermuda. Sizing up their future, they chose Bermuda.69

  Quite a few African American sailors jumped ship like Brown and Ball, including a couple of those who sailed with John Barry on the Alliance. When he returned from his final voyage of the war, Barry informed the Continental agent that the slaves among his crew had earned their masters “120 Livres each,” but he had bad news for Congressman William Ellery about his slave, Caesar. Ellery had inquired as to Caesar’s whereabouts. Barry claimed he had no idea that Caesar, who sailed through storms and fought a British frigate with free American shipmates, even had an owner. Barry had given Caesar “Liberty to go to N[ew] Port, and I dare Say he is there now.” Caesar was not there.70

  Names of African Americans are found on practically every surviving ship’s muster roll. Suriname Wanton served aboard the Cabot in Esek Hopkins’s first fleet. Cato Austin and Scipio Brown served in the Continental frigate Boston, Austin assigned to a starboard gun and Brown handling ammunition. John Martin, believed to be the first African American marine, was lost at sea. David Mitchell, a native of Bermuda and a slave, was captured while serving in a British ship. Held prisoner at Newbury, Massachusetts, he agreed to serve aboard the Alliance under Pierre Landais. Afterwards, he was given his freedom by the Massachusetts Council.71

  One story that exemplifies both the lot of African Americans at sea during the war and their courage and patriotism is that of James Forten. Born free in Southwark near the Philadelphia shipyards in 1766, he learned to read and write at the African School run by the abolitionist Anthony Benezet. When his father died, James took on what work he could along the waterfront to help support his mother and sister. In 1781, he was a tall, strapping fifteen-year-old, and signed on the letter of marque Royal Louis, twenty-two guns, commanded by John Barry’s friend Stephen Decatur, Sr.72

  Though a “landsman,” young Forten knew the sailor’s lingo well enough, and once he got his sea legs he began mastering a sailor’s duties. Decatur had a reputation for successful cruises, and this voyage of the Royal Louis was no exception. During one bloody engagement with the British sloop-of-war Active, Forten was the only man of his gun crew unharmed, and he won plaudits for his courage.73

  Forten’s second cruise was not so lucky. The Royal Louis had barely cleared the Delaware Capes when she was sighted and pursued by the warship Amphion, Captain John Bazeley, the man who captured the Lexington and fresh from participating in Arnold’s raid on New London. Try as he might, Decatur could not shake free of her. The chase finally ended off the coast of Virginia, where Decatur struck his colors. The capture filled young James with dread—while his white shipmates faced the horror of the British prison ships, Forten knew “that rarely . . . were prisoners of his complexion exchanged; they were sent to the West Indies, and there doomed to a life of slavery.”74

  But Forten was lucky. Bazeley had his two sons aboard the Amphion, younger than Forten and not yet ready to begin service in the Royal Navy. Watching James’s wizardry with marbles in a game with his son Henry, and learning that Forten was educated, Bazeley ordered him to serve as the boys’ tutor. While his shipmates groused over the black Forten’s good fortune, James was under orders, and carried them out so well that Bazeley summoned him to the captain’s cabin shortly before the Amphion reached New York.

  Impressed by Forten’s intelligence and winning ways, the well-off Bazeley offered to send him to England with his sons to live at the family mansion. England had its prejudices, but a black man had a much better chance of making a future for himself in England than in a rebel country that was tolerant of slavery.

  Forten’s answer stunned Bazeley: “I have been taken prisoner for the liberties of my country, and never will prove a traitor to her interest.” Bazeley could not change Forten’s mind, and so he turned him over to the commandant of the Jersey, along with a letter urging that he be exchanged at the first opportunity. James willingly turned down the promise of a life in England, free from the possibility of slavery, and chose instead the evils that awaited captured rebel sailors aboard that reeking death trap of a prison ship. He was, after all, an American.75

  Gustavus Conyngham had been back in Philadelphia for nearly a year when he took quill in hand to write to William Temple Franklin. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson was serving as the minister’s private secretary, and Conyngham knew he had Franklin’s ear. Conyngham needed help that only Franklin could provide.76

  The ship Hannibal docked in Philadelphia as the leaves were turning color and news of Yorktown was awaited with the city’s collective bated breath. Conyngham wasted no time paying a visit to Robert Morris, hoping the Agent of Marine would have a Continental ship for him, or at least an officer’s berth. Due to the diminished size of the navy, Morris had neither. Desperate to return to sea and further aggravate the British, Conyngham turned to the French for a commission, also with no results.77

  He had even less luck in getting his back pay from Congress. The representatives were, on the surface, glad he was safe at home, but hoped he understood that they could not possibly dole out a captain’s back pay unless they saw a captain’s commission. Just having some accounts from his voyages commanding the Surprise and Revenge was not enough.

  Conyngham had anticipated this response. Before departing France with Anne, he had asked Benjamin Franklin to help him prove his story. That was months ago. Now he wrote Temple. “I must request that you will speak to his Excellency,” he pleaded, hoping that Franklin had fou
nd the commission that Comte de Vergennes had ordered seized, or would at least send Conyngham a certificate corroborating his claim. He also needed Franklin’s assistance in getting all of his account books returned.

  Weeks later, Conyngham received his answer from Franklin:

  I do hereby Certify to whom it may Concern that the Commissioners of the United States of America at the Court of France, Did issue on the first day of March One thousand seven hundred and seventy seven to Captain Gustavus Conyngham a Commission of Congress appointing him a Captain in the Navy of the said States and to Command a Vessel then fitting out at Dunkerque on their account to Cruise against their Enemies . . .

  The affidavit went on, detailing what had occurred both to Conyngham and to his commission—exactly what he needed to present to Congress. Thus armed, he presented a proper memorial to Congress in October, asking for a new commission and reinstatement in the Continental Navy. Then he waited.78

  What Pierre Landais could not do, and John Barry could only envision, John Paul Jones did. He oversaw the completion of the ship-of-the-line America.

  She was titanic in length and breadth: 221 feet long with a 50-foot beam, displacing 2,000 tons. By September 1782 Jones had been in Portsmouth a solid year, but the fruits of his labors would soon be on tallowed ways, and in the Piscataqua River. “Will America ever be finished?” he had despairingly asked John Brown in the spring. As the days grew shorter and the New England breezes cooled perceptibly, she was nearly ready for launching. Jones wrote Gouverneur Morris, praising the ship’s builder, William Hackett: “The workmanship is a piece of perfection,” he crowed. Robert Morris sent word to both Jones and John Langdon, promising to send them enough money to get her launched that fall.79