by Tim McGrath
For more than a month, Barry petitioned both dons to let the two American ships go, but only the French ship-of-the-line Triton, also assigned to carry chests of money for her country, was allowed to depart. In the meantime, Barry made sure the Spanish knew he was in town. First, he careened the Alliance, with his men loudly hammering oakum into the frigate’s copper seams. Next, he ran round-the-clock gunnery practice, exercising both his cannons and small arms as he paced under “the Havannah’s Pleasant Weather.” To keep his crew happy, he issued shore leave six sailors at a time, warning them that latecomers would be placed in irons, and further leave canceled for all.109
While Barry was entreating Don Luis to let his frigate go, Robert Morris was dealing with a thorny issue over one of Barry’s prizes. Once word reached Nantucket that the whaler Somerset had been seized, her owner, John Ramsdell, fired off an angry complaint: just because Admiral Digby had given Captain Brock a pass protecting the Somerset from seizure by British ships did not mean she was not an American vessel. Morris turned the matter over to Congress.110
Finally, on March 5, with Morro Castle’s guns firing endless salutes, the Spanish fleet left Havana. The following day, the Alliance and the Duc de Lauzon, escorting a number of American merchantmen, sailed for home. At first they followed the Spaniards, but Barry tired of their sluggish sailing and signaled the Duc to follow him to the Gulf of Florida, and then up the Gulf Stream and home. The Duc’s cargo was too valuable to risk.111
The ships were sailing past the Florida Keys, then called “the Martair’s [Martyr’s] Rocks,” when Barry’s mastheader sighted British ships bearing southeast. With the Duc weighted down with money chests, Barry ordered a course change—they, too, would head south, and make for the Spanish fleet. Green signaled back that he wanted to continue northward, but Barry overruled him.112
Their pursuers were the British frigates Alarm, Captain Charles Cotton, thirty-two guns, and the Sybil, Captain James Vashon, twenty-eight (a third, the eighteen-gun sloop Tobago under Captain George Markham, was right behind). Cotton signaled Vashon to make straight for the Americans, and he willingly obeyed. The Sybil was a French frigate captured at the Battle of the Saintes and awarded to Vashon for his bravery in that fight.113
For seven hours the British ships gave chase, with Barry reefing sail to let Green’s lumbering vessel keep up with him. The Sybil was still ahead of the other enemy ships when she got within range of the Duc. It was now dark; Barry ordered the deck cleared for action. He planned to intercept the Sybil so the Duc could get away when the mastheaders on each ship saw lantern lights on the horizon: the Spanish fleet. Vashon sheered off, and the two American ships sailed into the welcoming arms of their Spanish allies.
To Barry’s bemusement, sunrise showed them to be “8 or 10 Sloops and Scooners,” with not a cannon among them. Nonetheless, the sardonic Barry reported, “they answered our ends,” and the ships tacked to the westward, sailing between Florida and Grand Bahama Island. He signaled the Duc, ordering Brown and Green to come aboard. Once in his cabin he told them he was transferring the chests to the faster Alliance. While Brown saw the wisdom in this, Green became so furious that Barry suspected Green had more than his official cargo in his hold. For several hours, longboats and pinnaces rowed between the ships, as sailors moved the heavy chests to Barry’s frigate. Then they were off again.114
At sunrise on March 10, the ships were four hundred miles off Cape Canaveral under light winds when Barry spotted the three sail bearing north by east. He knew exactly who they were. Suddenly the mastheader called down to him: there was another ship—a large sail—“Bearing SSW,” and too far away to tell if she was British, French, or Spanish. Barry decided the two ships would again show their heels, and signaled Green to follow him on another race southward. Soon the Alliance was flying ahead of the Duc, and Barry signaled Shift for Yourself.115
By now every ship but the large sail in the far distance was flying its true colors. Signal flags went up from the Duc: Green wanted to speak with Barry. Irritated beyond words, he once again shortened sail. He did not want to abandon Green—he certainly did not want to abandon Brown—but his priority was the mission Morris had given him, the gold in his hold. Barry saw the Alarm closing in, the Sybil and Tobago close behind. “Beat to quarters,” he ordered, and the Alliances jumped to their stations.
Shubael Gardner was responsible for the men manning the guns in the captain’s cabin. Once there, they cut loose the guns, took out the tampions, and loaded them with iron shot, the slow fuses lit, ready in the gunners’ hands. One of the powder boys came into the cabin, and began ladling out a ration of grog for each man. Gardner was a fighting Quaker; we do not know if he was a drinking one.116
Taking his speaking trumpet in hand, Barry demanded to know what Green was thinking. “They [are] Privateers,” Green shouted, adding, “We could take them.” For a second, Barry was dumbstruck. Then, “begging to differ,” he pointed out the two ships in the lead were frigates, and told Green to do what was done in such a situation: heave his guns overboard to lighten the Duc, and “try them before the wind.” Green might be in a disobedient mood, but as soon as Barry shouted his directions, the Duc’s crew started jettisoning all the guns overboard save her stern chasers. With flagrant disobedience, Green began sailing his ship next to the Alliance on her weather bow, putting the Duc in easy range of the Alarm’s guns.
Now the mastheader called Barry’s attention to the distant ship. Through his spyglass Barry watched as she tacked and began standing straight at them. If she was British, he thought, she would have done this long ago; she had to be Spanish or French. After running up the Spanish fleet’s signals for assistance, he changed course to save the Duc de Lauzon.117
The Sybil was just coming up to give the Duc a broadside when the Alarm bore away, crossing the Duc’s stern—not to “cross the T” but to depart. Barry was puzzled for an instant, then turned to see the large ship bearing down, now flying French colors. She was le Triton, the ship-of-the-line permitted to leave Havana days before Barry did. She was about an hour away, with these light winds.
Seeing that there was enough water between the Sybil and the Duc, Barry sent the Alliance between them in a risky pick play. He “ordered the courses hauled up and hard a Weather the helm.” No sooner yelled than done; the helmsman turned the wheel, and the Alliance yawed through the wind so fast the crew felt the ship shudder from masthead to keelson. In a split second, she had righted herself. While Green took advantage of the maneuver to get the Duc away, Captain Vashon watched from his quarterdeck, well aware that a fight was seconds away. He had seen the Alarm sheer off but did not yet know why. He was a British captain; one did not reach that position if he had not conquered his fear. Like Barry, he was popular with his men. They were ready to fight for him.118
As he had done since that April day in ’76 when he led the Lexingtons in their first battle, Barry grew quieter and calmer than the captain giving orders minutes earlier. Kessler watched as he “went from gun to gun, on the main deck cautioning against too much haste and not to fire until the Enemy was right abreast.” Time seemed to stand still, but only minutes had passed since Barry sent his fast ship into harm’s way. It was almost noon.119
The silence was broken by the Sybil’s bow gun, the round shot smashing into Barry’s cabin, shattering the windowpane and sending shards of glass and splinters flying, wounding everyone inside, including Gardner. Vashon now tacked through the wind to fire a broadside from her port guns, but he fired before his gunners could take aim, and every shot missed the Alliance. The Sybil glided helplessly within “half a pistol Shott” of the Alliance, letting the Americans see the expression on their adversaries’ faces. Barry “ordered the main top sail hove to the mast,” slowing his ship down to take full advantage of what came next.
“Fire!” he ordered, and a devastating broadside from Alliance’s starboard guns ripped through the Sybil’
s rigging, shredding the stuns’ls (studding sails) Vashon had not hauled in, killing a lieutenant and wounding several sailors. Seeing the damage to the Sybil’s sails and rigging, Barry ordered his helmsman to send the Alliance even closer. The next broadside was accompanied by the frigate’s swivel guns, loaded with musket balls that flew like buckshot across the water. In the fighting tops, Lieutenant Elwood’s marines poured a volley towards their British counterparts aloft.120
A second broadside from the Sybil wounded several Americans, but Vashon’s frigate was too damaged to sail effectively. The Alliance’s guns answered with another broadside; aiming higher, the gunners took down the Sybil’s foretopmast. Below deck, Vashon’s surgeon was overwhelmed with casualties.121
For another half hour, Vashon gamely maintained the fight, his stuns’ls dragging in the water while Barry’s gunners turned their attention to the Sybil’s hull. With his sails and rigging cut to pieces, Vashon “hoisted a signal of distress” for the Alarm and Tobago to come to his aid. He changed course as best as he could and sheered off. Looking angrily towards the Alarm, he saw Captain Cotton’s reply: Break off the engagement.122
Barry’s blood was up, but not to the extent that he would make a foolhardy decision. His “Sails Spars and Rigging hurt a Little, but not so much they would all do again,” he later reported. Much as he wanted to pursue the crippled Sybil, it would place the Alliance—and the treasure in her hold—at great risk, as long as she was the only ship in the fight against the three British ones. Where was that Frenchman?123
Later than sooner, le Triton came up. The Alliances could see her sixty-four guns run out. Barry hailed her captain: Had he seen Alliance’s signals? Why had he not entered the fight? The captain’s answer was thin: he had half a million dollars aboard himself, feared that the Alliance and Duc de Lauzon were already captured and that Barry’s signal was just an Englishman’s trick. When the three ships finally made sail to pursue the British trio it was too late. Le Triton sailed poorly. At seven p.m., Barry lost sight of them, and watched angrily as le Triton also went on her way. He signaled Green, ordering him and Brown to come aboard the Alliance.124
Brown began the meeting praising Barry’s actions, but Green was irate over Barry’s perceived mistrust of his conduct. Barry, in turn, demanded an apology from Green, promising to report everything to Morris. Friends for years, they parted acrimoniously as Green, with a stunned Brown in tow, returned to his ship.125
The next day Barry sent two 9-pounders over to the Duc for her protection, and the two ships started for home. For several days, Barry shortened sail, uncertain if it was Green’s ship or Green’s black mood that kept the Duc lagging behind. After eight days they had sailed just four hundred miles, reaching Cape Hatteras on March 18. Barry had had enough: duty dictated that the Alliance proceed on her mission with all speed. After he gave orders to make all sail, the Alliance began flying homeward. In just twenty hours she was off Cape Henlopen. Home was just up the Delaware.
At six p.m. on the nineteenth, a welcome fog cloaked the Alliance as she entered Delaware Bay. But this time Barry was not alone in the mist: “I fell in with two British Cruisers,” he noted, “one of them appeared to be a two-decker.” Barry now used the fog to get away. After several more attempts he was convinced “the Coast was lined with Enemy Ships.” A disappointed captain headed to sea just as the fog lifted, and the cruisers gave chase.126
If he could not fight the enemy he would out-sail them. With the wind on his side, Barry sent the Alliance northward at a speed her crew could hardly believe. A grinning Barry “hove the Logg myself” at one point to gauge the Alliance’s speed: “14 Knotts with a great deal of ease.” For two straight days, the Alliance made two hundred miles.
Barry did not know it, but in taking the British on this jaunt, he had cleared the way for the Duc de Lauzon—minus the Spanish milled dollars—to stand up the Delaware and safely reach Philadelphia. Under clear spring skies on March 20, the Alliance dropped anchor at Newport, Rhode Island, nearly eleven years after Abraham Whipple and some Rhode Island sailors had burned the HMS Gaspee and set in motion the American Revolution.127
Three days later, a French sloop-of-war, the aptly named Triomphe, came up the Delaware. When she docked at Chester, a courier was found to carry the momentous news she brought from France. On February 3, King George had issued a “Proclamation of Cessation of Hostilities.”128
The Sybil had suffered heavy casualties in her battle with the Alliance. While Vashon minimized his tally, other reports put his numbers as high as thirty-seven dead and forty wounded. A relieved Barry learned after the battle that just eleven Americans were wounded; only Shubael Gardner’s looked to be fatal. He died of the wounds he received in Barry’s cabin shortly afterwards, weeks after King George had called on his forces to cease fighting. Back in Philadelphia, Congress had determined that the Somerset had been wrongfully seized and her crew, including Gardner, should never have been taken.129
The following morning Bosun Lewis piped for all hands. They came on deck quickly but silently. Under sunny skies, some of Shubael Gardner’s shipmates, including those who served with him aboard the Somerset and had known him for years, bore Gardner’s shrouded body to the gangway, where they placed it on a plank and covered it with the Stars and Stripes. With their bare heads bowed, Captain Barry led the men in a recitation of John 11:25: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live . . .”
A pained stillness followed where the only sounds were the familiar creak of wood and the rustle of wind on canvas. Then, silently, sadly, Gardner’s comrades tilted the plank and sent him into the sea.130
EPILOGUE
Over the Long List of Vessels Belonging to the United States Taken and Destroyed, and Recollecting the Whole History of the Rise and Progress of Our Navy, It Is Very Difficult to Avoid Tears.
—JOHN ADAMS TO SAMUEL HUNTINGTON, PRESIDENT OF CONGRESS1
News that peace accords had been signed had barely reached Robert Morris’s ears when he began reassessing what to do with the Continental Navy. As Agent of Marine he understood the need to grow a naval force for protection of both commerce and coastline, but as Superintendent of Finance he knew this was impossible. In 1782, Congress had cut the navy’s budget by 90 percent. It was vain, he told Congress, to even consider a navy “Until revenues can be obtained,” adding that “Every good American must wish to see the United States possessed of a powerful fleet,” but the public mood and the country’s poor financial shape made this impossible. “The People,” he dolefully concluded, “will now give Money for Nothing.”2
Morris had turned his attention further eastward. Knowing that the young nation needed to broaden its business horizons, he decided to go around the world—to China. With a group of investors he purchased a 400-ton merchantman, renamed her the Empress of China, and gave command of her to one of his favorite captains—John Green.3
Over the coming months, Morris orchestrated the dismantling of the navy. The Hague and the Bourbon—now launched but unrigged—were both sold to two of Morris’s business connections, transactions that many viewed as corrupt at best. Morris had the Duc de Lauzon loaded with tobacco and sent to France, where both the tobacco and the Duc were sold. Congress sold the General Washington in 1784; on her last voyage as a naval vessel, Joshua Barney took John Paul Jones back to Europe.
Once John Barry rid himself of the Spanish milled dollars, Morris ordered him to take the Alliance to Holland with a shipment of tobacco. He was leaving Rhode Island to start his mission when the ship’s pilot struck a rock, damaging her so badly that he never left American waters. Congress spent a year debating whether or not to keep at least one ship for its navy, fueled in large part by a new enemy: the Barbary pirates. A Philadelphia merchantman, the Betsey, became the first in a long string of ships seized by the corsairs in the Mediterranean. Now that the United States was
a sovereign nation, it no longer had the protection of the British navy or the tribute that England paid to the Barbary States. In the end, Congress sold the Alliance in 1785 to another Morris acquaintance, who paid for her with “Morris Notes.”4
And Morris was not quite done with the Alliance. When her latest owner developed financial woes, Morris snatched her up and sent her to China (Richard Dale was first mate). By 1789 she was no longer seaworthy, and Morris had her “Broken up for her copper and iron.” A skeleton crew beached her on the north end of Petty’s Island. Over the next 120 years she slowly disappeared.5
The postwar years were trying for Continental naval officer and seaman alike. Sailors had already rioted in Philadelphia, “Clamorous for their Wages,” as Robert Morris put it. The new country had its first recession after the war, and it hit sailors hard. Officers bombarded Congress and state governments with “Memorials”: testaments enumerating their wartime services and sacrifices, each one concluding with a “prayer” that they be, at long last, paid. For years, they were not.6
Partisan politics began playing a part with these appeals, even if the petitioners had no political affiliations whatsoever. It only mattered who, or what side, presented the petition. When three survivors of Flamborough Head—amputees Joseph Brussels, John Jordan, and James McKenzie—appealed for a disability pension, Congress did not deliberate so much as bicker. Since this memorial was sponsored by Robert Morris, a sizable bloc of congressmen (mostly Arthur Lee’s disciples) opposed it, merely because Morris supported it. Even William Ellery, long the navy’s champion, voted against it. On September 15, the imposing Jordan hobbled in on crutches, appealing to Congress’s sense of decency. Even with such a stirring appearance, their petition was passed by only three votes.7
