more
robust. They had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the
Bay of Biscay to Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental
Congress ready to issue privateering commissions and letters of
marque than for them it was up anchor and away to bag a
Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled his arrival with a
deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than he received
orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for
mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred
eager privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern
rendezvous. The timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms
and nine-pounders, muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases,
boarding-pikes, hand grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and
doubleheaded shot.

In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and
Baltimore, crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a
strapping recruiting officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and
able-bodied landsmen who had a mind to distinguish themselves in
the glorious cause of their country and make their fortunes."
Many a ship's company was mustered between noon and sunset,
including men who had served in armed merchantmen and who in
times of nominal peace had fought the marauders of Europe or
whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar. Never
was a race of seamen so admirably fitted for the daring trade of
privateering as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail
schooners, and smart square-riggers, their sides checkered with
gun-ports, and ready to drive to sea like hawks.

In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both
absurd and sublime. Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men
aboard, mounting one or two old guns, sallied out in the
expectation of gold and glory, only to be captured by the first
British cruiser that chanced to sight them. A few even sailed
with no cannon at all, confident of taking them out of the first
prize overhauled by laying alongside--and so in some cases they
actually did.

The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in
winning the war than has been commonly recognized. This fact,
however, was clearly perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The
London Spectator" candidly admitted: "The books at Lloyds will
recount it, and the rate of assurances at that time will prove
what their diminutive strength was able to effect in the face of
our navy, and that when nearly one hundred pennants were flying
on our coast. Were we able to prevent their going in and out, or
stop them from taking our trade and our storeships even in sight
of our garrisons? Besides, were they not in the English and Irish
Channels, picking up our homeward bound trade, sending their
prizes into French and Spanish ports to the great terror of our
merchants and shipowners?"

The naval forces of the Thirteen Colonies were pitifully feeble
in comparison with the mighty fleets of the enemy whose flaming
broadsides upheld the ancient doctrine that "the Monarchs of
Great Britain have a peculiar and Sovereign authority upon the
Ocean . . . from the Laws of God and of Nature, besides an
uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages past as that its
Beginnings cannot be traced out."*

* "The Seaman's Vade-Mecum." London, 1744.


In 1776 only thirty-one Continental cruisers of all classes were
in commission, and this number was swiftly diminished by capture
and blockade until in 1782 no more than seven ships flew the flag
of the American Navy. On the other hand, at the close of 1777,
one hundred and seventy-four private armed vessels had been
commissioned, mounting two thousand guns and carrying nine
thousand men. During this brief period of the war they took as
prizes 733 British merchantmen and inflicted losses of more than
two million pounds sterling. Over ten thousand seamen were made
prisoners at a time when England sorely needed them for drafting
into her navy. To lose them was a far more serious matter than
for General Washington to capture as many Hessian mercenaries who
could be replaced by purchase.

In some respects privateering as waged a century and more ago was
a sordid, unlovely business, the ruling motive being rather a
greed of gain than an ardent love of country. Shares in lucky
ships were bought and sold in the gambling spirit of a stock
exchange. Fortunes were won and lost regardless of the public
service. It became almost impossible to recruit men for the navy
because they preferred the chance of booty in a privateer. For
instance, the State of Massachusetts bought a twenty-gun ship,
the Protector, as a contribution to the naval strength, and one
of her crew, Ebenezer Fox, wrote of the effort to enlist
sufficient men: "The recruiting business went on slowly, however,
but at length upwards of three hundred men were carried, dragged,
and driven abroad; of all ages, kinds, and descriptions; in all
the various stages of intoxication from that of sober tipsiness
to beastly drunkenness; with the uproar and clamor that may be
more easily imagined than described. Such a motley group has
never been seen since Falstaff's ragged regiment paraded the
streets of Coventry."

There was nothing of glory to boast of in fetching into port some
little Nova Scotia coasting schooner with a cargo of deals and
potatoes, whose master was also the owner and who lost the
savings of a lifetime because he lacked the men and guns to
defend his property against spoliation. The war was no concern of
his, and he was the victim of a system now obsolete among
civilized nations, a relic of a barbarous and piratical age whose
spirit has been revived and gloried in recently only by the
Government of the German Empire. The chief fault of the
privateersman was that he sailed and fought for his own gain, but
he was never guilty of sinking ships with passengers and crew
aboard, and very often he played the gentleman in gallant style.
Nothing could have seemed to him more abhorrent and incredible
than a kind of warfare which should drown women and children
because they had embarked under an enemy's flag.

Extraordinary as were the successes of the Yankee privateers, it
was a game of give-and-take, a weapon which cut both ways, and
the temptation is to extol their audacious achievements while
glossing over the heavy losses which their own merchant marine
suffered. The weakness of privateering was that it was wholly
offensive and could not, like a strong navy, protect its own
commerce from depredation. While the Americans were capturing
over seven hundred British vessels during the first two years of
the war, as many as nine hundred American ships were taken or
sunk by the enemy, a rate of destruction which fairly swept the
Stars and Stripes from the tracks of ocean commerce. As prizes
these vessels were sold at Liverpool and London for an average
amount of two thousand pounds each and the loss to the American
owners was, of course, ever so much larger.

The fact remains, nevertheless--and it is a brilliant page of
history to recall--that in an inchoate nation without a navy,
with blockading squadrons sealing most of its ports, with ragged
armies on land which retreated oftener than they fought, private
armed ships dealt the maritime prestige of Great Britain a far
deadlier blow than the Dutch, French, and Spanish were able to
inflict. In England, there resulted actual distress, even lack of
food, because these intrepid seamen could not be driven away from
her own coasts and continued to snatch their prizes from under
the guns of British forts and fleets. The plight of the West
India Colonies was even worse, as witness this letter from a
merchant of Grenada: "We are happy if we can get anything for
money by reason of the quantity of vessels taken by the
Americans. A fleet of vessels came from Ireland a few days ago.
From sixty vessels that departed from Ireland not above
twenty-five arrived in this and neighboring islands, the others,
it is thought, being all taken by American privateers. God knows,
if this American war continues much longer, we shall all die of
hunger."

On both sides, by far the greater number of captures was made
during the earlier period of the war which cleared the seas of
the smaller, slower, and unarmed vessels. As the war

<<Previous | Back to Page 1 | Next>>