After Yorktown

by Don Glickstein

  HBC’s leader at Prince of Wales since 1776 was Samuel Hearne, 37, “a handsome man of six feet in height, of a ruddy complexion and remarkably well made, enjoying good health.” A native Londoner, Hearne joined the navy and saw action in the Seven Years’ War. After the war, he joined the crew of an HBC trading boat out of Prince of Wales. Later, he led the first of three HBC exploring expeditions into the interior, and took copious notes about the Indians, flora, and fauna. On July 17, 1777, he became the first European to reach the Arctic Ocean by land, the first to see and cross Great Slave Lake, and the first to conclude that Hudson Bay didn’t connect to a northwest passage to the Pacific.5

  Lapérouse left Cap Français on May 31, 1782, his destination a secret to his two captains, crews, and nearly three hundred soldiers until they reached New England. In mid-July, they reached Hudson Strait, the passage from the Atlantic to the bay. There, they traded with natives for warmer clothes. Another two weeks, and they entered the bay. Eight days later, on the early evening of August 8, they arrived off Prince of Wales. “The sight of such unexpected visitors did not fail to engage the attention of the Factory [post] people, who were not used to see so many strangers in these seas,” Umfreville said.6

  Around 3 A.M. on August 9—summer sunlight is extended at higher latitudes—they landed troops, and two officers met with Hearne. They demanded his surrender. With just thirty-eight white men at the post, Hearne had no choice. He surrendered without a shot. “The British flag was lowered, and a table cloth from the Governor’s table hoisted in its stead.” That day and the next, the French demolished the stone fort as best they could, loaded their ships with HBC furs and goods, and burned the wooden buildings.7

  On the 11th, with the Severn, Hearne’s small ship, as a prize, Lapérouse began sailing toward York Factory. In the distance, they saw a ship, presumably a British supply ship, headed for Churchill. One of the French ships chased it, but it escaped.

  They arrived on August 20 at York Factory, where Hearne’s colleague, Humphrey Marten, had been dealing with a smallpox epidemic that devastated the nearby Cree and Ojibwa Indian communities. Just the day before, Marten wrote in his journal: “The Surgeon visited the sick. Another boy dead. A few out of danger; some dubious.” His next entry recorded more trouble: “Three masted ships were seen in the offing. . . . Loaded our guns to make the best defense we can.” On the 21st: “The ships were of force and an enemy.” Two days later: “We are now assured the French are landed in great force.” Lapérouse delivered his surrender demand on August 24, “offering us our lives and private property, but threatening the utmost fury should we resist.” Like Hearne, Marten surrendered. With hindsight, Umfreville was indignant at Marten’s “tepid stupefaction.” York Factory “was most ingloriously given up in about ten minutes . . . to a half-starved wretched group of Frenchmen.” As with Prince of Wales, the French burned the post, but in a humane gesture, possibly at Marten’s request, they left some food and supplies on shore for traders returning from the interior and the ill, starving Indians.8

  With the weather and season turning harsh, the now-four French ships left York Factory on September 2. By the 10th, they reached Resolution Island at the mouth of Hudson Strait. There, Lapérouse allowed Hearne and the thirty-two prisoners to proceed on parole in the Severn to Britain. The Astrée sailed for France, while Lapérouse’s Sceptre and Engageante headed for the allied naval base in Cadiz, Spain. All arrived at their destinations, but the crews of the Sceptre and the Engageante suffered. Of the Sceptre’s 536 sailors and soldiers, seventy died, most from scurvy, and another four hundred were so ill they couldn’t work. The Engageante’s crew was proportionately decimated.9

  Lapérouse had destroyed or seized furs and supplies worth seven to 11 million livres (at least $1.5 million today). He wrote his mother: “I must tell you that I had neither a chart nor a pilot. Not a single Frenchman in the last hundred years had come within three hundred leagues of this bay.”10

  He impressed his British prisoners. He allowed Hearne to keep his journal of exploration and suggested he publish it. Lapérouse’s “politeness, humanity, and goodness, secured him the affection of all the company’s officers, and on parting at the mouth of Hudson Straits, they felt the same sensation which the dearest friends feel in an interview preceding a long separation,” said Umfreville.11

  Hearne returned to Hudson Bay in late summer 1783. There, still employed by HBC, he built a new trading post across the Churchill River from the destroyed Prince of Wales fort. By 1787, his health began to fail, and he left Churchill that summer, retiring to London. There, he mixed with scientists and naturalists, and wrote a book about his experiences. It was published posthumously. Canada honored Hearne in a 1971 postage stamp, and Charles Darwin cited his nature observations three times in The Origin of Species. The ruins of Fort Prince of Wales is a national park, and Hearne’s final settlement, Churchill, attracts tourists from around the world to view polar bears.12

  Lapérouse married the daughter of a Mauritius merchant. “I fell madly in love with a very beautiful and charming girl” in 1775, he wrote, but didn’t marry her then because she had no money, and his father disapproved. The war over, Lapérouse married her anyway in 1783, but he didn’t spend much time with her. Two years later, he began his career as an explorer, leading a two-ship royal expedition. It sailed throughout the Pacific, from Cape Horn to the Gulf of Alaska; to Kamchatka, Japan, China, and the Philippines; to Samoa; to Australia—and then, the record ends. His ships apparently foundered in a hurricane. Lapérouse’s wreck was found in 1826 near the Solomon Islands. Several geographic landmarks were named after him, including the town of La Perouse, near Sydney, and Lapérouse Bay off Maui.13

  33. Coastal War: Halifax to Boston

  HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, WAS A NEW TOWN, EVEN FOR THE NEW World. Its first settlers arrived in 1749, part of a plan to build a strong naval base to counter the French and to protect British interests in the cod fishery. Its protected harbor is ice-free year round, and it is four hundred miles closer to London than Boston. When the rebel army forced the British to evacuate Boston in 1776, Loyalists took refuge in Halifax.

  If Halifax was a British stronghold, Boston harbored the rebels. Settled in 1630, it is four hundred fifty miles southwest of Halifax by sea.

  Between Halifax and Boston, thousands of islands lie off the Atlantic coast—more than 3,100 alone in what is now Maine (a Massachusetts district until 1820, just as New Brunswick was part of Nova Scotia until 1784). On shore, the Maine and Nova Scotia coastlines are broken comb teeth. Their coastlines extend 8,100 miles, including bays, inlets, and fiords. It’s the equivalent of sailing from Halifax to London and back, and back to London again. These are rocky shores, but beyond the rocks are dense woods. Even today, they cover ninety percent of Maine and eighty percent of Nova Scotia.

  This was frontier. As late as 1779, Micmac Indians attacked British settlers two hundred fifty miles north of Halifax. British marines fought the Micmacs, took sixteen prisoners, and forced them to sign a peace treaty. The last Indian attack in Maine occurred in August 1781, when natives from Québec plundered a remote settlement and took two prisoners.1

  Along the coast, rebel privateers and the British navy harassed each other for the war’s duration. One settlement, near the mouth of the Penobscot River and almost equidistant between Halifax and Boston, became a center of conflict for two hundred years. Pilgrim traders founded the Penobscot post (near current Castine, Maine) in 1629. The French and British fought over Penobscot in nearly all of their ensuing wars. In 1673, Flemish pirates attacked and kidnapped the governor. Two years later, settlers drove off a Dutch attack.

  In the revolution, both sides saw Penobscot’s strategic value. Its trees turned into ship masts and lumber. Its harbor provided a base for rebel privateers—or British navy ships. A Boston legislator told Washington he was concerned about Penobscot. If the British controlled it, they could “furnish themselves with masts, necessary for the
repairs of their ships in America and every species of lumber for the supply of their West India islands; as well as effectually prevent the inhabitants of Boston, and all our other seaports, from receiving that supply of wood and lumber, which seemed necessary to their existence.”2

  In February 1779, Henry Clinton, in New York, ordered troops from Halifax to fortify Penobscot. By mid-July, more than six hundred men, accompanied by five ships, had nearly completed the fort. Massachusetts responded by sending to Penobscot a fleet of twenty armed ships and seventeen transports carrying 800 marines and 1,200 militia. But unlike Grasse and Bouillé at St. Kitts, the rebel naval and army leaders didn’t coordinate their efforts, and different militia companies had their own ideas. They landed troops on July 25, and besieged the British fort.3

  Two weeks later, a British relief squadron of seven ships arrived. For the Boston men, Penobscot became a catastrophe. Their ships either surrendered, ran aground upriver, or were destroyed. The British killed nearly five hundred men. “The remains of their army and sailors are now exploring their way through thick woods and desert wastes, where probably many of them will perish with hunger,” the British captain George Collier reported.4

  Abigail Adams spoke of the ensuing recriminations. Boston is “groaning under disgrace, disappointment and the heaviest debt incurred by this state since the commencement of the war.” For the rest of the war, Penobscot ate away at Boston, its presence interfering with fishing and timber businesses, and threatening privateers.5

  A Maine county pleaded for help in a 1782 petition to the legislature: “Nearly all our coasting vessels and fishing boats have fell into their [enemy] hands . . . Many of our houses they have robbed or burned and carried off much of the stocks of cattle and sheep. . . . The enemy has kept the people under constant fears, frequent alarms, and expensive watching. . . . Large quantities of lumber decaying on the landings—coasting vessels and fishing boats nearly all taken or destroyed—and the enemy holding a strong post in the heart of the county.”6

  When they could, the residents fought back. On August 8, 1782, near what is now Kennebunkport, two Loyalist or British ships burned a boat and seized another. About forty rebel militia fought back, and they killed sixteen or seventeen of the one hundred fifty British. The only militia casualty was its captain, killed “with a musket ball through his breast, which brought on instant death.” Later that month, a Massachusetts state navy vessel attacked a Loyalist ship anchored in Penobscot Bay, seized it, and sailed it back to Boston as a prize.7

  Still, Penobscot remained “very troublesome,” French general Rochambeau told Vaudreuil, who, in late July, was with his fleet in Boston. Massachusetts was “very anxious” to retake the post. Vaudreuil had heard it firsthand and made Washington an offer: “I would wish to attack Penobscot with the troops of land which I have on board.” Washington declined. He thought Massachusetts would sacrifice the French fleet for Penobscot, when he had more important priorities. “The object is by no means equal to the risk that will attend the attempt,” he told Vaudreuil. “Your fleet will be placed in the great hazard of being totally destroyed.”8

  But raids continued, and Massachusetts kept the pressure on Washington. In March 1783, Washington pushed back again. “Penobscot is a secondary object,” he said. Attacking it would “waste time for an unnecessary purpose.”9

  Massachusetts wouldn’t take Penobscot during the war—territorial disputes in Maine weren’t resolved until an 1842 treaty—but preying on Nova Scotia ports and ships never stopped.

  “The lawless plunderers have lately done us much mischief and been so great a terror to the inhabitants,” said Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, Nova Scotia’s governor. The rebels intended to “annoy the coasts of the Bay of Fundy during the ensuing summer by small vessels as may elude the vigilance of his Majesty’s ships by keeping in creeks and shallow places.”10

  Despite some successes—British ships captured two privateers in May 1782, and another in June after a battle that killed or wounded half the rebel crew—the navy couldn’t be everywhere. From spring 1782 to the war’s end, rebel privateers experienced their greatest success. Small squadrons not only took larger ships, but also picked off fishing boats and, contrary to the rules, held prisoners for ransom.11

  Captain Noah Stoddard, commander of the Scammel, was one of those Massachusetts privateers. Sometime in June, Stoddard and four other captains planned what they hoped would be a lucrative raid on Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Lunenburg was even younger than Halifax. In the early 1750s, then-Governor Edward Cornwallis (the Yorktown general’s uncle) complained to London that English immigrants to Nova Scotia were “lazy and worthless.” London obliged by recruiting German protestants. By 1753, some 2,700 of the immigrants arrived in Halifax. The government resettled two-thirds of them in other parts of the colony. Their incentive was 50 acres, free from taxes or rent for a decade. Several hundred of the immigrants lived in Lunenburg’s forty or fifty homes at the base of its hilly peninsula sixty miles west of Halifax. Perhaps 1,500 people, half of them children, lived in the area.12

  On July 1, 1782, of the town proper’s sixty men, twenty were away, and twenty more were sick, infirm, or lame. Stoddard’s squadron landed ninety men about two miles from town, intending a surprise. A farmer’s wife saw them, and her husband ran into town to warn the militia. When the raiders arrived, militia colonel John Creighton and five men already were in a blockhouse, and they fired at their enemy, wounding three.13

  English-born Creighton, 61, a British cavalry veteran, was one of Lunenburg’s original settlers. He helped lay out the town, assign plots, and led the militia. In the 1760s and early 1770s, he served as a judge and assemblyman, and had amassed a fortune by Nova Scotia standards. He was, said a former governor, “a man of good character and understanding, in easy circumstances.”14

  Around 7 A.M. the privateer ships entered the harbor. Caught between the ships’ cannon and the ground force, Creighton surrendered. By 11 A.M., after a house-to-house search, the raiders secured the town. “The rebels . . . spiked the guns, broke everything, turned the guns and balls down to the water. Some remained at Mr. Creighton’s, spoilt and burned his house,” a militia officer reported. “They carried the colonel, with the others, prisoners on board their vessels. . . . Now they fell a-plundering the chief houses and the shops . . . We are at present almost without arms, ammunition, provision, and merchandise. Besides, I hear they have carried off from some houses money—gold and silver.”15

  A militia relief force arrived in the early afternoon. Under a truce flag, the raiders threatened to torch the town if the militia attacked. The militia refrained. The raiders got a bonus from their threat: Merchants and other residents ransomed Lunenburg’s safety by giving the rebels a £1,000 promissory note.

  Stoddard sailed away in the early evening, arriving in Boston two weeks later. (Creighton was eventually repatriated, and died in 1807 at eighty-six.) The attack outraged the British and their colonists. Bostonians praised the raiders’ moderation: “The strictest decorum was observed toward the inhabitants, their wearing apparel and household furniture being inviolably preserved for their use.”16

  34. Coastal War: Delaware to Chesapeake

  CHESAPEAKE BAY IS TWO HUNDRED MILES LONG, BUT ITS indentations create a shoreline of almost twelve thousand miles—fifty percent longer than Maine’s and Nova Scotia’s combined. To Chesapeake’s north is Delaware Bay, sixty miles long, with as smooth a shoreline as Chesapeake’s is complex.

  Who controlled Chesapeake and Delaware bays directly affected the government and economy. Near the head of Chesapeake was Baltimore; in 1791, with 13,500 people, it was the nation’s fourth largest city and a major port. Delaware Bay was even more important: At its head, Philadelphia was not only the English-speaking world’s third largest city in 1775 (after London and Edinburgh) with almost forty thousand people; it was the Whig capital.1

  When the British abandoned Philadelphia in 1778 after a nine-month occupati
on, the bays continued to shelter Loyalist enclaves, and Loyalist and British ships preyed on rebel shipping and settlements. “The barges and small vessels of the enemy . . . can pass up and down any of our rivers with impunity, to the great disquiet of the inhabitants,” a Maryland militia colonel complained. One Virginia man told a friend, “The business of horrid nightly depredation proceeds now, as before, in the same relentless and cruel manner.”2

  The Continental navy was incapable of protecting the bays’ merchant ships: From 1775 through 1783, Congress built, bought, or borrowed fifty-seven ships. By 1782, all but two were inactive, the rest being captured, burned, lost at sea, wrecked, or sold. Congress bought a third active ship in late 1782.3

  The state navies also were thin. French ships helped when they could.

  In Philadelphia, merchants paid to convert a trading ship to a 16-gun armed escort for duty in Delaware Bay. They named the ship Hyder Ally, after a native leader fighting the British in India. To lead the ship and 110-man crew, they hired an unemployed Continental navy captain who arrived in Philadelphia three days before, on March 21, 1782, after escaping from a British prison.4

  Captain Joshua Barney, 23, had already made a name for himself. He was a Baltimore man, one of fourteen children of a prosperous family. His parents apprenticed him to a counting-house at age ten; he insisted on a maritime career. By fourteen, he had made several voyages to Europe, and was a second mate on his brother-in-law’s merchant ship. In 1775, his brother-in-law died one month into a nine-month trip. Barney assumed command, conducted his European business with the help of a British commercial agent, was arrested in a dispute and then released with diplomatic help, participated in a European attack on North African pirates, and, arriving back in Chesapeake Bay, was boarded by the British navy, inspected for contraband, and informed of the fighting in Massachusetts.5