That same month, October 1775, Barney enlisted in the Continental navy. He served on three ships. As a lieutenant, he sailed to Statia in the same ship the Dutch saluted; it was the incident that infuriated Rodney. Later that year, while commanding a captured Tory privateer, he surrendered to a larger British ship. It was the first of three times the British would capture him in coming years serving on both privateers and Continental ships.6
He escaped from a British prison in May 1781, after impersonating a British officer, connecting with rebel sympathizers, and making his way to Amsterdam. There, he boarded Alexander Gillon’s South Carolina, supposedly headed to America. When the South Carolina arrived in Spain after Gillon’s circuitous prize-hunting detour, Barney and other passengers debarked for more reliable passage home. The passengers believed Barney saved their lives during a storm that Gillon had been unequal to. “The ship became unmanageable,” one said, “the officers lost their self-possession, and the crew all confidence in them, while for a few minutes, all was confusion and dismay. Happily for us, Commodore Barney was among the passengers. . . . He flew upon deck, saw the danger, assumed the command, the men obeyed, and he soon had her again under control.”7
On April 7, 1782, Barney began his first assignment as the Hyder Ally captain: He escorted seven merchant ships to the mouth of the bay. There, they anchored, waiting for the right winds and tides to enter the Atlantic. The next morning, two British navy ships cruising off the bay saw the eight anchored rebel ships. A Loyalist privateer, the Fair American, joined the British Quebec and General Monk.
Barney’s Hyder Ally headed for the British ships in hopes the convoy would scatter and escape. One convoy ship ran aground, and its crew deserted. The British captured another. The Fair American, the Tory privateer, then either ran aground or took the disabled rebel ship. (The accounts are confusing.) The Quebec, a frigate and larger than the others, stayed outside the bay, concerned that it, too, might hit some shoals.8
Now, the fight was down to the Hyder Ally and the General Monk. The General Monk was a captured rebel privateer out of Charlestown, originally named General Washington. Its new name honored a seventeenth-century general who had helped restore the monarchy after Cromwell’s death. Josias Rogers had captained the General Monk since December 1780; under him, the ship took sixty rebel prizes. Rogers, 27, joined the British navy in 1771; his first captain was Andrew Snape Hamond, who later became governor of Halifax. Like Barney, Rogers had been a prisoner of war, captured after being driven ashore off Delaware Bay during a storm. He escaped from the enemy while on parole in Philadelphia in 1777. He received command of the General Monk after distinguishing himself in the British capture of Charlestown.9
The General Monk was larger than the Hyder Ally, had more—and heavier—guns, and a larger crew. Rogers judged “from the appearance of the Hyder Ally that she was an easy prize,” a British sympathizer said. “We shall have the Yankee ship in five minutes,” Rogers told a crewman. He closed in to board it. Seeing this—according to Whig accounts—Barney told his men to follow the “rule of contrary,” meaning his next order would be the reverse of what he said. And Barney said it loud enough so Rogers heard. Rogers was fooled. The Hyder Ally’s rigging got entangled with the General Monk’s boom in a way that gave the rebel ship a good position to rake its enemy, firing twenty broadsides in twenty-six minutes.10
Rogers told a different story. As he neared the Hyder Ally, according to a contemporary biographer, “he found she was so full of men, and so well-provided with defenses against board[ing],” that he began a cannonade. But his cannon became overheated, and many came off their moorings. That was the sole reason for his surrender, he told the Admiralty.11
Both sides agreed on the result: the General Monk was devastated. Twenty of its 136-man crew were dead, and thirty-three were wounded, including Rogers, who was wounded in his foot and couldn’t stand. (The Hyder Ally had four killed and eleven wounded.) “The General Monk’s decks were, in every direction, besmeared with blood, covered with the dead and wounded, and resembled a charnel house,” said an eyewitness. Barney himself was surprised at his victory. “When we were about to engage it, it was the opinion of myself, as well as my crew, that she would have blown us to atoms, but we were determined she should gain her victory dearly.”12
Rogers was so badly wounded in the battle that he was forced to use crutches for at least two years, and was limited in walking for another five. After the war, he served on smuggling duty, and in 1790, was promoted to flag captain. Ironically, in the West Indies, he commanded the Québec—the frigate that was unable to help him with the Hyder Ally. Before leaving for England in 1795, he stopped at Grenada to suppress a French-incited slave rebellion. After two months of successfully stabilizing the situation for the whites, he caught yellow fever and died in his Québec cabin.
Barney became a successful Baltimore businessman. He was a less-successful politician, twice defeated for Congress. He served in France’s navy from 1795 to 1802, then distinguished himself trying to defend Chesapeake in the War of 1812. While en route to a new home in Kentucky in 1818, he died in Pittsburgh, where he was buried. By his own count, he fought in twenty-six battles and was captured six times. Over the years, the navy named four ships after him.
Gillon, after failing to bring Barney and other passengers to America, but later helping the Spanish to seize the Bahamas, sailed the South Carolina to Philadelphia, where John Joyner, an experienced South Carolina captain, took command.
He didn’t command it for long. On December 19, three British ships spotted the South Carolina off Delaware Bay. They chased it for eighteen hours, then fought it for another two before Joyner surrendered. (One crew member charged that Joyner stayed in his cabin preparing his full-dress uniform and newly powdered hair, then “shamefully surrendered without resistance.” But a 1784 court-martial acquitted Joyner.) The South Carolina ended the war as a troop transport, carrying Hessians back to Europe.13
Chesapeake Bay inlets made it possible for Loyalist privateers to sail directly to rebel properties, burn them, and steal their livestock, slaves, and other valuables. In response, the Maryland legislature created a small state fleet of barges funded by confiscations and sales of Loyalist property. With sails and oars, the barges were able to negotiate both shallow and deeper water. Captain Zedekiah Walley (also spelled “Whaley”) led the fleet in the Protector, built for sixty men and armed with a large cannon that was able to swivel.14
Walley had success from the start, capturing at least six prizes from mid-1781 to fall 1782. When, in November, he heard reports of Tory raiders near the bay’s entrance, he left Baltimore with three other barges and a schooner to try to capture them. On the 15th, he saw two Loyalist barges and captured one. Twelve days later, sixty miles from the bay’s mouth, Walley saw more enemy ships. He sent for reinforcements from Onancock, a small town fifteen miles to the east on the bay’s eastern shore in Virginia. There, Walley found enough volunteers to man two captured Loyalist barges, as well as a new second-in-command. Lieutenant Colonel John Cropper was a veteran Continental officer who had fought at Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth, and he stayed with the army at Valley Forge. He resigned in 1779 to help protect his neighbors on the Chesapeake from marauding Tories and British detachments.15
With Cropper and reinforcements, Walley left Onancok on November 29 after scouts told him the enemy was now in Cagey’s Strait (now Kedges), about twenty miles northwest. The next day, he found the enemy fleet, led by Captain John Kidd, a Virginia native and successful raider. Two months before, on September 18, Kidd had captured a Pennsylvania privateer in Delaware Bay that was returning to Philadelphia from Cuba with £5,000 in gold and silver as well as a cargo of sugar. A rebel account said Kidd or one of his men killed the captain after he had surrendered. Kidd cashed in his prize in British-held New York. Kidd manned his six barges with Loyalist refugees and escaped slaves.16
The Protector sailed faster than its colleagues
, and Walley was first to engage Kidd in what became known as the Battle of the Barges. When Kidd’s barges began firing, about 300 yards away, Walley’s other ships disappeared. “This dastardly conduct of our comrades brought on our barge the whole fire of the enemy, which was very severe,” Cropper said. Then things got worse. A small powder magazine blew up, “the explosion of which burned three or four people to death, caused five or six more, all afire, to leap overboard, and the alarm of the barge blowing up made several others swim for their lives. . . . There was one continual shower of musket balls, boarding pikes, cutlasses, cold shot, and iron . . . for eight or 10 minutes.”
Of the Protector’s sixty-five men, twenty-five were killed or drowned, and another twenty-nine wounded, some mortally. Only eleven escaped. Cropper described his own wounds: “Myself was wounded by a cutlass on the head, slightly by a pick on the face and thigh, slightly by a cutlass on the shoulder, and after the surrender, was knocked down by a four-pound rammer, the blow of which was unfortunately near upon the same place where the cutlass hit.”17
The Loyalists suffered nineteen killed or wounded. Kidd agreed to parole his captives and return them to Onancock, provided Cropper arrange for care of the Loyalist wounded. Cropper agreed. Cropper’s wounds led to an unexpected tragedy: In December, his wife was changing his bandages, holding several pins in her mouth. She accidentally swallowed one and died, presumably from choking or internal bleeding. After the war, Cropper continued to be active in the militia, served in Maryland’s legislature, and was county sheriff. As a state senator, he once threated to cut off the ears of a man who abused Washington’s memory.18
Joseph Wheland Jr. (also spelled Whalen) was another Loyalist privateer working the bays. He was arrested in 1776 for burning a Whig sloop in his native Maryland, then released after making restitution and promising he’d behave. He later commanded a tender to a British warship and started his privateer career by seizing a wreck. Rebel militia arrested him again, but he escaped from a Baltimore jail.19
A Whig captain, John Greenwood, lost his merchant ship to Wheland in fall 1781, and he left a description: “Captain Whalen appeared to me to be as great a villain as ever was unhung. . . . He was a tall, slim, gallows-looking fellow, in his shirt sleeves, with a gold-laced jacket on that he had robbed from some old trooper on the Eastern Shore.” Greenwood recognized one of Whelan’s crewmen as a six-foot-tall “mulatto,” an escaped slave. Another man Greenwood knew personally. When he asked if the man had joined “these pirates,” Whelan interjected that his commission was as good as any captain’s in the British navy.20
From 1781 into 1783, Wheland and his fleet of four barges successfully attacked rebel shipping. On February 17, 1783, he raided the village of Benedict, more than twenty miles up the Patuxent River, which feeds into the bay. Maryland’s governor complained to Washington, saying Britain’s pledge to end offensive operations “have been most shamefully violated by the enemy’s barges and armed vessels . . . There are now in the bay 11 barges and one sloop and two schooners who proceed in detached parties not only capturing our vessels, but landing on our shores and wasting and plundering the property of the people of this state.” He used the Wheland raid as an example. Wheland “plundered the town,” burning one home and stealing the slaves of another. Other Tories “make incursions up the rivers on the Eastern Shore robbing and plundering.”21
At the start of 1783, the Continental navy had three ships. John Manley captained one of them, the Hague.
British-born Manley was in his early fifties. He is a cipher until 1757, when he lived in Massachusetts. An early British historian said his life until then was that of a “master of a merchantman before he took arms against his sovereign.”22
Colonel John Glover, leader of a trusted Whig amphibious regiment (despite, in Washington’s view, its African-American crewmen), recommended Manley for “Washington’s navy,” the pre-Continental fleet that supported the army. Manley had its first success in November 1775, capturing five prizes within a month, including a British ordnance ship that gave Washington needed arms and ammunition. “Captain Manley’s good fortune seems to stick to him,” one of Washington’s officers said. Whig civilians honored him with a poem: “Brave Manley he is stout, and his men have proved true; by taking of those English ships, he makes their jacks to rue.”23
In mid-1776, Congress named him captain of one of the two newly built Continental frigates, but within half a year, he was fighting with the other captains over seniority and tactics. A Boston politician said Manley was a “blunt, honest, and, I believe, brave officer,” but Captain John Paul Jones described him as “despicable” and “altogether unfit to command a frigate.” He wasn’t alone in detesting Manley.24
British captain George Collier (who would later defeat the rebels at Penobscot) helped capture Manley in summer 1777. When he was exchanged a year later, no Continental captaincies were available, so he turned to privateering. The British captured Manley again in 1779, but he escaped. In mid-year, they captured him again, and this time sent him to an English prison. There, he wrote to Franklin, pleading for his help in getting exchanged. “I am the unfortunate Manley that commanded the ship Hancock in the service of the United States . . . and am still desirous of retaliating for the ill treatment I daily receive which without any recourse to humanity.”25
In late 1781, Manley was exchanged. He arrived home in Boston in spring 1782. There, he waited. In September, Manley became captain of the Continental frigate the Hague, originally named Deane, after a diplomat who had become persona non grata.26
The next month, he sailed for the West Indies. In mid-January, the Hague ran into five British warships. Discretion meant sailing to the French harbor at Guadeloupe, but Manley didn’t make it before the British caught up with him. “I have been drove on shore after a 36-hour chase by a 50-gun ship and lay at the mercy of her incessant fire for two days, who, with the assistance of a 74[-gun ship] and two other sail of the line to back her up, were not sparing of a heavy and brisk cannonade,” he reported. But he made it to Guadeloupe on January 13, with just one man killed and one slightly wounded.27
The cruise turned out to be profitable: He captured five prizes, including a merchant ship, the Baille. Manley had captured the rebel navy’s first prize of the war; the Baille was the navy’s last prize of the war.28
Manley died in Boston in 1793, but historians know little about his postwar years. Three U.S. navy ships were named after him, the most recent being a destroyer that was decommissioned in 1983.
John Barry, 38, a more successful captain—the British wounded him, but never captured him, allowing him to amass dozens of prizes—commanded the other surviving Continental frigate, the Alliance. Barry was an Irish-born son of a malt-house clerk. He went to sea as a youth, and at fifteen settled in Philadelphia. By the time the war began, Barry was a wealthy ship owner.
When the war began, he joined the navy as a captain, and made the Continental navy’s first capture of a British navy ship. Although he lost two battles during the war, forcing him to either burn or scuttle his ships, his success earned him Congress’s trust. In 1780, it named him commander of the Alliance, a two-year-old, Massachusetts-built 32-gun frigate.
The third surviving Continental ship was the 20-gun Duc de Lauzun, a former British customs ship that Congress bought in Europe in late 1782. It rendezvoused with Barry and the Alliance in Philadelphia in January 1783. Their orders were to sail to Cuba and bring back 576,000 reales, or 72,000 “pieces of eight,” there being eight reales to the Spanish dollars, a widely accepted currency (at least $1.4 million today).29
In February or early March, they arrived in Havana, and then soon sailed north with the money, intended for Congress. (The money’s source is unclear, but the French often used Havana as a transfer point for both loans to Congress and money to sustain their American army.)
On March 10, 1783, they were off the Florida coast when they saw three British ships bearing down on them.
Because the Alliance, with a copper bottom, was faster, it was carrying the money. Barry told the slower Lauzun to jettison its guns and make a run for it. It escaped and arrived in Philadelphia eleven days later. The Alliance was headed for an uneven battle with the British when a strange ship appeared. It was a French warship, and two British ships left the scene.30
That left the Alliance to fight the British Sibyl (also spelled Sybille), a smaller ship with four fewer guns and fewer men. The British captured it from the French in Chesapeake Bay a year before. Its captain, James Vashon, 41, had fought as a young sailor in the Seven Years’ War. He earned a promotion to captain in 1779 after sailing through a storm with a prize and two hundred French prisoners. Rodney appointed Vashon flagship captain, and together they fought at the Saintes. Later, in 1782, Vashon took command of the Sibyl.31
Now, Vashon fought Barry. The American account was that after half an hour, the Sibyl’s “guns were silenced and nothing but musketry was fired from her. She appeared very much injured in her hull.” After another fifteen minutes, Vashon retreated. Barry reported one killed and nine wounded. “My sails, spars, and rigging hurt a little, but not so much but they would all do again.”32
Vashon had a different report. He said it was the Alliance that sailed off and ended the fight. Rebel propaganda that Vashon had praised Barry’s skills “is an entire fabrication,” an early British historian said. With a French ship nearby, Barry “seems to have had very little cause to boast, but on the contrary, we think his courage might reasonably be called in question for running away as he did.” The Sibyl’s casualties were similar to the Alliance’s: two killed, seven or eight wounded.33
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