After the February thaw, Wickes took Reprisal on a three-week expedition in the Bay of Biscay that netted four British merchantmen and, at the cost of eight American casualties, the armed “Lisbon packet” carrying mail from Portugal to London. Returning to France, he let the prizes go cheap at 100,000 livres (about £4,000) to merchants who, in exchange for a bargain, “are willing to take upon themselves all consequences as to the illegality.”
Hushed up though they were, the transactions were immediately known to Lord Stormont, the British ambassador. His source was Bancroft, Deane’s friend and fellow partygoer. Paid by the British to uncover “intelligence that may arrive from America, the captures made by their privateers, and how the captures are disposed of,” Bancroft regularly hid notes in a tree near the Tuileries for pickup by his handlers. Through working as Franklin’s secretary and carousing with the affable, loose-tongued Deane, his access to American secrets was limitless. Thanks to Bancroft, Stormont’s complaint to Vergennes about Wickes’s activity was supported by an itemized list of prize sales.
Embarrassed to be caught red-handed in its tolerance of illicit behavior (he’d expressly demanded of his maritime officials that “the registers must not contain any item or any indication of this connivance”), the foreign minister gave Wickes twenty-four hours to leave port and face enemy warships waiting offshore. At once the captain claimed Reprisal had sprung a leak and provided a carpenter’s report as evidence. To British dismay, for it was all but certain that Wickes had poured seawater into his hold, a stay was granted on humanitarian grounds so that Reprisal could make repairs. The stay lasted three months, outlasting the Royal Navy blockade.
The prizes listed by Stormont meanwhile were snapped up by local merchants after registrations bearing false names and manifests were filed with the government. On May 22 the French naval secretary, Antoine de Sartine, informed the British ambassador with regret that “if there had been fraud, it would be very difficult to trace it now.”
By that time, Deane had added two vessels to Wickes’s command: Captain Henry Johnson’s Continental brig, Lexington, which had arrived in April with two prizes in tow; and Dolphin, a refurbished cutter recently purchased by the commissioners and skippered by Samuel Nicholson, a drinking buddy of Carmichael’s.
The “three American privateers,” as the British press called them, sailed on May 28. Circling Ireland twice during a month-long cruise, they seized eighteen vessels, sending eight to French ports, releasing three, and sinking seven. The squadron “most effectually alarmed England,” prompting forty British transports awaiting departure in the Thames River to shift their loads to French vessels, closing down a fair in Chester near the Irish Sea out of invasion panic, and generating, no doubt to the crown’s particular annoyance, glowing newspaper testaments from British passengers “of the humane treatment they met with from the commanders of Reprisal and Lexington, both of whom endeavored to make the situation of their prisoners as easy as their unhappy circumstances would admit.”
Reprisal barely made it back to France. Chased into Saint-Malo by HMS Burford, Wickes had to heave his guns overboard to lighten weight. His report to Deane included a straight-faced gripe at his pursuers for ignoring the legal boundary of France’s territorial waters as the distance from shore of a cannon shot. “They pay very little regard to the laws of neutrality,” he complained.
In a replay of the aftermath of Reprisal’s February cruise, Stormont filed a protest with the foreign ministry. The main offense was the sale of prizes, and as before the speed with which they were purchased undercut any response that might have satisfied the British. It also—unfortunately for the cash-strapped commissioners—meant that no profit was generated. Deane explained, “The prizes are sold without condemnation and consequently to a great loss, as the whole is conducted secretly.” On the positive side, “Though these cruises have not been profitable to us, they have been of infinite prejudice to our enemies.”
At minimum, Stormont wanted the American warships banished. Vergennes rebuked Franklin and Deane (“this conduct offends the dignity of the King my master at the same time it abuses the neutrality which His Majesty professes”), but stopped short of expelling Wickes’s squadron from port. Rather, he had it “sequestered and detained there until sufficient security can be obtained that they will return directly to their native country.”
Since the Royal Navy again was poised to ambush Wickes upon departure, Vergennes’s order was really a disguised pledge of sanctuary. Stormont argued the point to no avail. “Vergennes insisted,” he reported with dismay after their meeting, “that no ship is ever sent forcibly out of a neutral port as long as cruisers that are in wait for her are within sight of the coast.” There was no such rule. It was just another instance, the ambassador fumed, of the foreign minister’s “usual frivolous answer.”
Meanwhile Vergennes told his staff that he was prepared to squabble along these lines indefinitely. “This sort of war will not be dangerous so long as governments do not meddle with it.”
After a two-month layover that featured parties and parades in the Americans’ honor, Reprisal and Lexington (Dolphin was unfit to sail) made a dash for home. Prior to sailing, Wickes instructed Captain Johnson to destroy, “if you are taken,” their codebook of ship-to-ship signals. “I will do the same.” He looked forward to their rendezvousing in New Hampshire. “The wind is now fair. I shall depart immediately.”
Neither man reached his destination. Lexington was overtaken off Brittany by HMS Alert. The journal of the British warship gives the cold facts: “5 a.m. saw a sail to eastward…fired a swivel to bring her to…he hauled down English colors and hoisted American colors…gave us a broadside which we returned…half past 2 she struck…the enemy had seven men killed and 11 wounded…the loss on our side was three men wounded and two killed.”
Many of the injured were “in need of amputation of arms or legs” London’s Daily Advertiser reported. Captain Johnson was sent to Mill prison along with 60 crewmen, including a large number of Frenchmen whom he blamed for his defeat because they “would not stand to their guns.”
Meanwhile Reprisal eluded the enemy but foundered off Newfoundland in heavy winter seas. According to the lone survivor, three massive waves swamped the ship and “carried her down” along with 128 men. Franklin notified Congress of Wickes’s death. “This loss is extremely to be lamented, as he was a gallant officer and a very worthy man.”
Beyond his personal fondness for the captain, which dated from their voyage to France in 1776, Franklin appreciated Wickes’s concern for “the distressed situation” of American mariners held in British prisons. Speaking for himself and his officers in a letter to Franklin, Wickes earlier had pledged, “We ourselves will readily and willingly assist them as far as our money or credit will go.”
With the “three American privateers” having taken a hundred captives in their European sorties, Franklin offered a prisoner exchange to Stormont, whose snippy reply conveyed his frustration on many fronts. “The King’s ambassador receives no applications from rebels, unless they come to implore His Majesty’s mercy.”
Franklin’s response was no less astringent. “We received the enclosed indecent paper as coming from your Lordship, which we return for your Lordship’s more mature consideration.”
Unsurprisingly, it would be almost two years before the two sides got together to exchange Americans held in Britain for Britons held in France. The deals would be grudging and the numbers skimpy even then.
1780
NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA
The 18-gun sloop Ranger, outfitted at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by John Langdon in 1777, had wreaked havoc off Scotland and Ireland under John Paul Jones. After Jones was detached to command Bonhomme Richard two years later, Ranger returned to refit for a cruise to the Caribbean.
Visiting the town waterfront with his father one day, young Andrew Sherburne found it a stirring pageant of color and industry. “Ships were building, prizes
taken from the enemy unloading, privateers fitting out, standards waved on the forts and batteries, the exercising of soldiers, the roar of cannon, the sound of martial music and the call for volunteers so infatuated me that I was filled with anxiety to become an actor in the scene of war.”
His father let him join Ranger’s crew only because it was “in service of Congress” and not a seedy privateer. Despite the precaution, life on shipboard introduced the boy to boxing, drinking, and the “abominable practice” of cursing. “There was a necessity for it,” Andrew wrote in his memoir many years later. “To counterbalance my guilt I became more constant in praying. I prayed every night to atone for the sins of the day.”
Seasick most of the time, he waited on Ranger’s officers and “in time of action” carried ammunition to “the third gun from the bow.” One prize, the three-deck Holderness loaded with cotton, sugar, rum, and spices, made the voyage a hit. And because it was armed with twenty-two cannon (“her crew was not sufficiently large to manage them”), the transport was designated a warship and thus awarded 100 percent to its captors.
Sherburne’s naval salary was $6.66 a month. His share of Holderness’s loot was “one ton of sugar, from thirty to forty gallons of fourth-proof Jamaica rum, about twenty pounds of cotton, approximately twenty pounds of ginger, logwood, and allspice, and about $700 in paper money equal to one hundred dollars in specie.” At age fourteen, he’d become his family’s star breadwinner.
In the spring of 1780 Ranger took part in the failed defense of Charleston against an assault of British land and naval forces. It was Sherburne’s first heavy combat. The explosion of an artillery shell “within a few feet of me” left him “much alarmed” and “in continual apprehension” for the much of the battle. Captured, he was shocked by the spectacle of redcoats “hurried into eternity” by accidentally sparking a storehouse of gunpowder. “I saw the print of a man who had been dashed against the end of a brick church thirty feet above the ground.”
Since orderlies were paroled along with their officers, Sherburne got back to Portsmouth within a few months. He found his family in shambles. His father and older brother had been lost at sea aboard trade ships. His mother, now that “the avails of my former cruise were pretty much exhausted,” was working as a seamstress to support her two daughters and youngest son.
“Almost sixteen and pretty well grown,” Sherburne gave in to a recruiter’s persuasion to “take a short cruise in a fine schooner and make your fortune.” He joined the “jovial company” of the privateer Greyhound. “She had a full complement of officers, two or three ordinary seamen before the mast, and between twenty and thirty boys, some of them not a dozen years old.”
Dispatched with a small crew to sail Greyhound’s first prize back to port, Sherburne soon detected that his prizemaster was “completely deranged,” tending to bark out orders to imaginary subordinates and then replying “as though they answered him.” The man had deserted from the Royal Navy and was consumed with dread of recapture. His anxiety drove him to fold his clothes neatly on deck one night and jump naked over the side, never to be seen again.
Run down and boarded by British privateers whose threats to execute them were defused at the last moment by their captain, “who appeared more rational,” Sherburne and the rest of the prize crew were incarcerated in a Canadian village previously “visited” by American raiders who’d plundered its stores and terrorized its citizens, an affront that disposed Sherburne’s jailors to starve him to death in retribution. Fortunately a Royal Navy ship, Duchess of Cumberland, came to take the prisoners to Newfoundland for exchange.
On the way, a gale whipped up and drove the vessel onto the rocks. “Her decks began to open.” A column of seawater “eight or ten inches in diameter” gushed into the hold. The ship pitched so violently its officers started “raving and swearing, crying and praying.” The helmsman was thrown overboard and crushed between the hull and the rocks “as quick as you could crush an egg shell in your hand.”
Two sailors swam to shore clinging to a wooden spar to which a rope was tied. After the rope was looped around a boulder, Sherburne was the fifteenth man to pull himself along it through the raging surf; ten had made it alive so far. The survivors from among the ship’s company then trudged to the nearest port, where the Americans were remanded to a British transport bound for Plymouth, England.
There, a court of “elderly judges, and all wore large white wigs,” sentenced Sherburne to Mill Prison “for rebellion, piracy, and high treason on His Majesty’s high seas.” When released in the spring of 1781 malnutrition had taken its toll. “I walked poorly even with two canes.”
Disembarking in Salem, he learned that Greyhound had taken a valuable prize and its original crewmembers were entitled to “sixty-three pounds sterling each.” But having left his mother power of attorney in his absence, he found that she’d drawn his money and spent it.
Still lame and gaunt from his captivity, he signed on to Scorpion, a transport carrying eight small guns and a letter of marque permitting it to take prizes during its trade run to the West Indies. He would have preferred to remain on land and convalesce, “but this business would not do to live by.”
Eighteen months later he would return to Portsmouth after trekking overland from Rhode Island. Meeting him at the outskirts of town, his younger brother almost fainted at the sight of “my bones projecting” beneath the skin. Sherburne staggered the rest of the way home on his brother’s arm and collapsed into bed, where he remained for twenty days. “I was very unwell,” he wrote.
Nine
The equipping of armed vessels in the ports of France to act under commissions from the Congress against the English, being contrary to treaties and therefore disagreeable to government here, cannot possibly be complied with.
—Benjamin Franklin to a French merchant, August 1777
England is extremely exasperated at the favor our armed vessels have met with here. To us, the French court wishes success to our cause, winks at the supplies we obtain here, privately affords us very essential aids, and goes on preparing for war.
—Benjamin Franklin to Congress, September 1777
Irish-born Gustavus Conyngham was twenty-eight when he’d skippered a powder voyage to Holland for his cousin’s Philadelphia trading firm in late 1775. The experience gave a glimpse of commerce raiding as seen from the other side when his vessel was captured and placed under the command of a Royal Navy prize crew. En route to Plymouth, England, Conyngham and his men retook the ship by force and sailed on to Amsterdam. But thwarted by British officials from exchanging his cargo for munitions, he’d sold his vessel and journeyed to Dunkirk in search of a job.
Located on France’s northwest coast near the narrowest point of the English Channel, Dunkirk was unique among French ports in that a British commissioner resided there with international authority to make sure it wasn’t fortified against amphibious attack. The stipulation was part of agreements signed after France’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War and aimed to prevent Dunkirk from arming and harboring privateers so near the British coast. Britons had a proprietary view of the place as a result, which gave treaty violations occurring there an especially irksome sting.
William Hodge, another young go-getter attached to the American mission, went to Dunkirk in early 1777 on assignment from Deane and Franklin to procure two packet boats to improve communications with Congress. Hodge recently had arrived in France via Martinique bearing blank congressional privateer commissions. Having observed Bingham’s daring deployment of privateers, he was eager to convert one of the new vessels to a warship.
John Ross, the Scotsman in Robert Morris’s employ, recommended Conyngham as a captain, and in March Franklin commissioned him as a Continental commander. The appointment proved problematic. Though it placed Conyngham in government service, his ship and crew were 50 percent financed, due to the mission’s chronic lack of funds, with private money. The pitfalls of this hybrid arrangement loomed larg
e when disputes later arose over his expeditions’ prize payouts. “I always acted under the orders of the commissioners and none other,” the captain later testified in a bid to claim his share. “I understood (merely by hearsay) that money was advanced by private persons but did not know the terms of such advance.”
After buying the mail boat Peacock, Hodge snuck aboard four cannon and ten swivel guns at night outside Dunkirk harbor, then renamed it Surprise. He was one of its investors—as possibly was Deane, though the only evidence is testimony given by Carmichael to Congress eighteen months later. Carmichael had brought Conyngham his sailing orders from Deane. His later suggestion that his boss held a stake in Surprise was officially discounted due to its basis in hearsay. Deane’s critics, however, never doubted that he’d taken “an active part in this piratical enterprise.”
Conyngham and his twenty-five-man crew sailed on May 2. One day later he snagged his target, Prince of Orange, the “royal packet” plying between Holland and the British port of Harwich. Its hoped-for cache of £10,000 in government gold wasn’t on board; still the capture brought headlines if not treasure. London’s Public Advertiser railed, “The capture of the Orange is a complete refutation of what we have been so often told of the reduced state of the Americans. They have hitherto kept us in sufficient play on their own coasts, and now, in their turn, they even venture to assail ours.”
Benjamin Franklin was seemingly available to every portraitist that asked him to take time out for a sitting—he’s depicted here in Paris during the war. Franklin’s casual manner belied his crafty manipulation of privateers to stir up mistrust between France and Britain, and he was tireless in working behind the scenes to aide American privateersmen in British prisons facing the hangman’s noose as “pyrates.”
Patriot Pirates Page 19