by Willis, Sam
The goal was then to get on board as quickly as possible before the sleeping crew could be sufficiently roused to defend their ship from a position of strength. The British ship being attacked was actually an American-built schooner, no more than forty-nine feet long. The Americans would have known such craft well: they would have known that her crew numbered no more than thirty, and they would have known the rough layout of the ship below decks. The success of the plan rested on the assumption that the crew could be surprised with many of them still down below. Defending the decks of a ship from an attack launched from below deck was relatively easy. The companionway ladders were steep, narrow and few. Only one or two sailors could ever get up at a time, and if any became injured or were killed, they would then block the passage of those behind.
The attackers thus pulled for the Gaspee’s bow as quickly as possible. One British sailor estimated that only three minutes passed between the strangers being sighted and their climbing on deck.
Most of the Gaspee’s crew were asleep and undressed. The lamps were extinguished and the arms chest was locked. It is easy to argue that their lack of preparation was a failure of command, but it is also helpful to see it as a measure of the confidence that the British captain felt at that time and in that location. This was, after all, a British warship from the Royal Navy – the very navy that had recently dominated the oceans in the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) and which had helped Britain carve out the largest maritime empire that the world had ever seen. Rhode Island was one of no fewer than twenty British colonies in North America.* The captain of the Gaspee clearly felt as secure as if he had run aground off the coast of Devon or Cornwall. There is an important level of expectation here, a theme that runs throughout this book. The British expected their sea power, exercised and conceived here on a local scale, to be sufficient to cow the citizens of Rhode Island. But they were wrong.
The schooner’s commander, Lieutenant William Dudingston, stood near the forward shrouds and ordered the mysterious boats to stand clear. A commanding position it may have been, but he presented an easy target for Joseph Bucklin, who crouched in the bow of one of the boats and eyed along his musket. As soon as his target was steady, he pulled the trigger and shot Dudingston in the arm, the musket-ball unfortunately ricocheting into his balls, or – in the roundabout way of a polite eighteenth-century witness – ‘five inches below his navel’.9 He immediately collapsed, pouring blood from his groin. No doubt he screamed. The attackers, meanwhile, forced themselves aboard like a wave smashing its way through the scuppers and over the bulwarks. The few crewmen who stood to meet them were clubbed to the ground with wooden handspikes. Dudingston was surrounded ‘and told to beg my life’.10 He swiftly surrendered his ship. The crew were secured and the Americans set about the task of burning their prize.
* * *
The way to burn a ship was this. First, you had to open the gun-ports to ensure a good through-draft. This was often a problem. As the fire spread, the ropes that held the gun-ports open, hinged from above, would quickly burn, thus closing the gun-port lids and denying the fire the oxygen it needed to spread.*
Secondly, you had to pile some kind of kindling in the centre of the ship. Dried heather, reeds or birch, two or three feet long and tied in bundles, were ideal. The kindling could then be covered with a layer of material known as quick-match – strands of cotton dipped in saltpetre and gunpowder. Pitch, tar, olive oil, camphor and sulphur were also excellent accelerants. The fire had to be set sufficiently distant from the ship’s magazine to allow time for the fire-setters to row themselves to safety. Five minutes was enough if a boat was to hand with a strong crew.
The fire then had to be lit. Sometimes this was done with more quick-match, but a ‘port-fire’ – essentially an eighteenth-century version of a fire-lighter – might also be used. Compositions of saltpetre, powder and sulphur packed into paper cases, these would burn for about twelve minutes, long enough to ignite substantial sections of timber.11 If everything went to plan, the fire would spread evenly, the flames would lick out of the hatches and catch the masts, yards and sails, and the ship would become a fierce pyre. Guns might go off, paint would sizzle and pop, masts would creak and groan as the rigging gave way. The burning detritus would hiss as it fell into the sea. The fire would grow, live and breathe as the ship would break, moan and die. This is exactly what happened to the Gaspee.
* The twenty consisted of the thirteen colonies that eventually rebelled: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia; and the seven that did not: East Florida, West Florida, Quebec, Nova Scotia, St John, Newfoundland and Rupert’s Land.
* This is why gun-ports on fireships were always hinged at the bottom, so that the fire could not suffocate itself with its own success.
2
AMERICAN ORIGINS
Revolutions are rather like oil slicks. Once they have begun, they can leach in any direction for any distance, and it becomes impossible to find a beginning or an end. No part of the oil is first and no part is last; it simply exists. All one can do is sample the oil for what it can tell us. In a similar way, any event chosen as the ‘beginning’ of a revolution is always going to be inadequate in one way or another. The best one can do as an historian is to choose an event that directly suggests or indirectly reflects as many significant issues as possible, and that is why the burning of the Gaspee is particularly important. I make no claim that it was the start of the American Revolution, nor do I claim that it was the start of American maritime hostility in the 1770s: the first claim would be unhelpful, the second manifestly false. The Gaspee does help, however, by encouraging us to think about the outbreak of the American Revolution in several important ways.
The first is to emphasize the maritime nature of many of the confrontations between colonial rebels and British armed forces in the early 1770s. So often the start of the war is measured from clashes between armed rebels and British redcoats at Lexington and Concord on 19 April 1775, when Massachusetts militia fought off British soldiers determined to seize stockpiles of military supplies. Others look to the Boston Massacre of 5 March 1770 as an important precursor to Lexington and Concord, when Bostonian civilians were killed and injured by British redcoats attempting to calm a demonstration against the Townshend Acts, new legislation that imposed an array of taxes on the colonies and tightened up customs enforcement. Both of these are, of course, important events in the timescale of revolution, but it is also important to realize that the years between them were alive with other examples of rebellion and, particularly, with maritime-focused examples of rebellion.
Long before the destruction of the Gaspee, we know that the fort on Goat Island in Newport Harbour, Rhode Island, fired at the customs schooner St John on 9 July 1764; that, in 1768, local residents seized and scuttled the revenue sloop Liberty in Newport Harbour; that, in November 1771, a Philadelphia mob damaged a customs schooner and imprisoned her crew.1 We also know that Massachusetts’ fishermen rose up in their opposition to British policies and that there had been several riots over the impressment of American colonists into the Royal Navy, with Boston as the epicentre. This had a long history. On one occasion in 1747 a group of Royal Naval officers were actually kidnapped in Boston and held until a group of impressed Americans were released. By the end of the 1760s the British were unable to press American sailors ashore – indeed, it has been argued that countering the British impressment of American sailors on American soil was the first significant victory of the American Revolution.2
The importance of the maritime nature of these early flares of rebellion is that they could so easily spread down the liquid highway of the eastern seaboard. Every one of the British American colonies had a significant coastline, and although some groups of settlers had penetrated as far as 200 miles inland, the focus of every colony was at, or near, the sea. The sea was both a focus of rebellion and t
he means by which the rumour and reality of rebellion spread.
The Gaspee incident, however, was more than a maritime event, it was a naval event, and that too is highly significant because it raises the important questions of why she was attacked and of who attacked her – questions that help us understand both the Gaspee incident and, more broadly, the complex motivation for rebellion that ultimately led to revolution.
In 1772 no one knew that there was going to be a war within three years. The key point to realize here is that the Gaspee incident was a brief crisis in naval power that happened during a period of peace. Naval power is too often and too easily associated with naval war, but that is to ignore the important activities of navies in peace, particularly the activities of the Royal Navy. A key part of its day-to-day work in American waters in the 1770s was the suppression of smuggling. Wars created debt that was reduced by increased taxation; increased taxation led to increased smuggling; and decreased navies led to an increase in the population of seafarers with nothing to do. The result was that there was usually an explosion of smuggling in times of peace.
Peacetime naval power therefore became far more personal and far more intrusive to the coastal population of the nation in question. In times of war the great ships usually fought their battles clear of the home horizon, on many occasions thousands of miles clear of that horizon. One of the paradoxes of naval power in wartime is that the majority of the people it benefited knew so little about it. For the domestic population, naval power in time of war was something obscure, something that existed through rumour, something that was experienced through terse description in newspapers, occasional artwork, and storytelling in pubs and coffee houses. In peacetime, however, naval power came home.
Tension between the Royal Navy and coastal populations was particularly acute in 1770s America. Britain and the American colonies had increasingly begun to confront each other over issues relating to taxation. The British empire was deeply in debt after the Seven Years’ War (1754–63), a debt which now cost the government £5 million per year in interest alone at a time when the government collected only £8 million in revenue.3 The British government believed that the American colonies should contribute to paying that debt off on the basis that they had clearly benefited from the results of the Seven Years’ War. There was a real sense of unfairness underlying this in Britain. Some estimates claimed that British taxpayers were actually paying as much as ten times more in taxes than their colonial counterparts,4 but the Americans also saw an imposition of tax as unfair: they had no representation in Parliament, so why should they be taxed?
Smuggling therefore became a way of flexing colonial muscle against the hated tax, but it was also an attractive proposal in 1770s America because it was so likely to succeed. Anyone who has sailed up the east coast of America will know of its mind-boggling length and variety, from towering cliffs to low-lying bluffs, with forests that run down to the sea, marshlands, lagoons, mudflats and mile upon mile of windswept beaches. A colonial customs service existed, but it was too weak to make a significant number of seizures.
To assist, the customs service began to deputize British naval officers. In this crucial period before the outbreak of war, therefore, British naval officers in North America actually carried two commissions: one from the Admiralty and one from the Treasury. In effect the British declared a modified, maritime form of martial law, typically the preserve of locations where there had been a breakdown of civilian authority or where an occupying force ruled over a conquered foe. British naval officers were encouraged in their role by being allowed to keep a substantial percentage of any illegal goods that they seized.5 This was all unpleasant and provocative, and a frank admission that the British government was unable to perform one of the basic duties of any civil government – to collect revenue.
The link between tax and customs, the Royal Navy and American resentment over their tax burden was thus made explicit, and it was worsened by the method of policing. With such a weak force, even when boosted by naval officers, the British resorted to a tried and tested method of enforcing discipline: they acted occasionally and in few locations but with great vigour. In the same way that pirates might be hanged to discourage piracy, so smugglers were now severely punished to dissuade smuggling. In several cases, British naval officers were excessively violent, intrusive and demanding, and perhaps none more so than Lieutenant William Dudingston of the Gaspee.6
The problem in 1770s America created by the relationships between war and peace, and the navy and taxation, was well summed up by Benjamin Franklin, who, in his Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One of 1773 – the year after the Gaspee incident – wrote a passage which deserves to be quoted in full for its passion and insight:
Convert the brave, honest officers of your navy into pimping tide-waiters and colony officers of the customs. Let those who in time of war fought gallantly in defence of their countrymen, in peace be taught to prey upon it. Let them learn to be corrupted by great and real smugglers; but (to show their diligence) scour with armed boats every bay, harbour, river, creek, cove, or nook throughout the coast of your colonies; stop and detain every coaster, every wood-boat, every fisherman; tumble their cargoes and even their ballast inside out and upside down and, if a penn’orth of pins is found unentered, let the whole be seized and confiscated. Thus shall the trade of your colonists suffer more from their friends in time of peace than it did from their enemies in war.7
* * *
The Gaspee was attacked because the local population was exasperated with Dudingston. He had developed a reputation as a violent, uncaring man who took pleasure in terrorizing the locals. The newspapers called him ‘cowardly and insolent’ and ‘a disgrace to his profession’.8 According to the Providence Gazette, he was ‘haughty, insolent and intolerable’ and had been ‘personally ill-treating every master and merchant of the vessels he boarded, stealing sheep, hogs, poultry, &c. from farmers round the bay, and cutting their fruit and other trees for firewood’.9 For these Rhode Islanders, their isolated rebellion was no theoretical cause, no matter for political philosophers in ivory towers; it was very real, very personal, and they were very, very angry. And, as always with anger, it was particularly potent because it concerned concepts of reasonable or fair behaviour.
If the broader question concerned the fairness of being taxed, the specific question in this case was how a British naval officer, as a direct representative of the monarch carrying the King’s Commission, should behave. Those rebels, as British subjects, believed that Dudingston had behaved improperly, that he had shamed the reputation both of the navy and of Britain herself. A crucial factor in their motivation was that, not only had they had enough of Dudingston, but they were fed up with the failure of the British system to keep him in check – a motivation that was shared in numerous other maritime-oriented attacks on British officials.10
One of the leaders of the attack was a man named John Brown, a wealthy merchant and the future founder of Brown University. Brown had tried to solve the problem of Dudingston through official channels three months earlier but with no success; it only led to the most acrimonious correspondence between the governor, Joseph Wanton, and Admiral John Montagu.11 This, therefore, was not the Rhode Islanders’ first response to Dudingston’s behaviour, but their last.
The lesson of the Gaspee attack was that official channels of grievance and policing seemed broken. So often the American Revolution is presented as a caricature of Americans fighting for liberty from British tyranny with the implication of over-regulation that comes with such an interpretation, but in fact the colonists needed more control from a governing body that understood their particular problems and interests. The paradox of the Gaspee and of other similar demonstrations of dissent is that the rebels were creating disorder because they wanted to contain disorder.
A key indicator of this is the relative lack of violence used in the Gaspee attack. It was a bold and vigorous attempt against the s
hip, certainly, but the only man who was wounded was the vessel’s commander, and there is plenty of evidence that he was shot in the balls by accident. The rest of the crew had no more injury than bruising from handspikes, and the attackers gave their word that the crew would not be harmed.12 The destruction of a ship may seem bad, but consider how much worse it could have been: in the early years of the French Revolution the figures of hated authority were butchered like dogs.
Even with their blood up the actions of other American rebels in this period were similarly characterized by restraint and control. The Boston Tea Party is the best-known example. Then, gangs of enraged merchants and smugglers, who were all set to lose out from new legislation, threw tea worth £10,000 into Boston Harbour. The important point for this story was how the demonstration was staged: it was highly organized, exceptionally efficient, entirely non-violent, deliberately theatrical and carefully symbolic. Even as they threw the tea into the harbour, they replaced a broken lock to demonstrate that their ‘quarrel’ was not against property or order, and one man who stole a small amount of tea was made to run the gauntlet and his coat nailed to the whipping post.13 Similar non-violent events occurred at the same time up and down the eastern seaboard – a strong display of unity throughout the disparate colonies in both the motivation and style of rebellion.14
Such acts, of which the Gaspee was an important part, were designed to demonstrate American responsibility as much as they were the scale of American anger. At this stage the question of independence simply did not exist: the Americans wanted to be treated justly and fairly as British citizens; they still felt closer to Britain than they did to one another.