by Tim McGrath
This time not even John Adams rose to defend the old mariner, and Congress suspended Hopkins from his command on March 26. Hancock sent the resolution to him personally, barring him “in any way whatsoever to exercise in Act or Authority or Command over any of the Vessels” of the United States. America’s Neptune had lost both crown and trident.
The future of the navy was now in the hands of the commanders on that damned list, along with a barely known Irish American merchant captain languishing in France who would become, in King George’s opinion, the most terrorizing Continental Navy captain of them all.70
CHAPTER FIVE
“HEAVEN HAS SUCCEEDED OUR ADVENTURES”
The Facts then really are, That an American purchased a Vessel in England, took in Warlike Stores at Dunkirk Armed his Vessel at Sea, & having a Commission from the United States made Two prizes.
—SILAS DEANE1
Gustavus Conyngham was born in the British Isles, in Ireland like John Barry, but a Protestant like John Paul Jones. While not overly wealthy, the Conynghams were landowners, far better off in both finances and status than either the Barrys or the Pauls. One of Gustavus’s cousins was the wife of the lord chancellor of Ireland.
At the time of his birth in 1744, the Conynghams lived in County Donegal in northeast Ireland. He was sixteen when his father took the family to Philadelphia, where a cousin, Redmond, ran a thriving mercantile business with James Nesbitt. Redmond gave Gustavus a seaman’s apprenticeship under one Captain Henderson, the firm’s top sailor, who made several voyages a year to the West Indies. In Gustavus, Henderson found a quick study, who soon became a top hand and skilled navigator. Henderson was a good example for any aspiring youth, and Gustavus made the most of the years sailing under his supervision.2
Henderson’s main destination was Antigua, one of the Leeward Islands. The British saw the islands as a chain of sentries guarding the Caribbean Sea. As early as 1671, Sir Charles Walker hoped that the Royal Navy would seize both Antigua and the opportunity it provided. “’Tis as large as Barbados & the best land in the West Indies,” he reported. Its two harbors, divided by only a neck of land, put them out of the path of most hurricanes. The navy took Walker’s advice. By the time Gustavus first saw Antigua, its native peoples had been decimated by disease and slavery, replaced in numbers by so many African-born slaves for the island’s sugar plantations that the population ratio was ten slaves to every free man. Only the British military presence and a history of hanging runaway slaves prevented a general rebellion.3
Some years after the French and Indian War, Redmond Conyngham returned to Ireland. He left his share of the business to his son Daniel, who made his cousin one of the firm’s captains. Gustavus was an instant success, and was soon invited to join the Society for the Relief of Poor, Aged & Infirmed Masters of Ships, & their Widows and Children, better known to Philadelphians as the Sea-Captains Club. Their sumptuous dinners at the City Tavern gave him the chance to rub elbows with the Biddles and John Barry, among others.4
In 1773, Gustavus married Anne Hockley, daughter of another successful merchant. A miniature portrait of Conyngham shows a slender man of indeterminate height with reddish hair, sad but penetrating eyes, and a thin nose above a small mouth. His uncertain expression seems to ask the painter, “What next?”
During the 1770s Conyngham & Nesbitt grew in both financial success and political activism. After war broke out, the firm made two significant contributions to the cause: selling the brig Sally to Congress (renamed Columbus) and sending another ship, the brigantine Charming Peggy, on a risky mission under Conyngham’s command. With orders to return with “powder, salt petre, arms, medecins, and every thing Necessary for War,” Conyngham departed Philadelphia in August 1775.5
The Charming Peggy crossed the Atlantic in just three weeks. Conyngham’s first stop was Londonderry in Northern Ireland, a ploy to throw off any suspicions from British authorities about his true mission. After making it clear he was taking on “Irish Spirits” to sell in England, he set sail—for Dunkirk, already legendary for harboring colorful characters.
Lying six miles below Belgium, Dunkirk was named after an abbey built in the coastal dunes, and had withstood Viking raids well before a wall was built around the city. For centuries it had changed hands during European wars, conquered by Dutch, Spanish, English, and French armies until King Charles II sold it to France for £320,000. French privateers made it their bastion under Louis XIV. When the Treaty of Utrecht ended the War of the Spanish Succession, it included a clause forbidding the use of Dunkirk by the enemies of either France or England. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the French and Indian War, forbade the French government from using the old port in any future wars with England (because of its close proximity). But its reputation for harboring pirates and smugglers kept British naval and political officials stationed there forever wary.6
The Charming Peggy reached Dunkirk on November 11. She was moored in front of the port’s powder magazine, alongside a British transport that had run aground and was now under repair. Conyngham had an obvious problem: how to fill his hold with half barrels of gunpowder with an enemy captain as his next-door neighbor? At nighttime, of course. Yet the British captain was not easily fooled. His suspicions aroused, he met with the British consul, Andrew Frazer, whose protests soon reached the ears of England’s ambassador to France: David Murray, Lord Stormont.
Stormont was a rotund, dark-eyed, imposing character, a distant relative of Lord Dunmore. His diplomatic talents were dwarfed by his size and his eternal suspicions that every American ship and shipmaster in France wanted to smuggle munitions and stir up trouble. He knew—he just knew—that France would help the rebels behind his broad back. When Stormont learned of Conyngham and the Charming Peggy, he demanded action from the Comte de Vergennes, France’s foreign minister. This “vessel purporting to be Irish” was being filled to the gunwales with gunpowder. Stormont wanted it stopped.7
On December 3, a cadre of French Admiralty officers ascended the Charming Peggy’s gangway, carrying iron pokers. As Conyngham protested their presence, the Frenchmen went below, jabbing their pokers into the bales and barrels: no gunpowder. How Conyngham was tipped off, and unloaded his ship so quickly, one can only guess. Thwarted in Dunkirk, Conyngham decided to try his luck in Holland.
The Charming Peggy was sailing through fog in the English Channel when the mist lifted and she was spotted, chased, and taken by a British frigate. Her captain, convinced he had captured a rebel smuggler despite Conyngham’s vehement protests and false documents from Londonderry, placed a small prize crew aboard with orders to sail the Charming Peggy to Plymouth. Once the ships lost sight of each other, Conyngham and his men successfully subdued the few British sailors aboard and continued north to Holland.8
Conyngham soon brought the brigantine into Dutch waters, anchoring off Texel Island, a large island in the Amsterdam roadstead. Amsterdam, like Dunkirk, was a freewheeling port, and like Philadelphia, its bustling waterfront was a mélange of shipyards, taverns, warehouses, and brothels. Conyngham hoped his luck would change here. He wasted no time in filling his hold with gunpowder, weapons, flints, and musket balls—sixteen tons of gunpowder alone.9
But his second attempt at getting out to sea brought even more misfortune than the first. One of his crew, an Irishman named Brackinridge who had signed on in Londonderry, jumped ship and went straight to the British consul at the nearby town of Ostend, informing him of the contraband being stored in the Charming Peggy. Conyngham and his men were arrested, with a detachment of British marines sent aboard to guard them. As before, Conyngham waited until the opportunity presented itself to overpower his captors, and did so. Conyngham sent the Charming Peggy around Texel Island and made for the open sea, but a severe gale forced him to turn into Nieuport Channel. The Americans were safe from the storm, but soon trapped by a British cutter, the Wells, on March 16. The Americans abandoned ship, manne
d their boats, and rowed back to Texel Island.
Conyngham decided to sell the Charming Peggy and pay off his crew, only to run afoul of the town burgomaster’s chicaneries. While the Americans were ashore, Dutch fishermen looted the ship’s stores, stealing the goods unguarded by the British marines. Conyngham had failed. He made his way back to France.10
For months, Conyngham languished in France, a captain without a ship from a country not yet recognized. By March 1777, he had been away from home and family for eighteen months. Philadelphians assumed the Charming Peggy had been lost at sea and that Conyngham had drowned. He hoped desperately for a second chance.
His deus ex machina was Benjamin Franklin. To the bitter dismay of Lord Stormont, the new American minister had been most graciously received by the court of Louis XVI. If Britain’s ambassador had only known what Franklin had in mind—not just for Conyngham, but for Lambert Wickes and other American captains as well—Stormont would have been more than dismayed.11
From the second he assented to letting Lambert Wickes capture those ships in French waters, Franklin wanted to unleash America’s fighting sail in England’s backyard. He was impressed enough to fill in a blank captain’s commission, signed by John Hancock, with Conyngham’s name, promising his fellow Philadelphian a ship.12
Franklin knew full well that seizing British merchantmen in European waters was not only justifiable retribution for the same being done by the British to American ships but also a potential weapon for the Cause. This would send shock waves throughout England, compel the Admiralty to keep more ships on its own side of the Atlantic, force insurance rates to soar, and add to the level of British dissension over the war. It would be as if the Vikings had returned.13
The first captain to literally test the waters was Lambert Wickes. After setting Franklin ashore, Wickes learned from French officials in Quiberon that selling his prizes in a French port was against France’s treaty with Britain. Nor was there an American Admiralty in France to libel and condemn them. However, Wickes learned that the merchants of Quiberon were more than willing to buy them at a low price while assuming the consequences of the purchase. They were sold at night, while the two ships were still officially “at sea.” Once he disposed of them, Wickes sailed the Reprisal up the Loire River for refitting. By Christmas Eve he informed Franklin in Paris that he was “ready to sail at half-hour’s warning,” but the Loire had frozen over, preventing his departure.
In January, the ice began breaking up. Wickes set out on a short cruise in the perpetually stormy Bay of Biscay and the calmer English Channel, where in just three weeks he captured four merchantmen. On February 5 the Reprisal fought and bested the British packet Swallow, sixteen guns, in a hard-fought battle. The Reprisal took a shot to the hull and was leaking badly when Wickes closed in. After ordering “Grappling hooks away!” he led his men over the rails, and in close combat took the packet. With his ship still taking water and most of his men manning prize crews, Wickes sailed back to France, arriving on February 13.14
Franklin’s plans for Conyngham began taking shape with the arrival in France of William Hodge, a Philadelphia merchant arrived from Martinique “after a long Passage & was near being starved.” Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur Lee—the third American commissioner—got him fed and sent him to Dunkirk. By this time, there were four Continental captains in France: Wickes, Conyngham, William Johnson of the Lexington, and Samuel Nicholson, James’s younger brother, fresh from London and, like Conyngham, seeking a ship. Hodge combed the French sea towns, looking to purchase luggers or cutters, small, swift sailing vessels, the favorites of smugglers for their speed and seaworthiness.15
He found one, ironically, in Dover, England. The Peacock was a lugger known in France as a chasse-marée—a “tide chaser.” Hodge bought her under an assumed name and turned her over to John Beach, another Irishman by birth, believed loyal to the British but in actuality another Philadelphia patriot. His official destination as master of the Peacock was the Faroe Islands, which lie between Scotland and Iceland. Once Beach cleared Dover, he made straight for Dunkirk, but anchored offshore.16
In the dark of night on May 1, a shallop manned by mostly American sailors came alongside the Peacock. They immediately began transferring small cannons and swivel guns, followed by ammunition and supplies. While they labored at their tasks, John Beach turned over command of the Peacock to Gustavus Conyngham, who made Beach his first officer and renamed her Surprise. Then he sailed off in search of mischief.17
Philadelphia was free from invasion, thanks to General Washington and his bold army of veterans, volunteers, and sailors. The year 1777 began with the American and British armies huddled at their respective winter quarters. The Continental schooner Georgia Packet slipped between the Delaware Capes, her captain informing Robert Morris that they were now clear of enemy ships. Only ice prevented the Randolph and Delaware from getting to sea.18
The Randolph was still at Fort Island when Nicholas Biddle had a visitor—his old lieutenant, James Josiah, recently exchanged by the British. Washington had exerted what influence he possessed as rebel commander-in-chief to free him. After months spent toiling in the Cerberus, Josiah had been transferred to the prison ship Whitby in New York harbor. “Grateful” was not a strong enough word to describe Josiah’s feelings after being released.
The lieutenant he was exchanged for had been freed by the Americans ten days before Josiah was discharged from the Whitby. When Josiah asked to be put ashore in New Jersey, he was dropped off in Connecticut without a safe-conduct pass, to make his way home as best he could. Before visiting Biddle he called on Morris, who informed him of his rank on the Captains List (number 18—one behind Jones). True, he was the only one on the list not given a command (due to his imprisonment), but the fact that Congress ranked him while he was a captive says much about James Josiah.19
After his visitor left, Biddle placed a double guard of marines aboard the Randolph. The long wait for the ice to thaw took its toll on the frigate’s already small muster rolls. Boredom and ice bred restlessness in the confines of a ship, even the grandest yet built in Philadelphia. If enlisted Americans got the urge to jump ships, what about Biddle’s English “volunteers”? After a spate of desertions, he posted a £5 reward for information leading to their arrest, with a £35 bonus if the informant’s tips bagged the lot of them. One deserter, “stout built” and “pitted with the small pox,” was American-born. The rest, the broadside concluded, “are Irishmen.”20
The frozen river annoyed Morris as well. A four-month-old letter from Silas Deane sat on his desk, informing Morris that he had arranged for a huge quantity of supplies earmarked for Washington to be shipped from Martinique, including 20,000 uniforms, 200 brass cannon, and 100 tons of gunpowder. “The Delaware continues too full of Ice for Ships to sail,” he wrote Hancock, “as Capt. Biddle has now 200 Men on b[oar]d the Randolph and is ready to push out at the first opening.” Philadelphians have long believed the adage “If you do not like the weather, just wait, it will change.” Miraculously, it did—in forty hours. “Our River is now clear of Ice, and I propose pushing out Captain Bidd[le],” Morris informed Congress. “We cannot employ him & the small Vessells better than to send them to Martinico for the Stores mentioned in Mr. D’s letter.”21
After waiting for the ice to break up, Biddle saw this retrieval of supplies by the first American frigate to get to sea as nothing more than a grocer’s errand. The Randolph was built for a fight, not freight. He went to Philadelphia to ask, convince, and argue with Morris and get his orders changed. When he reached Morris’s office he found that the congressman had already had a change of heart—thanks, ironically, to Esek Hopkins, who was still commodore of the fleet. From Baltimore, the Marine Committee had ordered Hopkins to send the Warren and Providence on a cruise to Virginia and take, burn, sink, or destroy any British ships they encountered. Realizing that such orders were what frigates were built for in
the first place, Morris gave Biddle similar instructions, with the warning that he avoid two-deckers like the Roebuck.
Before departing, Morris received Biddle’s signals in the event new orders needed to be given again: the Randolph would be recognized by “a White Jack at the fore top mast and a Pendant over it.” Biddle headed back to Fort Island to get his frigate ready for departure. On February 3 one final contingent of British prisoners was delivered to the Randolph’s bosun, bringing the number aboard to 240 officers and men.22
Biddle had one last task to complete before sailing. The Marine Committee wanted each captain to guarantee that any marine or sailor wanting to make a will before leaving port could do so. No fewer than eight of Biddle’s hands had taken lodging at Jane How’s boardinghouse on the waterfront. They had been “on the beach” so long they had run out of money and were promising to pay her when the Randolph returned. Mrs. How had heard this line before, but whether she was being patriotic or just a savvy businesswoman, she had a solution that would get her paid one way or another. One by one, her boarders were summoned to Biddle’s cabin, where he and his officers witnessed each man’s signature or mark on their last will and testament, naming Jane How “Friend & Executrix” of their respective estate, large or small—most likely small.23
On February 4, the Randolph stood down the Delaware accompanied by the Hornet, the Fly, and several merchantmen under their convoy. Although the weather was clear, the pilot mixed his expertise with a heightened dose of caution—no pilot had ever sent an American frigate down Whorekiln Road before, and he wanted no mishaps.