The First American Army

by Bruce Chadwick

  Whipple, and others, worried that the privateers would seize cargo from friendly ships, too, for the money, and that some would wind up behaving no better than pirates. In a letter filled with sarcasm, John Pickering wrote to his brother Timothy, a congressional delegate, just after the war ended that many sailors and port workers seemed demoralized by the peace because it ended their opportunities to make money on privateers.16

  Of course, the punishments for those captured on privateers were severe. Those not killed or drowned in hotly contested sea battles were imprisoned in the wretched British prison ships in New York harbor or, if captured in the waters of the Caribbean, put in irons in hot, rancid jails on malaria-infested islands held by the British there. Some went to prisons in England.

  None of this concerned John Greenwood. The young private had survived the invasion of Canada, smallpox, and the crossing of the Delaware; he would not worry about being captured on the high seas. As every sailor he knew who had sailed with the privateers assured him, the small, sleek American boats could always outrun the lumbering British warships.

  In 1778, he signed on to the Cumberland, bound for Barbados in the Bahamas with one hundred thirty men, as a steward but worked as a midshipman. At first, the men were nervous because sea combat was dangerous. Men were killed and their ships sunk or wrecked. One vivid description was written by John Paul Jones after his Ranger took on the Drake: “The Drake being rather astern of the Ranger, I ordered the helm up, and gave her the first broadside. The action was warm, close, and obstinate. It lasted an hour and five minutes, when the enemy called for quarters, her fore and main top sail yards being both cut away, and down on the cap; the fore top gallant yard and mizzen gaff both hanging up and down along the mast; the second ensign which they had hoisted shot away and hanging over the quarter gallery in the water; the jib shot away and hanging into the water; her sails and rigging entirely cut to pieces, her masts and yards all wounded and her hull also very much galled.”17

  Captain Nathaniel Fanning was just as graphic in recounting his sea battle with the British ship None Such, a privateer that not only carried valuable cargo, but 127 British soldiers bound for America. He wrote, “We soon got within reach of her guns, when she began to fire upon us. But we after this soon got astern of her . . . We now [fired on] the privateer, brought our broadside to bear upon her stern and poured it into them.”18

  The Cumberland’s first encounter was easy pickings. The vessel seized a sinking British ship, wrecked by a storm that suddenly appeared, and, with an officer appointed as prize master, repaired her, and sent her on to French-held Martinique for the sale of her goods so that the crew could pocket the money. The Cumberland’s crew, delighted at such early and effortless success, could not wait until it reached the busy shipping lanes of the Caribbean, where British vessels carrying valuable cargo could be found rather easily. For days they moved over the water with no other ships in sight, the men lounging on the deck of the ship as its sails filled up with wind and its boards creaked. The hot winter sun of the region beat down on them, their hats and rolled up bandanas covering their foreheads giving them little refuge from it. Their idyll amid the rolling waves of the Atlantic south of Florida ended suddenly just after dawn on January 26, 1779, however, when they spotted the Pomona, a thirty-sixgun British frigate with three hundred men, one of the Crown’s most famous ships. The Pomona bore down on them, its mast continually bobbing up and down as the ship cut through the waves.

  The Pomona began firing her decks of cannon several hours later, their smoke nearly engulfing the sides and deck of the vessel. The cannonading killed an officer sitting on top of the Cumberland’s main mast with his spyglass. The captain of the Cumberland knew that his ship was no match for the British ship and wanted to sail away with as much speed as his ship could muster. To lighten the vessel, he ordered eight of the ship’s eighteen heavy cannon tossed into the water, but the Pomona was already too near, sailing in behind her, and closing fast.

  Greenwood wrote, “The frigate, being right in our wake within short distance, kept her course and shooting close up under our larboard quarter, gave us four or five double headed and round shot. Some flew among our rigging and one ball striking us abaft the forechains, went through and through the ship, making her shake again.”

  The captain of the Cumberland devised a desperate plan that depended on ingenuity and sheer luck. He would let the Pomona crash right into the Cumberland’s side. That would enable the men of the Cumberland, armed with cutlasses, muskets, and pistols, to quickly board the Pomona under the cover of the smoke from the cannon and capture the British frigate in a bold maneuver.

  When the weapons cabinet doors were thrown open, however, the men of the Cumberland found less than thirty swords and only a few muskets. There would be no fight. The captain decided to surrender, striking his colors when the captain of the Pomona yelled across the water for him to do so.

  The boarding of the Cumberland was delayed by the distance between the ships and high waves that tossed both vessels up and down and made it difficult to close the space between them. A comedy followed, according to Greenwood. The men of the Cumberland, resigned to capture and prison, decided to have one last fling. They broke open the liquor casks in the hold and began to pour the contents down their throats; many became drunk. The drunken sailors then raced to the storeroom where the captain had put dozens of British uniforms taken from the men of the ship they captured earlier. The inebriated men were certain that if they dressed like the Redcoats they would not be jailed. Unable to distinguish coat and trouser sizes in their stupor, they put on uniforms that did not fit, their pants legs dragging across the deck and their arms sticking through short sleeves of coats designed for much smaller men. Many of the inebriated “Redcoats” then collapsed on the deck and had to be tossed into the boats to take them to the Pomona, “like hogs,” Greenwood wrote. The officers of the Cumberland rowed over to the Pomona but the rough waves upended their boat at the last moment, smashing it against the side of the frigate. The British had to lower their own boat and fish the Americans out of the ocean.

  “It would have made a saint laugh to see the men tumbling about,” Greenwood observed.

  The last laugh was on Greenwood. He carefully wrapped up several pounds of chocolate, some sugar, and some biscuits in a handkerchief, put some of his clothes in a small bag with the sweets and climbed into the longboat to be taken to the Pomona. There, a teenage British sailor just as young as Greenwood told him that the captain would seize his candy and biscuits. He offered to take them and hold them for Greenwood until they could split the sweets later. Greenwood breathed a sigh of relief, thanked the teen, and handed him the handkerchief. He never saw the sweets again.

  The Americans were rushed into the dark hold of the ship that was already filled with supplies. “Here we were stowed so close that we had no room to stand, sit, or lie, except partly on each other, for with the exception of the captain, doctor, first and second lieutenants, and captain’s clerk, we had all officers and men, to the number of 125, been placed indiscriminately together.”

  Their prison in Barbados was awful. Greenwood wrote, “Our dungeon consisted of three apartments connected together, the floors of which were nothing but mud and clay, and, on account of the heavy rains prevalent in the West Indies, the water had settled in the center of these to the depth of two inches. Every part of the place was wet and damp yet here on the ground we were obliged to lie, having been robbed of everything except what we had on our backs. No bread was furnished us, nor do I recollect that they gave us a particle during the five months we were kept on the island.”

  It was in that jail that Greenwood was scarred for life. Another prisoner, assigned to assist with the kitchen facilities, stumbled while carrying a large pot of scalding hot soup as he walked through the yard. The soup pot tipped over and its contents spilled over Greenwood, barechested, lying on the ground to relax. The soup burns left a permanent scar on his shou
lder and chest.

  A few days later, word spread that on the following morning British navy and English privateer captains would arrive to choose men to be placed on their ships as impressed seamen for the remainder of the war. Greenwood and five others attempted to escape to avoid that fate, but they were caught. Greenwood then came up with another scheme. He talked a doctor into giving him a double dose of an emetic designed to make men purge themselves. His timing was perfect and just as the prisoners were led into the yard for sea assignment his systems erupted; he became violently ill and then fell down in the dirt courtyard.

  His scheme almost backfired. Somehow, Spanish inmates in their prison obtained knives and used them during an altercation among themselves on the floor above the dungeons where the Americans were held. Guards, local police, and a mob of townspeople rushed the jail to put down the revolt and some charged toward the American cells, thinking they were responsible for the melee.

  “Prepared to sell our lives as dear as possible, we prepared to meet them,” Private Greenwood wrote. “We first brought close up to the door a half barrel or tub which had been placed in the room for the accommodation of several of our men who were at the time very sick and five or six of us stood ready with tin pots to greet the enemy if they attempted to unlock the door. We were likewise armed with junk bottles which, holding by the necks, we intended to dash against the grated door so that the fragments would fly among them. They saw our warlike preparations and when we stirred up our ammunition, afraid . . . they soon left the doorway clean.”

  That stroke of bad luck was offset by another of good fortune a short time later when the prisoners were ordered released and put on a schooner bound for Martinique. By chance, on that island Greenwood was spotted by an old schoolmate from Boston who was an officer on a ship bound for New York. That ship’s captain turned out to be a cousin of Greenwood’s father. He took Greenwood to New York, where he was certain he could hide from British troops occupying the city.

  The voyage was a nightmare. The old and battered ship, badly in need of repairs, continually took on water and had four feet in the hold during most of the trip north. The crew was struck by yellow fever halfway up the coast; most fell ill and several men died. Then, off of Long Island, they were intercepted by a British privateer carrying numerous guns. Greenwood’s ship had port holes for guns, but no cannon on board. The ingenious private scampered about the deck in search of all the wood he could find and then, wielding an axe and hammer with as much agility as he could muster, he built fake wooden cannon that jutted out of the port holes enough to look believable. He and other sailors took extra jackets and nailed them near the cannon and on the deck rails to make it appear that the ship’s crew was several times its actual number. The ruse worked. The English vessel sailed close enough so that it’s captain could see what appeared to be a long train of cannon and a large crew and turned away.

  Once on shore in Boston a few days later, free at last, Greenwood was relieved. “No emperor or king could feel so happy as I then was, and there is a good and true saying that no person ever knows what happiness or pleasure is without first seeing adversity,” he wrote.

  Restless as always, Private Greenwood could not relax. He was soon hungry for the war again. “I could not long content myself while my fellow countrymen were abroad, contending for their freedom,” he wrote.

  He signed on for another voyage aboard a privateer, this one the wellarmed Tartar (there were several ships of that name), with twenty-eight guns and a crew of one hundred fifty, commanded by Captain David Porter of Boston. It was Porter’s third ship in two years. After a stormtossed sail south, the Tartar moved into the warm waters of the Caribbean and immediately began to take British ships. It was a small miracle, because the Tartar was a war-weary vessel. Greenwood lamented, “Our ship was so old, crazy, and leaky that we were obliged to nail strips of rawhide over the sides of her upper works in order to keep the oakum in place.”

  To make up for its lack of speed, the captain of the Tartar and his crew relied on ingenuity. Every few weeks they painted the hull of the ship a different color. Sometimes they appeared to sail as a merchant ship, hiding their guns. At other times, the captain hid the guns and struck most of the sails to appear disabled to lure a prize ship close before opening up with his cannon. One very successful trick was to fly an American flag on the top mast of small schooner they captured and a British flag on the Tartar. The schooner would chase ships that would turn and sail toward the “British” warship for protection—and be captured.

  The Tartar soon became one of the chief targets of the British fleet in Jamaica and three warships were sent out with the sole mission of sinking her. They found her, too, and Porter, knowing he could not take on three ships at once, raced for French-held Port-au-Prince, in Haiti, but did not make it. The three ships closed in on him and he turned into an inlet short of Port-au-Prince. There the Tartar ran around on some rocks and sank; the crew fled.

  Greenwood found passage on another privateer, the General Lincoln, bound for New York, but the Lincoln was stopped at sea by a British warship. Prior to its seizure, the captain had asked if any of the crew could help repair the ship. The private volunteered and spent the entire voyage trying to fix the leaks that caused several feet of water to spill into the hold of the Lincoln every day. The crew started to good naturedly call him “the carpenter.”

  When the British seized the ship, their captain asked around for the man everyone called “the carpenter” and told Greenwood, when he found him, that he needed someone to stay with the Lincoln to keep up with repairs as the British sailed it to New York as their prize; the rest of the crew would be put in irons. Greenwood, by then tired of prisons of any kind, kept up his appearances as “the carpenter” and stayed with the Lincoln all the way up the coast. A crowd of several hundred curious people waited for the Lincoln to dock at Manhattan, preparing to board her for the ritual inspection of the public that the British permitted because they thought it built up Loyalist morale. Greenwood waited until half the curious crowd had surged across the gangplank and on to the deck and then slowly, unobtrusively, slipped between them and walked away in a calm and very successful escape to the congested streets of Manhattan.

  He had fled into British occupied New York, though, and had to avoid capture. The English would soon be looking for “the carpenter.” There were only two New Yorkers whom he knew, Ahasuerus Turk Jr., the instrument manufacturer who had sold him several fifes just before he traveled north to Canada with his regiment in 1776, and a friend of his father’s named Francis Hill. Turk offered him refuge until he located Hill. He lived in New York for six weeks, constantly ducking any British soldiers he saw, always trying to figure out a way to get out of the occupied city and back to Boston. Finally, Hill and a chaplain that he knew concocted a ruse. The chaplain persuaded someone in the military to simply add Greenwood to a group of prisoners scheduled for immediate parole and about to sail to Boston. Young Greenwood was free again.

  Cleverness seemed to run in the family. Greenwood’s older brother Isaac, who served on the crew of another privateer, was captured and imprisoned in the West Indies. He escaped by feigning sickness to enter and then escape from a prison hospital and then, dressed as a British naval officer, made it on board a merchant ship and fled to the U.S.

  Despite his numerous escapes, John Greenwood had yet to learn his lesson about the dangers of sailing on privateers. Upon his return to Boston, he sought out more privateers and signed on as a seaman on the Aurora with his former captain, David Porter, at the helm, for an expedition to Port-au-Prince that nearly resulted in his death. This time it was not at the hands of the British or local jailers, but misfortune.

  The Aurora sailed to Port-au-Prince without incident, but an explosion in port sunk her. Private Greenwood, ill, had earlier taken medicine that made him groggy. Unable to work any longer, he had climbed into his hammock, below deck and near a cannon port hole, and fell asleep. The roar
of the explosion awakened him. He opened his eyes and felt his body sliding toward the other side of the boat. He looked toward that side and saw the boat begin to roll away from him. The cannon on that side crashed into the port hole and water gushed in. He saw that water was coming into every port hole on the far side of the ship and felt her start to sink. He rolled out of the hammock, grabbed the cannon next to him and climbed up its barrel, out of the port hole and scrambled off the ship to save his life.

  The tragedy was quickly followed by comedy. Back in Boston a few months later, Greenwood signed on with the Race Horse, captained by Nathaniel Thayer, bound for the West Indies. In the middle of the night, serving as watch, he saw a ship sailing toward him. He summoned the captain, who always feared capture, and the commander ordered sails rigged for a getaway. It turned out that the vessel was a prize captured by the British and captained by a woefully inexperienced sailor trying to bring her to a port. The ship had been floating around the Caribbean for days, completely lost. Captain Thayer seized the ship himself, promising the grateful British officer that he would get his crew to Barbados and release them.

  He told Greenwood to serve as the new captain and take five crewmen to bring the ship to port. That night Greenwood nearly ran into a huge British man-of-war sailing nearby. He knew he could neither outfight or outrun the ship, but might trick her commander. In the dark, their captain knew just as little about “Captain” Greenwood as the American knew about him. The novice captain had a man-of-war trumpet on the ship and a single, small, swivel-gun cannon. He sounded the trumpet and shouted with convincing bravado that he would sink the British ship if its commander did not heave to and surrender. There was no response from the man-of-war’s captain, trying to figure out what ship was out there in the dark, and if it was in range for his guns.