Whaler, merchantman, and slaver were training a host of incomparable seamen destined to harry the commerce of England under the new-born Stars and Stripes, and now, in 1775, on the brink of actual war, Parliament flung a final provocation and aroused the furious enmity of the fishermen who thronged the Grand Bank.Lord North proposed to forbid the colonies to export fish to those foreign markets in which every seacoast village was vitally concerned, and he also contemplated driving the fishing fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland.This was to rob six thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin among the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from which sailed hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners.This measure became law notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one peers of the realm who declared: "We dissent because the attempt to coerce by famine the whole body of the inhabitants of great and populous provinces is without example in the history of this, or perhaps, of any civilized nation."The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation without representation but whetted their anger with grudges more robust.They had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the Bay of Biscay to Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental Congress ready to issue privateering commissions and letters of marque than for them it was up anchor and away to bag a Britisher.Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled his arrival with a deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than he received orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred eager privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern rendezvous.The timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms and nine-pounders, muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases, boarding-pikes, hand grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and doubleheaded shot.
In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and Baltimore, crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a strapping recruiting officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and able-bodied landsmen who had a mind to distinguish themselves in the glorious cause of their country and make their fortunes."Many a ship's company was mustered between noon and sunset, including men who had served in armed merchantmen and who in times of nominal peace had fought the marauders of Europe or whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar.Never was a race of seamen so admirably fitted for the daring trade of privateering as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail schooners, and smart square-riggers, their sides checkered with gun-ports, and ready to drive to sea like hawks.
In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both absurd and sublime.Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men aboard, mounting one or two old guns, sallied out in the expectation of gold and glory, only to be captured by the first British cruiser that chanced to sight them.A few even sailed with no cannon at all, confident of taking them out of the first prize overhauled by laying alongside--and so in some cases they actually did.
The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in winning the war than has been commonly recognized.This fact, however, was clearly perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The London Spectator" candidly admitted: "The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of assurances at that time will prove what their diminutive strength was able to effect in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred pennants were flying on our coast.Were we able to prevent their going in and out, or stop them from taking our trade and our storeships even in sight of our garrisons? Besides, were they not in the English and Irish Channels, picking up our homeward bound trade, sending their prizes into French and Spanish ports to the great terror of our merchants and shipowners?"The naval forces of the Thirteen Colonies were pitifully feeble in comparison with the mighty fleets of the enemy whose flaming broadsides upheld the ancient doctrine that "the Monarchs of Great Britain have a peculiar and Sovereign authority upon the Ocean...from the Laws of God and of Nature, besides an uninterrupted Fruition of it for so many Ages past as that its Beginnings cannot be traced out."** "The Seaman's Vade-Mecum." London, 1744.
