If By Sea

At ten o’clock on the moonlit night of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere arrived at Dr. Joseph Warren’s elegant residence on Hanover Street in a state of high excitement. He was about to receive his orders. The dapper, Harvard-educated, thirty-four-year-old Dr. Warren was president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, the extralegal revolutionary government that had seized power in the Bay Colony in 1774. With Samuel Adams and John Hancock hiding in Lexington, Dr.Warren had become the patriot leader in Boston.

A few blocks away, seven hundred British light infantrymen and grenadiers in full battle gear were embarking from the foot of Boston Common in twenty boats, manned by dozens of seamen from the fleet in the harbor, for a one-mile dash across the Charles River to Lechmere Point in East Cambridge. From there, as Warren and Revere well knew from their spies, the redcoats would be marching west to Concord via Lexington to arrest Adams and Hancock for treason, and to destroy arms and military supplies the Provincial Congress had hidden around Concord.

King George III, who followed events in the colonies closely but with little understanding, believed that removing a few rebel leaders and making a show of force would go a long way toward snuffing out the incipient revolt in Massachusetts. Lieutenant General Thomas Gage, the commander of British forces in North America and the royal governor of Massachusetts, had four thousand regulars in Boston, supported by a fleet of twenty-four men-of-war. Surely, the king reasoned, this was enough to suppress the deluded Massachusetts upstarts, who, as far as he knew, had no army to speak of, and no navy at all. “Once those rebels have felt a smart blow,” he wrote, “they will submit.”

At this point in British history the king had regained a considerable amount of power, dominating the government in a way George I and George II never had. George Otto Trevelyan described him: “Intent, heart and soul, on his favorite scheme for establishing a system of personal rule, under which all threads of administration should center in the royal closet, he entertained an instinctive antipathy to high-minded and independent men of all political parties, [selecting] his instruments among those who were willing to be subservient.”

Major John Pitcairn, leader of the marine regiment in Boston and second in command of the column marching to Lexington and Concord, agreed with the king’s approach. He wrote to Lord Sandwich, the first lord of the Admiralty, “Vigorous measures at present would soon put an end to this rebellion. The deluded people are made to believe . . . they are invincible . . . When this army is ordered to act against them, they will soon be convinced that they are very insignificant when opposed to regular troops.” In another letter to Sandwich, Pitcairn wrote, “I am satisfied that one active campaign, a smart action, and burning two or three of their towns, will set things to rights.” The march to Concord with the arrest of Adams and Hancock was the kind of “smart action” the king wanted.

Boston in those days was a tiny, pear-shaped peninsula tenuously hitched to the mainland by a 120-foot-wide, half-mile-long isthmus called the Neck. With mudflats on either side, it was regularly submerged during the high tides of a full moon, turning the town into a veritable island. For those traveling west, the fastest way out of the city was by boat. The entire British column could be across the river in an hour; by two o’clock the redcoats could be in Lexington, only twelve miles away. Concord was just an hour’s march from there.

After leaving Dr. Warren’s house, Revere told his young neighbor Robert Newman to hang two lanterns from the belfry of nearby Old North Church, Boston’s highest point and most prominent landmark. With the help of vestrymen John Pulling and Thomas Barnard, also Revere’s neighbors, the twenty-three-year-old Newman climbed the belfry steps. Working in the dark, he flashed two lanterns from a window above the great bells, signaling Charlestown patriots that the regulars were crossing the Charles River by boat rather than marching overland across the Neck. Revere then collected two companions, Joshua Bentley and Thomas Richardson, and hurried down to the mouth of the Charles in North Boston, where his twenty-foot skiff was tucked in a clump of bushes. Less than a mile upstream the regulars continued crawling across the river, their boats looking like giant water bugs. It was now ten-thirty. The three patriots launched the skiff into calm water, and while Bentley and Richardson rowed with muffled oars, Revere sat in the stern sheets searching the dark outline of Charlestown, where a fast horse waited.

The town wharf was only six hundred yards away, but he doubted they would be landing there tonight, for riding at single anchor directly in front of him was HMS Somerset, a gigantic, 64-gun sail of the line, her nightlights blazing fore and aft. Revere wasn’t surprised by her presence; she’d been in position for several days, taking the place of two smaller warships, Canceaux and Lively. Admiral Samuel Graves, commander of the British fleet in North America, kept a warship stationed in the ferryway to intimidate Charlestown patriots who might be tempted to set artillery on Bunker Hill or Breed’s Hill. He warned that if they did, men-of-war would incinerate the town. Such an action, as he was well aware, would be highly pleasing to the king and his circle in London. Graves directed operations personally from his flagship, the 50-gun Preston, which never left the harbor.

Revere assumed the Somerset would be on high alert, watching for alarm riders, but he was determined to slip past her. “It was then young flood,” he recalled many years later, “the [Somerset] was winding [on her single anchor] and the moon was rising.” He naturally expected a lookout or, more likely, a tar on a guard boat to spot him. Deserters were a constant problem for the men-of-war, and they patrolled every night. If a guard boat captured Revere, red-coated marines would clap him and his mates in irons and throw them into a cramped wooden brig in the suffocating bowels of the giant battleship. It could be weeks, even months, before he and his friends breathed fresh air again. Admiral Graves might even hang them.

The trio circled the Somerset to the east, being careful not to row too far in front of her, lest one of the other sixteen men-of-war in the harbor notice them. If the warships were on alert—which Revere had to assume they would be—it was hard to imagine how they could miss him. This particular night, however, the Somerset had no guard boats running. They were all being used downstream to ferry troops across the Charles. In less than thirty minutes Revere’s skiff glided unnoticed past the Somerset’s bow and brushed up against Charlestown’s main wharf near the old battery. After he hopped out, his companions rowed back the very way they had just come, passing once more under the Somerset’s nose. And again, she ignored them. Unaccountably, her captain, Edward LeCras, had received no orders from Admiral Graves to stop boat traffic between Boston and Charlestown, or even to be on the lookout for alarm riders, though General Gage had specifically requested Graves to do both.

Not only did Graves not have his warships on alert, but he had also failed to provide enough boats to ferry the infantrymen across the Charles all at once. As a result, a crossing that should have taken an hour became a lengthy expedition, consuming more than three hours. That gave Revere and his compatriot, William Dawes (whom Dr. Warren had sent by land), plenty of time to gallop into the countryside and ignite the alarm riders who would alert every village and town that the regulars were out.

Bells began tolling and alarm muskets firing, as young farmers rushed to village greens where their town militias were assembling. Those immediately adjacent to Boston answered the call first. As word spread, militiamen from the rest of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire turned out. In a few hours, thousands were marching toward Concord. “A sudden alarm brought them together, animated with the noblest spirit,” Dr.Warren later wrote to Sam Adams. “They left their houses, their families, with nothing but the clothes on their backs, without a day’s provision, and many without a farthing in their pockets.”

The militiamen had been in training for months. The patriots had been organizing since the fall of 1774 to counter an expected British outbreak from Boston. After establishing a separate government in Massachusetts, the Provincial Congress had urged all the towns to begin serious militia training and prepare 25 percent of their toughest members to be ready at a minute’s notice.

The patriots had already won the first battle of the Revolution by gaining political control of all the towns in Massachusetts with the exception of Scituate and Marshfield. Elected officers committed to the patriot cause replaced the old Tory leadership in the town militias. Once in power, the new leaders began drilling their men in earnest, creating the building blocks for a revolutionary army.

No attempt, however, was made to organize sea militias or create a revolutionary navy. There were no precedents for such a force in the colonial past. Town militias, in contrast, had existed from the earliest times and were easily applied to the new army. Furthermore, the Royal Navy appeared so dominant that it would have seemed lunacy for anyone to organize a patriot sea force along the lines of its land army. And no one did.

British Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, commanding officer of the troops marching to Concord, was determined to carry out his orders no matter what delays or obstacles he encountered. When he reassembled his men after crossing the Charles River, he hoped they could march to Concord and back without opposition. After all, General Gage had given no orders telling him what to do if the patriots attacked him. Gage was hoping that when the farmers saw a large force of regulars dressed in all their finery they would withdraw.

As Smith marched his column toward Lexington, he began hearing the bells ringing and guns firing. He heard so much noise that at three o’clock when he reached Menotomy (now Arlington), the town adjacent to Lexington, he sent for reinforcements. He also ordered Major Pitcairn, his second in command, to march six companies ahead to Lexington as fast as he could to make up for lost time, while Smith followed behind with the rest. At five o’clock, Pitcairn, who was expecting to teach the rebels a lesson, was approaching Lexington Green. There he saw seventy-seven men of the town militia assembled with their muskets.

As Pitcairn’s companies approached, Captain John Parker, the elected leader of Lexington’s militia and a veteran of the French and Indian War, could see the disparity of forces and ordered his men not to initiate any foolhardy action. He had no intention of fighting against such odds. Parker was not leaving the green, either; he intended to remain and watch the redcoat column as it passed. Although Parker had good control of his men, Pitcairn did not. Without orders or provocation, his redcoats began running wildly toward the patriots, firing their bayonet-tipped muskets as they went. Parker and his men fled before the onslaught, eight being killed and nine wounded before Pitcairn could restore order. Only one of his soldiers had received a scratch.

Lieutenant Colonel Smith now came up with the rest of his men and continued down the road to Concord. As he marched, word of the Lexington massacre spread and the gathering militiamen, their anger raised to a high pitch, prepared for a bloody fight. Smith reached Concord by nine o’clock and spent the next three hours destroying a few supplies and munitions and waiting for reinforcements. Shots were exchanged at North Bridge over the Concord River and some of Smith’s men were killed, as the patriot ranks swelled ominously. By noon Smith decided he could wait no longer. Pretending he had accomplished his mission, he began the long trek back to Boston.

Patriot militia units that were well protected by stone walls and trees now guarded key points on the road between Concord and Lexington.The first was at Meriam’s Corner, where a pitched battle broke out that staggered Smith. Another occurred at Nelson’s Bridge, where Captain Parker and his Lexington men exacted retribution for the surprise attack on them earlier. As Smith’s bloodied column stumbled toward Lexington, it was obvious they would never make it back to Boston. Still thinking reinforcements would arrive, Smith refused to surrender. Fortunately for him, General Gage had dispatched, albeit belatedly, twelve hundred men under Brigadier General Lord Percy. They appeared on a hill overlooking Lexington with two brass field pieces just as Smith was about to give up, and he raced into their welcoming arms. But the number of armed provincials kept growing, and Percy had to fight his way back to Boston.

At this point Dr. Joseph Warren and patriot Brigadier General William Heath arrived on the scene. Thanks to Graves’s lax oversight of the harbor, Warren had crossed over the Charlestown ferryway earlier that morning and galloped to Lexington, arriving shortly after Percy. On the way he met General Heath, one of five general officers of militia appointed by the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Heath had just reached the outskirts of Lexington. In the fast-moving situation, Warren and Heath gave the patriots what direction they could.

A full-scale battle developed between the equivalent of two brigades of British regulars led by an outstanding general and at least twice that number of patriot militiamen. Although greatly outnumbered, Lord Percy had the advantage of unity of command and experience. With cool courage and monumental determination, he fought his way to Charlestown Neck, arriving just after sunset. General Heath was close on his heels. But lacking firm control of the diverse militias or any artillery, he and Dr. Warren decided not to cross the Neck and fight it out with Percy in the dark.

Admiral Graves used the Somerset’s boats to ferry what was left of Percy’s exhausted force back to Boston. At the same time, suddenly aware that he might have some explaining to do to the Admiralty, he finally issued orders to the Somerset’s captain to stop patriot boat traffic moving between Boston and Charlestown. Later Graves told the Admiralty that the whole fracas had taken him by surprise.

By the end of the day fourteen thousand well-drilled, well-led patriot militiamen had answered the call. In the succeeding forty-eight to seventy-two hours their ranks would swell to over twenty thousand—as many men under arms as existed in the whole British army. Seventy-three British regulars were dead from the fighting, one hundred seventy-four wounded, and twenty-six captured. The patriots suffered forty-nine killed, forty-one wounded, and five captured. “From beginning to end,” British Lieutenant John Barker lamented, “[this expedition] was [as] ill planned and ill executed as it was possible to be.”

As bad as the defeat was, it would have been far worse had the patriots been as organized on the water as they were on land.They might have boarded and captured some of the men-of-war dozing in the harbor that night, including the Somerset. Fortunately for Admiral Graves, none of the patriot leaders in Massachusetts had given any thought to creating a navy, though the raw materials for one were readily available. Only when the fighting began did their thoughts turn to the sea. And even then, they failed to recognize where their real naval strength lay.

Admiral Graves, however, saw it clearly. Once he awoke to the fact that a war was on, he became anxious about the safety of his ships. He saw threats coming from two places in particular: hills and whaleboats. If rebel artillery were placed on Dorchester Heights or the high ground in Charlestown, it could force him out of the harbor. As for whaleboats, he wrote to the Admiralty, “[They] lay in abundance in different creeks round this harbor, [and might] in a calm night . . . surprise one of the frigates of the squadron and carry her by suddenly pouring in great numbers.” He might have added that if enough whaleboats were so deployed, the entire fleet in Boston, which fluctuated in numbers and was at times quite small, could be in danger.

In the hours and days immediately following the fighting, Dr. Warren, as head of the Provincial Congress’s executive body, the Committee of Safety, worked tirelessly from his new headquarters at Jonathan Hastings House in Cambridge. Forty-eight-year-old General Artemus Ward, an honored veteran of the French and Indian War and head of the Massachusetts militia, moved in with him. Warren, as the political leader, was in command, but the two worked smoothly together.With firm support from the full Provincial Congress, they focused on keeping the militiamen from returning to their farms. Warren offered enlistments of eight months and pay from the Provincial Congress if they would join the incipient patriot army. This and their burning patriotism seemed to be enough, as hundreds and then thousands signed on. No one envisaged a long struggle. Everyone assumed there would be an early settlement and the men would be home before Christmas.

But while Warren, Ward, and their associates were organizing the new army, using whaleboats to challenge Admiral Graves never seems to have occurred to them. Dr. Warren knew the essential shape an army would take, but he had no conception of what a successful sea force might look like. Although Warren had no vision of a navy, John Adams, his cousin Sam Adams, and some of their colleagues did. Once the shooting had started—“this glorious crisis” Sam Adams called it—the Adamses and some of their associates turned their thoughts to building a prestigious American navy of large frigates and sail of the line. They took these bold ideas to the Continental Congress, not realizing where the patriots’ real naval strength lay—in the humble whaleboats that worried Admiral Graves.

In the midst of organizing an army, Dr. Warren was also working hard to get the true story of Lexington and Concord before the British public. At his urging, the Provincial Congress on April 22 appointed Elbridge Gerry of Marblehead to chair a committee of nine and charged it with collecting eyewitness accounts. With characteristic energy, Gerry and his associates interviewed dozens of spectators and participants, including captured British soldiers. Their research showed unmistakably that General Gage’s infantrymen had initiated the bloodshed, massacring the minutemen assembled on Lexington Green.

Well schooled in the importance of propaganda by his mentor Sam Adams, Dr. Warren wanted these facts spread by London’s newspapers as soon as possible. Richard Derby, a prominent Salem merchant and solid member of the Provincial Congress, offered his family’s yacht-like schooner Quero for the job. His son John, an experienced captain, volunteered to sail her. Attentive to every detail, the tireless Dr. Warren instructed Derby to take a roundabout route to London. “Make for Dublin,” he urged, “or any good port in Ireland, and from thence cross to Scotland or England, and hasten to London . . . so that [you] may escape all cruisers that may be found in the chops of the [English] Channel.”

The Quero set out quietly on the night of April 27, eight days after the battle of Lexington and Concord. As the sleek schooner fell away from Derby wharf with no lanterns lit, she appeared little more than an indistinct shadow in the dim moonlight. Salem Neck was immediately to port, and before passing it, William Carleton, the Quero’s master, had all his canvas up, trying to catch every breath of wind. He would need all of the schooner’s speed that night. A 20-gun British frigate, HMS Lively, was patrolling the waters off nearby Marblehead. While Derby suspected she might be looking for him, he wasn’t overly concerned. Even if the warship spotted her, the Quero would be hard to catch, unless the Lively managed an exceptionally lucky shot in the dark from a distance.

Still, Derby knew the Quero was in a race. Four days earlier, the British fast packet Sukey had departed Boston with Lieutenant Joseph Nunn aboard, carrying General Gage’s official dispatches. Anticipating that London would view Lexington and Concord as a calamity, Gage, the consummate military bureaucrat, had artfully composed an account that minimized the bad news and had it aboard the Sukey on April 24, five days after the battle. By the time Derby put to sea, the Quero had four days to make up. The tiny schooner was fast, and unlike the Sukey, she carried no cargo, only ballast. Nonetheless, Derby would be hard put to beat her to England.

Thinking Warren’s instructions unnecessary, Derby ignored them and sailed straight to Portsmouth, England, navigating boldly up the Channel to the Isle of Wight, where Carleton deposited him and then put back out to sea, planning a rendezvous later at Plymouth. Once ashore on the Isle of Wight, Derby rented a pair-oared wherry that carried him to the mainland through Britain’s giant naval base at Portsmouth. As he viewed the great warships in the harbor, he clutched Dr. Warren’s sensational documents under his surtout. Waiting on the dock as he landed was a post chaise to London, and he hopped aboard, arriving in the capital twenty-nine days after slipping past the Lively in Salem Bay. The Sukey and her unsuspecting captain, William Brown, along with his most important passenger, Lieutenant Joseph Nunn, were still far out at sea.

Derby hurried directly to Benjamin Franklin’s quarters. To his surprise Dr. Franklin, the longtime London agent for Massachusetts, had already left for America. In spite of his unceasing efforts to avoid it, war now appeared inevitable to him.Without hesitating, Derby rushed to the lodgings of Franklin’s associate and rival, Arthur Lee, who took Warren’s documents to Mansion House, the official residence of the lord mayor of London, John Wilkes. A supporter of the American cause and a bitter foe of the king, Wilkes instantly grasped the significance of the papers and brought them to the antigovernment London Evening Post, which printed them immediately. Other newspapers picked up the story, issuing special editions, and in a few days the entire country had the news.

The Post’s story stunned the British. While they were enjoying the beautiful spring of 1775, they hadn’t been paying attention to the conflict back in Massachusetts. They assumed—as their king did—that General Gage and his four thousand regulars would easily put a stop to the disturbances in Boston. Now there came reports that Gage had suffered a crushing defeat. How could this be? Great Britain was supreme among the world’s powers, without rival since her victory over France in the Seven Years War; it was absurd to think that a few undisciplined peasants could withstand the power of His Majesty’s armies. The king refused to believe the newspaper accounts, assuming them to be based on rebel sources, though he was greatly agitated that an official report wasn’t available to contradict them.

The Sukey finally reached London on June 9, thirteen days after Derby landed at Portsmouth. Lieutenant Nunn, still unaware of any urgency, waited until the following morning before delivering the dispatches to Lord Dartmouth at Whitehall. Dartmouth, secretary of state for the colonies, knew of the king’s distress and was relieved to see Nunn’s dispatches. As he read them, however, they confirmed what the newspapers had been saying, with the exception of Gage’s claim that the Americans had been the aggressors. Nor did the sparse, carefully worded paragraphs deny the rebel victory. Dartmouth was crestfallen; the king would be furious.

Dr.Warren had hoped the Quero’s mission would lead to negotiations and an end to the bloodshed. Among the papers he had entrusted to Derby was a letter for Arthur Lee. “Lord Chatham and our friends,” Warren wrote, “must make up the breach immediately or never. The next news from England must be conciliatory, or the connection between us ends, however fatal the consequences may be.” But when Lord Dartmouth presented the dispatches, the king reacted angrily toward both the rebels and his hapless general. Never for a moment did he consider a political compromise. Instead of the conciliatory approach Dr. Warren hoped for, he renewed his commitment to crushing the rebellion, hanging its leaders, and imposing a draconian regime on America that would ensure she never rose up again. The latter part of the plan he kept to himself; it could only be inferred from the unguarded comments of his more belligerent supporters.

The king was convinced that entering into talks with the likes of Dr. Warren would lead to the loss of not only Britain’s North American possessions but the rest of the empire as well, including India and Ireland. Even the homeland might become infected with New England’s leveling ideas. Speaking for the king, Lord Dartmouth wrote to the Admiralty, “It is His Majesty’s firm resolution of which I am directed to acquaint your Lordships, that every measure be pursued for suppressing, by the most vigorous efforts, by land and sea, this unnatural rebellion which menaces the subversion of the present happy constitution. To this end it is His Majesty’s pleasure that the Admiral commanding upon the Boston station, do carry on such operations upon the seacoasts of the four governments of New England as he shall judge most effectual for suppressing in conjunction with His Majesty’s land forces, the rebellion which is now openly avowed and supported in these colonies.”

Thus in spite of the patriots’ desire to end the war swiftly through a negotiation, the king’s hostile attitude prolonged the fighting. Chief among his instruments would be the Royal Navy. Without its enormous power, he could never have contemplated waging a colonial war three thousand miles away. With it, he could imagine an easy victory.

The overwhelming superiority of Britain’s sea force was so obvious that challenging it would appear at first glance to be madness. But in the first days and weeks of the war, important naval activity erupted spontaneously in a number of places that suggested how a successful American navy might be organized. Ironically, leaders like the Adamses, who never lacked the courage to defy the Royal Navy, failed to grasp the lessons of this activity.

During the first week of May, for instance, while on patrol in Buzzards Bay, British Captain John Linzee, commander of the 14-gun sloop-of-war Falcon, sent a lieutenant and twenty men in a tender to capture a patriot sloop laden with provisions. The lieutenant completed his mission swiftly enough and was just heading back to the Falcon with the sloop in tow when Captain Daniel Egery and thirty patriots from nearby Dartmouth, Massachusetts, in a ragtag squadron of small craft, attacked him. In the ensuing melee, the lieutenant, the gunner, and a doctor’s mate were wounded before the British tender finally struck her colors, thereby yielding to the patriots. Captain Egery took the captured vessel back to port and sent thirteen British prisoners off to the Taunton jail.

At the same time, in early May, Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Thompson was contemplating an even bolder action in the busy seaport town of Falmouth (now Portland), in the Maine district of Massachusetts. Admiral Graves had sent the 6-gun Canceaux up from Boston to shepherd a large shipment of white pine masts, spars, and yards to England. Colonel Thompson planned to capture it. The giant white pines of Maine and New Hampshire were vital to the Royal Navy. Along with Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Falmouth was a principal mast port. But local patriots, led by Enoch Freeman and Jedediah Preble, had recently blocked the export of all wood products from Falmouth to Britain. Graves expected the Canceaux to extradite the embargoed masts.

On the night of May 9, Thompson arrived in Falmouth with fifty armed men, sporting boughs of spruce in their hats and a spruce pole with a green top for a standard. They seized the Canceaux’s captain, Lieutenant Henry Mowat, while he was walking on shore with two shipmates. Upon hearing of Mowat’s capture, the warship’s master, Mr. Hogg, put a spring on her cable and hove it taut, bringing three guns to bear on the town. He then fired two warning shots. Horrified, Freeman and Preble insisted that Thompson abandon his plan and release Mowat. The captain was allowed to return to his ship, but he was unable to get the shipment of masts released. He was forced to sail back to Boston empty-handed, demonstrating that the Canceaux alone could not force Falmouth to do anything against its will.

Mowat was aware that if Falmouth’s patriot leadership had supported Colonel Thompson, he could have captured the Canceaux. Enoch Freeman betrayed the leaders’ collective timidity when he wrote to the Provincial Congress the next day, calling Thompson’s actions “rash, injudicious, and unjustifiable.” He was worried, Freeman said, that Admiral Graves might retaliate by sending a whole squadron against the defenseless town. He neglected to explain why a town of four thousand had no defenses, or why it wasn’t preparing any.

Of far greater importance than the activity in Maine and Buzzards Bay was the patriots’ capture of Fort Ticonderoga on May 10. Ethan Allen, accompanied by Benedict Arnold and eighty-three Green Mountain roughnecks, crossed Lake Champlain at three o’clock in the morning in a boat and barge, attacking while the fort’s forty-eight defenders were asleep. Taken by surprise, Captain William Delaplace surrendered, handing the patriots an important cache of weapons, including eighty heavy artillery pieces, twenty brass guns, a dozen mortars, small arms, powder, and ball.

The next day, patriot Lieutenant Colonel Seth Warner captured nearby Crown Point and its military stores. At the same time, another band of Green Mountain Boys easily took nearby Fort George at the head of Lake George.Worried for months about all three forts, General Gage had sent a warning to General Guy Carleton in Quebec. But the warning came too late; in any case, Carleton, with only a few men, was in no position to act.

Immediately after seizing Ticonderoga, Colonel Arnold set out to add to his luster by capturing Lake Champlain. On May 15 he put seventy men in bateaux (flat-bottomed boats, tapering toward the ends) and headed for St. Jean on the Richelieu River at the outlet of the lake, intent on seizing the only British warship stationed in those waters. On the way, his party stopped a bateaux with a British lieutenant carrying mail from Canada. Not only did the cache of letters reveal that a mere seven hundred redcoats were defending the entire country, but they also gave Arnold a general idea of where the soldiers were located—all of which sent his outsized ambition soaring.

The following day a small schooner, which patriots had taken from the notorious local Tory leader Philip Skene at Skenesborough, caught up with Arnold; he climbed aboard and charged down the lake. Thirty miles from St. Jean he lost the wind and was forced to transfer his men back to the bateaux, rowing the rest of the way. When he reached land on the 18th, he hid his men in a bug-infested swamp and sent a spy up to the village. The soldier soon returned with the news that both the town and its schooner were practically defenseless. Breathing more easily, Arnold’s men crept into St. Jean, surprising a sergeant and twelve redcoats who surrendered without a fight. Afterward, the crew of the warship, seeing such a large number of armed colonials, surrendered as well “without any loss on either side,” Arnold reported.

The captured warship was sixty feet long and carried two brass 6-pounders—enough to dominate the lake. Arnold renamed her Enterprise.There were also nine bateaux at St. Jean. Arnold gathered all the munitions and supplies he could find into four of them and burned the remaining five before leaving. With the Enterprise and the other captured schooner, as well as the three forts, Arnold now commanded the lake. This achievement was of great strategic importance, since control of Lake Champlain was essential to stopping a British invasion from Canada.

By this time the patriot army that had gathered after Lexington and Concord numbered well over fifteen thousand. It had succeeded in trapping the British within Boston, forcing General Gage to rely on the Royal Navy for sustenance. On May 14, Dr. Warren and his Committee of Safety, hoping to further tighten the patriots’ land blockade, planned to remove all livestock and provisions from the many islands dotting Boston harbor. The beleaguered Gage had immediate intelligence of Warren’s plans—presumably from the villainous patriot insider, Dr. Benjamin Church—and warned Graves.

The admiral had a particular interest in one of the islands, Noddle’s. He had hidden away boards, spars, and other wood products in a storehouse there. He claimed the materials were scheduled to be sent to the repair yards at Halifax, Nova Scotia. But he was probably holding them for sale in Boston later that winter, when supplies would be tight.

Even in that golden age of speculation, the admiral’s greed was noteworthy. His “fishing policy” (despite the crying need for fresh fish in the city, no one was permitted to drop a line in the harbor without paying a small bribe) was but one of many examples.

In spite of his interest in Noddle’s, the quixotic admiral informed General Gage that he was sending only a single guard boat to watch it and neighboring Hog Island. He also insisted that soldiers would protect the island more effectively than his ships. Graves had no intention of cooperating with the army. As had been the case during the battle of Lexington and Concord, he appeared strangely indifferent to the war.

On May 27 Dr. Warren ordered more than two hundred men under New Hampshire’s John Stark to remove the horses, cattle, sheep, hay, and other supplies from Hog, Noddle’s, and Snake islands, as well as the nearby Chelsea coast. Stark set out early in the morning and began taking horses and cattle, along with one hundred sheep, from Hog Island. In the early afternoon, a party of about thirty patriots waded across the creek to Noddle’s Island. As they slogged through the knee-deep water, a red flag shot up from Graves’s flagship, Preston. A hundred marines from the warships Cerberus, Glasgow , Somerset, and Mercury made for the island to drive the rebels away, even as the armed schooner Diana, commanded by the admiral’s nephew, Lieutenant Thomas Graves, hurried up Chelsea Creek to cut off Stark’s party.

With her four 4-pounders, twelve swivel guns, and thirty men, the Diana was a machine to reckon with. Seeing what was coming, the patriots retreated to Hog Island, where they jumped into a ditch and faced the marines, fending them off easily while receiving fire from the Diana. Then, at six o’clock in the evening, wind and tide turned against Lieutenant Graves, prompting the admiral to send the Somerset’s tender, Britannia, and eleven barges armed with swivel guns to rescue his nephew.

It took the barge captains a painfully long time to maneuver into position. The delay gave the patriots time to strengthen Stark on Hog Island.When the barges finally managed to secure lines on the Diana, the wind and tide compelled them to tow her slowly down Chelsea Creek, forcing the entire party to pass through a vicious gauntlet of musket fire from patriots on the mainland. Meanwhile, Dr. Warren was directing the battle from his headquarters in Cambridge. With the Diana under siege, he had ample time to muster a thousand men under Brigadier General Israel Putnam, a popular hero of the French and Indian War.

The general positioned the bulk of his men on the high ground at Winnisimmet (now Chelsea), where the barges and the Diana would have to pass. Around eleven o’clock, a sudden breeze blew the struggling schooner aground near the ferryway at Winnisimmet. Wading into the water, General Putnam shouted to Lieutenant Graves to surrender. The lieutenant answered with a burst of cannon fire. Putnam returned fire with two field pieces. A brisk exchange flared, the hot fire eventually forcing the lightly armed barges to cast off and desert the Diana. In spite of his brave crew’s willingness to fight on, Lieutenant Graves recognized the hopelessness of his situation. He abandoned ship and fled with his men to the Britannia, which was obliged to withdraw.

The victorious patriots boarded the Diana and removed everything of value—first and foremost her cannon. Then they stuffed hay through the cabin windows and set her on fire. “I wish we have something of this kind to do every day,” General Putnam remarked. “It would teach our men how little they have to fear from cannonballs.”

The following morning General Gage dispatched two hundred men to augment the marines on Noddle’s, only to withdraw them the next day for fear of a patriot attack. By May 31, Putnam’s men were back on the island, burning buildings and stores. Soon afterward they turned their attention to Peddock’s Island, removing five hundred sheep and thirty head of cattle without opposition. Next, they advanced to Deer Island, where they took eight hundred sheep and lambs. When a barge from a man-of-war came to investigate, they promptly captured it and took five prisoners.

News of the battle of Chelsea Creek and the capture of the Diana soon reached the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, winning a major generalship for “Old Put.” But the startling fact that the patriots could operate effectively against the Royal Navy in Boston harbor was lost on both Congress and the patriot leadership in Massachusetts. Had Dr. Warren possessed any kind of naval strategy, he might have kept the Diana, rather than burning her, and let the admiral come after her. It would have been interesting to see how Graves reacted to the insult, for his tools in Chelsea Creek, even with the cooperation of General Gage, were limited.

Following the battle of Chelsea Creek, the patriots again exhibited their naval prowess. On May 24, General Gage had requested that Graves dispatch an armed escort for two trading sloops traveling to Machias, Maine, a lumbering town. These sloops were loaded with provisions to exchange for lumber needed in Boston. Graves reluctantly agreed to help, not because he cared a twig about Boston’s lumber shortage but because he wanted to retrieve the cannon that Lieutenant Joseph Nunn had lost on February 15, when he had run the armed schooner Halifax aground at Machias and abandoned her. Graves suspected that Machias rebels had the guns.

The admiral demonstrated his level of interest in the mission by providing the poorest warship in the fleet, the converted merchant schooner Margaretta. Though she boasted four double-fortified 3-pounders and fourteen swivels, she was a dull sailer and generally in such poor shape that exercising her cannon might be enough to rip her apart at the seams. Graves appointed one of his favorites, Midshipman James Moore from the Preston, as captain, and supplied him with twenty men from the flagship as a crew. But neither the admiral nor the midshipman had any idea what the Margaretta would encounter when she reached her destination. Located 316 miles from Boston, Machias might have been a tiny lumbering village, but its militia, along with those of the surrounding towns, was composed of more than a hundred wilderness-hardened fighters. Were their sympathies to lie with the rebels, the unsuspecting Moore would be heading for trouble.

Unaware of the political situation in the town—or that it mattered—Moore arrived in the Machias River on June 2 with the two seventy-ton merchant sloops, Unity and Polly, laden with a variety of goods, which, after a long winter, Machias desperately needed. The owner of the sloops, Captain Ichabod Jones, had been bringing supplies from Boston to Machias for ten years, and he knew how badly the townspeople wanted what was stuffed in the holds and strapped to the decks of his ships. Nonetheless, fired up by reports of the fighting at Lexington and Concord, and well aware that their timber would be of great use to General Gage, most of the townspeople refused to trade with him. Annoyed, Jones convinced the inexperienced Moore to position the Margaretta closer to town and threaten it with his 3-pounders. When Moore obliged, the frightened townspeople called an emergency meeting with Jones in attendance. After heated debate, they decided by a narrow margin to trade. But Jones wasn’t satisfied. Some of the remarks he’d heard were so disparaging he wanted to retaliate. When he edged his sloops over to the town wharf, he refused to sell to anyone who had reproached him at the town house.

This enraged the entire population of the town, and trading came to an abrupt halt. Led by fiery young Jeremiah O’Brien and veteran Captain Benjamin Foster, the townspeople held a secret meeting in the thick woods just outside town on Sunday, June 11. They invited their neighbors from the villages of Mispecka and Pleasant River, many of whom came with their weapons. After wrangling for some time, the assembled townspeople agreed to capture Jones and Moore, who were attending church services in town that day. But the patriots were careless in their movements. Moore spotted them coming, leaped through an open window with his lieutenant, and ran to the Margaretta’s gig, tied at the town dock. Jumping in and casting off, Moore managed the tiller, while his men rowed back to the warship as fast as they could. Jones, meanwhile, fearing for his life, fled to the woods and hid, only to be captured a few days later.

After Moore was secure aboard his ship, he delivered an angry message to the town, announcing that he had express orders to protect Captain Jones, that he was “determined to do my duty whilst I have life,” and that, if the people presumed to stop Captain Jones’s vessels, he would burn the town.

O’Brien, Foster, and their followers responded by attacking the two sloops, Unity and Polly. The thirty-one-year-old O’Brien—along with his five brothers and thirty-five other men brandishing guns, swords, axes, and pitchforks—boarded the Unity and easily overpowered her terrified crew, while Foster with other armed patriots seized the Polly. Lieutenant Moore was livid, but he remained calm, weighed anchor, and slipped downstream to within musket shot of the Polly, forcing Foster to run her aground and run for cover. Moore then tried to retake her, but patriots on shore, with help from Foster and his men, kept up a steady hail of musket fire. After an hour and a half, they drove Moore off.

He retreated downriver, drifting with the tide.Townsmen on shore and in boats and canoes chased him, keeping up their attack. Moore returned fire. Then, with darkness deepening, he dropped anchor for the night, expecting the attacks to stop. But they continued. It was all his crew could do to beat them off with swivel and musket fire.

Early the next morning, Moore tried to escape. Explaining to Admiral Graves why he had retreated would be difficult, but Moore was now convinced that his force was too small for the mission. Intent on returning to Boston, he took advantage of a favorable wind and tide and stood down the Machias River. The Margaretta, however, would not cooperate. In jibing while going downstream before the wind, her main boom and gaff carried away. Minutes later, Moore spotted a sloop at anchor in the river. Maneuvering over to her, he took her boom and gaff for his own before racing once more for the open ocean.

Just as he reached it, he saw two vessels bearing down on him. They were O’Brien in the Unity and Foster in the Falmouth Packet, a loyalist trading schooner he had appropriated only that morning. Jury-rigging the new boom and gaff on the Margaretta had delayed Moore, allowing his pursuers to catch up with him. O’Brien had on every bit of sail, as did Foster. Both sporting breastworks of pine boards, and anything else they could find to screen themselves from the Margaretta’s small-arms fire, they were well prepared for a fight.

O’Brien watched as Moore struggled to increase speed by adding sail and cutting away the small boats towing astern. But O’Brien and Foster soon caught the decrepit Margaretta, and hot action ensued. Moore fired stern swivels and muskets at the approaching schooners, then luffed and gave them both a broadside with his swivels. But he never fired his cannon. He probably feared that the Margaretta would be torn apart if he did.

O’Brien shouted to Moore to strike his colors, but in spite of the three-to-one odds against him, the plucky midshipman continued to fight it out. O’Brien and Foster now closed with the Margaretta. As they did, Moore threw hand grenades at them, but to no avail. The patriots swarmed aboard, shooting Moore in the chest and belly. As blood spurted from his wounds, all resistance collapsed. Admiring the midshipman’s courage, O’Brien’s men brought him below and tried to save him, asking in frustration why he hadn’t struck his colors. Moore replied that he’d rather die than “yield to such a set of villains.”

O’Brien next took the Margaretta’s armament into his own schooner, along with the prisoners and the mortally wounded Moore, and sailed back to Machias. The grateful townspeople greeted him as a hero. Later he renamed the Unity the Machias Liberty. The Margaretta, however, was too far gone to be salvaged, so he ran her aground and left her to rot.

Angered and embarrassed by the incident, Admiral Graves dispatched Lieutenant John Knight in the 6-gun schooner Diligent and her tender, the Tapnaquish, from Halifax, to intercept and destroy the Machias upstarts. But O’Brien, working with Benjamin Foster again in the coasting vessel Falmouth Packet, managed to capture both British vessels and their crews, including the luckless Knight, while they were ashore near Machias on July 12. No lives were lost on either side.

Decades later, James Fenimore Cooper, in his History of the Navy of the United States of America, called this episode “the Lexington of the sea.” Of course there had been earlier battles, but the analogy was well taken. Once again, in their arrogance the British had sent out a ludicrously small force to subdue a far greater number of rebels.

Not long afterward, on the afternoon of June 16, Commodore Abraham Whipple of the newly created Rhode Island state navy was patrolling off the north end of Conanicut Island in Narragansett Bay in the 12-gun Catey (sometimes called Katy) with a tender when he spotted a small British vessel, one of several attached to the 20-gun frigate HMS Rose. The frigate’s notoriously anti-American captain, James Wallace, had been wreaking havoc on the local patriots by examining every vessel entering or leaving the bay. Whipple chased the tiny sloop, which turned out to be the Diana, under the command of Savage Gardner, a master aboard the Rose. Having hailed her and tried to bring her to, Whipple was answered with swivel fire, which his 6-gun tender returned. A brisk exchange followed for half an hour. Then Gardner made a run for it. Greatly outgunned and outnumbered, he ran the Diana aground and escaped with all his men. Whipple then landed some sailors who ran after the fleeing British tars but failed to catch them. Gardner and his men returned safely to the Rose, leaving the Diana to the patriots.

The Catey, with twelve 4-pounders, and her tender with six, comprised Rhode Island’s only navy at the time. These vessels were converted merchantmen that John Brown, the renowned merchant prince of Providence, had reluctantly sold to the colony, keeping private the rest of his huge fleet so as not to antagonize Captain Wallace. In a bit of irony, the Diana was revealed to be a packet that Captain Wallace had appropriated from Thomas Linsey of Providence, and when presented with the evidence, Whipple returned her to her former owner.

Many years later Whipple claimed that this action was “the first shot . . . fired on water in defiance of the British flag.” He also stated, with more hyperbole, that he had risked everything “at a time when no other man in the colony would undertake the hazardous business lest he should be destined to the threatened cord,” ignoring what General Nathanael Greene’s Rhode Island militiamen were, even then, risking every day in Boston.

These various incidents throughout May and June demonstrated that the patriots could hold their own on the water using unorthodox, low-cost, guerrilla-style tactics. If cleverly organized on the larger scale that Admiral Graves feared, they might pose a serious problem for the Royal Navy. They could play an important role in defending Boston, Newport, New York, Philadelphia, Norfolk, Charleston, and Savannah. And they could be used to capture British men-of-war, allowing the patriots to acquire larger warships without having to build them.