Chapter 9 “This Terrible Day”

ON THE MORNING of Friday, the thirteenth of August, another joint council of war was held aboard the Warren on the question of whether to end the Rebel siege of Majabigwaduce. For two hours the men cajoled, accused, charged, and blamed one another; yet despite the obvious perils of inaction, they agreed to nothing in the way of strategy. A frustrated and incensed officer aboard the Continental ship Hunter recorded in his journal the prevailing mood of the American forces:

Three weeks have now elapsed since our siege began, and little or nothing is affected to our advantage. In the meantime our opponents are fortifying, and have completed a very formidable citadel, where they are secure against us; which at our arrival was only a breastwork . . . which then, in all probability, we could have reduced very easily, as also their shipping . . . in the course of which time thirteen or fourteen councils of war have been held, resolving one day to attack, and the next day reversing their schemes. The Commodore complaining that the General is backward, and the General that the fault is in the Commodore; the people censuring both, and are determined, unless something is directly done, that is either to attack vigorously or raise the siege (preferring the former) that they would leave the ships, and not risk an attack by a superior force which was daily expected.1

Fourteen officers—including Solomon Lovell and Peleg Wadsworth—voted to continue the siege of Fort George, over the objections of Paul Revere, who joined Commodore Saltonstall and eight others urging the immediate evacuation of Majabigwaduce.²

Solomon Lovell now reached his fated moment. Clinging to the hope that reinforcements would soon arrive, he resolved that, this day, he would lead his men into battle and would rather die in the attempt than to abandon his duty or to give the commodore one further excuse not to act.3

Lovell gathered his men and once again pleaded with them to stand with the “Sons of Liberty and of Virtue”⁴ in one last blow against the enemy. Within a thick fog that enveloped Majabigwaduce, General Lovell personally marched four hundred volunteers to the edge of the forest encampment and, through a barrage of enemy grapeshot, skirmished his way to a position at the rear of Fort George. With courage and desperation, the valuable ground between General McLean and his naval forces on the Majabigwaduce River finally had been taken. Now, thought Lovell, if the commodore would just venture his ships into the harbor, he might be able to convince his men to storm the British ­garrison.

Energized, Lovell dispatched one of his officers to the Warren to inform Saltonstall that the time had come for the navy to enter the harbor and destroy the British ships.

By mid afternoon, word had traveled to the American sea captains of a possible excursion, and naval maneuvers began in preparation for attack.

Captain John Allen Hallet, aboard the state brigantine Active, peered through the lifting haze for any sign of motion. Several days earlier the commodore had placed Hallet’s vessel together with the Diligent at the mouth of Penobscot Bay to provide advance detection of the approach of any British reinforcements. Now, at about 2:00 P.M., Hallet spotted through his glass what looked to be a cluster of thin trees towering in the distance above the ocean fog. Unsure of what he was viewing, he asked the opinion of the Diligent’s captain, Philip Brown. It was unmistakable, concluded Brown: a fleet of large ships was advancing from the south through the mist of the open seas.

Instantly, the Diligent bore away toward the remainder of the fleet with the disquieting news.⁵

From the bluffs to the east of Fort George, General Lovell watched with mounting exhilaration as the mainsails of five American warships caught the remaining breeze of the day and began sailing into Majabigwaduce Harbor. The commodore had, indeed, given the order to proceed, and the attack finally appeared to be under way.

In the harbor, Captain Mowat had armed his remaining transport ship, the St. Helena, and arranged it with the other sloops of war in a defensive broadside against the approaching threat. Within the fort, General McLean had turned five artillery pieces toward the American ships and prepared “to salute them as they came in.”6

Suddenly, the Diligent was seen surging briskly from the bay. From above, General Lovell observed the attacking Rebel fleet abruptly heave to and seemingly hold its position. The late afternoon winds had been diminishing, and Lovell surmised that the naval assault had been delayed until sailing conditions improved. By dusk, however, he knew that something was wrong, and when the fog began to lift, Lovell and his men could see the faint silhouette of ships emerging on the southern horizon.

At about 10:00 P.M., a messenger from the Warren approached the newly held Rebel position and handed the general a message from Dudley Saltonstall. Six enemy ships had been spotted through the fog approaching from the south of Penobscot Bay.

“If you mean to order the Transports up the River, I think they ought to be under way—as soon as possible,” wrote the commodore.⁷

Without naval support, Lovell had no other option but to order a retreat of his army. That night, anticipating the political firestorm to come, he wrote to the council, “I hope the Public will suspend their Judgment till a fair and Candid hearing can be had—The two Fleets are now closing together what will be the Event God only knows . . .”⁸

Through the rain-­soaked night and into the predawn hours, vacant-­eyed troops stoically packed equipment and munitions and quietly made their way down the cliffs of Majabigwaduce that, seventeen days earlier, had been so valiantly conquered with American blood. Finally granted what he had advocated for some time, Paul Revere dutifully collected his regiment and oversaw the swift removal of each piece of artillery remaining in the various Rebel batteries surrounding Fort George.

By sunrise, every man, musket, cannon, and store—amassed by the good intentions of Boston to fulfill the glorious purposes of the Penobscot Expedition—had been cleared from the heights of Majabigwaduce and crammed into the transports waiting at the shore. “This morning,” wrote the general in his diary, “I completed my retreat . . . without the loss of a Man.”9

When the “brave, vigilant and indefatigable seaman”¹⁰ Sir George Collier finally set sail on August 3 aboard HMS Raisonnable from Sandy Hook, New York, toward New England waters, he was battling a terrible illness that he privately thought might be his last. “The raging fever . . . grew to that height, as to make me believe I was on the point of setting out on a much longer voyage than to Penobscot,” he would write to Henry Clinton.¹¹

Mounting 214 guns in total, the Royal fleet heading for Majabigwaduce presented an imposing naval fighting force.¹² The Blonde, Greyhound, Virginia, Galatea, Camilla, and the Otter joined the Raisonnable in the ten-­day, fog-­enshrouded journey; and though they were temporarily separated in the darkness, all but the Otter found their way to a rendezvous point at Monhegan Island north of Falmouth, Maine.¹³

Sailing against the better judgment of his physicians, Collier had found the voyage a difficult one. As his fleet cruised safely into the southern waters of Penobscot Bay in the late afternoon of August 13, however, the Admiral could feel his fever showing signs of breaking.

In the forests surrounding Fort George, an eerie calm prevailed. As dawn approached, the British sentries noticed “an unusual degree of quiet” on the Rebel lines and, upon investigation, found that the positions had been abandoned.¹⁴ General McLean immediately sent eighty men from the Hamilton Regiment to cut off the American retreat, but they found only litter-­strewn trails heading from the heights, devoid of men and artillery.

With the bulk of his fighting force huddled safely aboard the unarmed transport ships in the waters off of Dyce’s Head, General Lovell now ordered a swift retreat north into the Penobscot River, where, under the command of General Wadsworth, they could erect a defensive fortification. Once within the twenty-­mile stretch of narrow but passable river waters, the sloping terrain of the valley would, they hoped, offer refuge as well as strategic sites for the mounting of cannon to impede the advancing British warships.

As Lovell’s transports embarked upon their escape, Commodore Saltonstall conducted yet another council of war aboard the Warren to consider what action the Navy should take regarding the approaching enemy. With the arrival of further intelligence regarding the fleet’s size and strength, the captains summarily agreed that the American force was “vastly inferior” to that of the enemy; and upon a vote exhorted by the commodore, they unanimously determined not to directly engage the British warships.15 Some of the captains advocated slipping through the west side of Long Island at the center of Penobscot Bay to make their escape, while others wanted to navigate up the river and make a stand.¹⁶ Following the meeting, Titus Salter, captain of the New Hampshire privateer Hampden, approached the commodore and requested orders. A confused and bewildered Saltonstall turned to the captain and muttered, “[W]e must all shift for ourselves . . .”¹⁷

As the transports moved north through the bay, General Lovell realized that three Rebel cannon remained in the previously captured battery on Nautilus Island. With British soldiers and sailors already swarming though the area, it was clear that decisive action had to be taken to rescue the guns for the establishment of artillery positions upriver.

Lovell would later record that he “used every endeavor to secure them, by ordering a party for that purpose, but . . . time was too short.”¹⁸ The “party” referred to by the general was Paul Revere—and perhaps his characterization of the reasons for failing to safeguard the Nautilus Island cannons had been overly charitable.

Through the bellowing chaos of retreat, William Todd had delivered the general’s order to Revere to gather his men and remove the three cannon from the island battery. Despite the obvious gravity of the situation, Revere paused to evaluate Lovell’s order; then according to Captain Gilbert Speakman, the commissary of ordnance who witnessed the encounter, Revere curtly replied that compliance was quite impossible and that all available craft were employed elsewhere in the course of the retreat.19 Later that morning, according to Speakman, Revere admitted that he simply chose not to risk his men on such a mission. He then fished out his original orders given weeks earlier by the Massachusetts Council and began to scrutinize them legalistically to determine whether he was compelled even to obey the general’s directives at that point in the mission. “[He] said his Orders were to be under the Command of General Lovell during the Penobscot Expedition,” declared Speakman, “and as the Siege was rais’d he considered the expedition at an end, and therefore did not consider himself any longer under General Lovell’s ­Command.”²⁰

Despite the timidity of the Rebel navy and its waffling and irresolute commodore, the American warships managed to form themselves temporarily into a defensive crescent across the river mouth to allow time for the transports to begin their flight. The Rebel ships at first “seemed inclinable to dispute the passage,” noted Admiral Collier.²¹

With Saltonstall holding his position in the bay, the transports ventured about seven miles upriver to the jut of land housing the abandoned Fort Pownal, a British stronghold during the Seven Years’ War. Then, against an ebbing tide and calming breezes, they were forced to halt and drop anchor. To the south, the winds driving Admiral Collier’s fleet remained brisk, and by late morning as the British warships approached, word came to General Lovell that Saltonstall “was very much dejected.”²²

Fearing the stability and judgment of the naval commander, Lovell felt compelled to navigate downriver to the Warren, where he found the commodore “in low spirits” and on the verge of abandoning the fleet’s defensive position.²³ Perceiving that Saltonstall’s seventeen warships provided the only chance of survival for his beleaguered troops and their unarmed transports, Lovell pleaded with the commodore to stay the course and fight the enemy. Receiving nothing but steadfast refusals, Lovell angrily departed the Warren and rushed back toward Fort Pownal to warn his men of their pending fate.²⁴

By 1:00 P.M. the imposing mainsails of six fast-­closing, square-­rigged British vessels could be seen commandingly unfurled in the open waters of Penobscot Bay. Panic immediately infused the Rebel warships, and in the words of George Collier, “an unexpected & Ignominious flight took place.”25

Sensing chaos and weakness in their enemy, the British instantly gave chase “with all the eagerness which a desire of destroying the enemy could inspire,”²⁶ and the bulk of the American warships hove sharply to port and began racing into the mouth of the river.

In a desperate attempt to elude the marauding British vessels, the captains of the privateer Hunter and the brig Defence banked hard and sailed to the west seeking passage through the bay behind Long Island. As the rest of his ships began their methodical corral of the American fleet, Admiral Collier immediately dispatched the Blonde and the Galatea in pursuit. The Hunter would quickly be run aground with every sail raised and her men taking to the woods without a fight, while the Defence attempted to evade capture by anchoring in a small inlet. Collier later ordered his ship, the Camilla, to take the brig with its sixteen guns, “but she prevented that measure being carried into execution,” he wrote, “by blowing herself up.”²⁷

Now Captain Mowat and his three sloops of war rearmed themselves with the cannon previously sent to Fort George, slipped their moorings, and eagerly joined in the chase. First Lieutenant George Little, who served on the Massachusetts State Navy brig Hazard, would later note the delicious irony of the ships, which the commodore had seen no advantage in destroying, now pursuing him up the river.²⁸

Captain Titus Salter raised every available sail on the Hampden and attempted to break free of the coming onslaught, but she was “sailing heavy”²⁹ and the fast-­moving Blonde and Galatea were closing upon her. Soon followed by the Virginia, each British ship began firing its guns at the hapless vessel. During every council of war, Salter had consistently urged attacking the enemy. Now, as the Hampden’s mainsail, flying jib, and foresail were shot away and fell about her deck in a twisted mass of cloth and rigging, Captain Salter turned his crippled ship broadside and returned fire as best he could. Heavily outgunned and with men lying wounded upon the deck, the captain soon realized that he had little chance of escape. Against his every instinct to stand and fight, Salter reluctantly struck his colors and surrendered the Hampden and her crew of 130 to his British pursuers.30

By mid afternoon, the upriver breezes began to stir, and the transports once again drifted north toward the narrows of the Penobscot River. With the same wind in their sails, the Rebel warships now took flight from the bay as well and, with four of Admiral Collier’s frigates in close pursuit, bent every sail toward Fort Pownal.

As the transports approached Orphan Island (present-­day Verona Island), which divided the Penobscot into east and west narrows, Saltonstall’s fleet quickly approached from the south. Anticipating that their armed vessels would heave to and finally make a protective stand allowing the clustered transports to escape up the river, the men hailed the ships and welcomed their arrival. To their “great mortification,” however, the warships frantically signaled the transports to clear the way and allow them to pass. “Without any notice or assistance,” the American warships shoved and heaved their way forward through the westward narrows and past the huddled and helpless transports.³¹ “With every endeavor [they] strove to keep way,” wrote General Lovell, “but the Armed Vessels run by and left them to the power of the Enemy . . .”³²

As Saltonstall’s panic-­stricken fleet pushed its way past the transports without even the pretense of defensive fire, the stunned and unprotected troops looked about half a mile south toward Collier’s ships, which drew menacingly closer by the moment. With dusk approaching, and with the boats struggling against the adverse tide and a dying wind, fear ran through the Rebel army like a corrosive thread.

The captains of the transports were now faced with the unenviable choice of scuttling their vessels or surrendering them to the enemy. Though the men had gallantly attempted to tow their sloops and schooners upriver with rowboats, movement against the tide had become all but impossible and capture by the approaching enemy seemed inevitable. As dusk settled on the Penobscot, the transport captains, seemingly out of options, began purposely running their vessels aground. One after the other, they set them ablaze, while from a distance, Admiral Collier and his crewmen looked on with astonished pleasure. The panic-­stricken Rebel troops gathered their muskets and what provisions they could. With all semblance of order or command now lost, they abandoned all but four of the twenty-­one transport ships and, in the throws of “utmost confusion,”33 dashed for the forest to avoid capture.

Prior to the retreat of Saltonstall’s warships from Penobscot Bay, Paul Revere had joined General Wadsworth in an effort to rescue some of the sick and injured from the makeshift American hospital near Fort Pownal. Just as they returned to a point below the narrows, the men witnessed Saltonstall’s warships retreating through the helpless transports. Amid the turmoil Revere sought out the ordnance brig. Wadsworth took to his boat and began moving among the various transport ships, many aground, some not yet on fire, and exhorted his men to stay on board and not abandon their ships unless forced to. “No Pains were spared to collect the Troops, to save the Stores & Ordnance on board the Transports then on fire, but neither Men nor Officers were under the least control . . .” Wadsworth would later write.³⁴

As he passed the Samuel, Wadsworth shouted orders to Revere to place a twelve-­pound cannon on a flatboat to be held in readiness while he scouted the narrows for a place to land the gun and halt the enemy’s progress. Quickly surveying the upriver grounds and discovering an appropriate fortification site, Wadsworth soon returned in a birch canoe navigated by two Indians only to find, to his dismay, the bulk of the transports clustered together and in flames—and the Samuel abandoned with her sails unfurled and her bow bumping into the river bank. There was no sign of the ordered cannon or the artillery commander who was to secure it.

Undaunted, the young general heroically attempted to gather his troops scattered in the bush along the shore, many of whom by that point had already decided on the futility of further resistance.³⁵ During the siege of Fort George, Wadsworth had implored General Lovell to consider the creation of some rendezvous point up the Penobscot River, where the men could meet and a fortification could be established in the event a retreat was deemed necessary. “[T]he General would hear nothing of the kind; alleging that it would dishearten our Army & show them that we did not expect to succeed,” Wadsworth would later muse.36 Now, with the flames from the burning transports lighting up the evening sky and the troops flailing about the water and along the riverbank in disarray, Wadsworth ordered whatever men he could find to retrieve any salvageable provisions and to prevent what remained of the boats from falling into British hands. The task would prove demoralizing. “The troops were chiefly dispersed or gone back into the Woods & the rest not to be commanded,” recorded Wadsworth. “By the help of a few Individuals, chiefly Officers, a small Quantity of Provisions & Ammunition was got on Shore.”³⁷

While General Wadsworth courageously attempted to buoy his men, Paul Revere seemed to have concluded that his cooperation was no longer required.

With the timbers of the burning transports littering the narrow waterway, the general’s attention was at once drawn to a small schooner drifting helplessly in the ebbing tide toward the enemy ships. The vessel, Wadsworth understood, contained a crew of men and a large supply of remaining provisions. A rescue of the craft had to be attempted.

Wadsworth immediately spotted Revere’s Castle barge bobbing near the shore and ordered several of the artillerymen to quickly “tough [the schooner] across the stream & . . . take out her crew.”³⁸ Nevertheless, amid panicked shouts for help from the beleaguered seamen, Revere instantly bristled at the young general and, turning to his men, forbade them from following the order.

Incredulous at the lieutenant colonel’s obstinate refusal of orders, Wadsworth angrily overruled Revere’s denial and once again sternly ordered the artillerymen to launch the barge. As the men leaped into action, Revere indignantly turned to the general and grumbled that his personal baggage and other belongings were stowed on the vessel. “Who would thank [me] for loosing that, in attempting to Save the Schooner to the State?” Revere demanded. Wadsworth glared back in disbelief at the pugnacious officer and hissed, “Have you come to take care of [your] private baggage, or to Serve the State?”

With that, the man whose grandson would one day immortalize the name of Paul Revere now promised his immediate arrest as soon as the army could be collected.39

With darkness shrouding the river narrows and the presence of burning transports preventing further safe passage, Sir Collier’s frigates anchored downriver and bided their time. Following his last futile encounter with the commodore, General Lovell had gone aboard the Hazard and unwittingly joined the frenetic rush past the besieged transports. Now, as seventeen American ships of war lay scattered for miles in the calm evening waters north of Orphan Island between Marsh Bay and Bald Hill Cove, Lovell contemplated the question of how to salvage the Penobscot Expedition.⁴⁰

Just to the south, a dejected Captain William Burke stood alone in the darkness at the helm of his warship, Sky Rocket. The vessel earlier had run aground, and her crew had darted into the woods heading for home. With no other choice seemingly available to him, Burke fashioned a trail of powder that led from the ship’s rope ladder to the holds below where barrels of gunpowder were stored. Then, as the nighttime mist began to settle on Marsh Bay, he ignited the trail and dove into the woods for cover. Instantly, a blast ripped through the ship’s massive hull illuminating the night sky and shattering the relative quiet of the Penobscot River. Through the night, similar explosions would bring the same fate to three other warships in the fleet, though no order or authorization allowing their destruction had been issued.

Aboard the Pigeon, one of only several transports to escape the inferno near Fort Pownall, Paul Revere slept comfortably. He insisted that earlier, while the Castle barge “was getting some men from a Schooner,” he had been separated from the rest of his regiment and spent the remainder of the evening searching for them as he moved upriver.⁴¹ Captain Cushing, however, would later recollect that Revere had left him on the beach, telling him that he would be back in a few minutes, “but I saw no more of him . . .”⁴²

Awake in his cabin aboard the Hazard, a crestfallen General Lovell replayed the events of the day over and over in his mind. Years later, Peleg Wadsworth would describe the general as “a Man of Courage & proper Spirit, a true Roman Character, who never would flinch from Danger; but He had not been accustomed to the Command of an Expedition in actual service.”43 Though clinging to the hope of generating some opposition to the British naval force pursuing him, Lovell knew that the retreat from Majabigwaduce would be viewed as nothing short of a catastrophic and humiliating defeat for the Rebel cause.

“To attempt to give a description of this terrible Day is out of my Power,” he wrote in his journal entry of August 14. “It would be a fit subject for some masterly hand to describe it in its true colours, to see four Ships pursuing Seventeen Sail of Armed Vessels, nine of which were Stout Ships, Transports on fire, Men of War blowing up, Provisions of all kinds . . . throwing about, and as much confusion as can possibly be conceived.”⁴⁴

By daybreak, Paul Revere had sent one of his officers to scout the river in the Castle barge for his artillerymen with orders that they join him upriver if found.

General Lovell, who had made up his mind to collect whatever troops he could to make a stand against the British fleet, was already on a small boat rowing south with a group of other like-­minded officers. As the boat passed the Pigeon, Lovell spotted Revere on the deck and shouted for him to gather his men and retrieve the artillery from the Samuel. “[H]e told me, he was going to bring up his men, to make a Stand,”⁴⁵ Revere later recorded. Without hesitation, Revere informed the general that an officer already had been dispatched in search of his men and that the Samuel and all its armaments had been destroyed with the other transports.⁴⁶ Undaunted, Lovell continued on, intent on securing his artillery from whatever ships remained. The commander of the artillery train, apparently content with his contribution to the cause, then proceeded upriver as far as Grant’s Mills to join others who had been ordered to assemble and refortify. “There I landed to wait for my boat . . . I stayed there all that day,” Revere wrote in his journal.⁴⁷

It was true that Revere had moved north along the river and that his men had scattered through the Maine woods, but his ordnance brig was, in fact, alive and well, contrary to what he had informed the general. Upon running the Samuel ashore a day earlier and abandoning her on the western side of the river narrows between two burning transports, the ship’s captain, James Brown, thought surely, as perhaps Revere did, that the heavily armed vessel would catch fire and explode into cinders. Instead, the brig somehow survived and, through the night, drifted aimlessly north along the narrows of the Penobscot River with its full store of artillery still aboard.

When Lovell and his officers arrived at Marsh Bay, they discovered the Warren run aground and its crew reeling and confused. In the commotion, Commodore Saltonstall informed the general that, in fact, the Samuel and its valuable armament were intact but perilously ensconced upon a sandbar about three miles downriver. Lovell, at once, directed his trusted militia captain, Waterman Thomas, and the salty George Little, first lieutenant aboard the Hazard, to gather some men and free the Samuel.

As Lovell sought out the assistance of barges to tow the Warren to safety, Little and Thomas encountered the Samuel and began the task of leveraging her back into sailable waters. “After much difficulty,”48 and with pensive eyes scanning downstream for any sign of the British fleet, the two officers, assisted only by a few spirited sailors and a flooding tide, managed to free the brigantine and begin navigating the ship north in the light breezes.⁴⁹

With the Samuel and her makeshift crew limping back toward friendlier waters, it would not be long before two quick-­moving and agile British sloops of war were spotted in pursuit at the river bend just north of Orphan Island. Lieutenant Little, not a man to surrender without a chase, unfurled every sail on the brigantine and raced north as quickly as the breeze would take him. The valuable cargo of artillery upon the Samuel, he knew, would be instrumental in the general’s plan to stop the British and to refortify farther up the river.

By noon, however, after nearly nine miles of pursuit, the tide again began to shift, and the Samuel slowed in the water. With the Warren now freed from the sandbar and in plain sight ahead of them, Little dropped anchor and nervously watched as the sloops of war edged closer from the south. He thought that if he could only drift nearer to the Warren, the commodore would spot the scene downriver and surely turn several of his thirty-­two guns on the approaching British ships. As all hope seemed to fade, a southwest wind again began to stir and, against the ebbing tide, the lieutenant weighed anchor and steered the ship gradually forward.

By the time the ordnance brig reached the Warren, it was painfully clear that Saltonstall had no intention of rescuing the besieged vessel. Little and Thomas could clearly see the Warren’s crew fleeing the ship in droves and running into the forest under the direction of the commodore. With the British sloops steadily making their way upstream despite the ebbing tide, and with no chance of Saltonstall ordering a defensive stand, it was clear that the Samuel would have to be scuttled to prevent it from falling into enemy hands. After hurriedly off-­loading two barrels of flour and whatever entrenching tools and ammunition they could, Little and Thomas ignited the powder hold and burned the Samuel. In seconds, the intrepid crew was huddled in a small rowboat headed for the safety of the Warren.

With the brigantine ablaze in the middle of the narrow waterway, the captains of the approaching sloops of war dared not risk further pursuit for fear of detonating their own powder-­laden ships, and so they dropped anchor and waited for the flames to subside. Aboard the Warren, Lieutenant Little could hardly believe what he was hearing. “I found General Lovell Begging the commodore not to Burn his Ship,” recalled Little.50

In solicitous tones, Lovell pledged to Saltonstall that, if necessary, he would remain on the ship with him and be of service in any way that he could in defending her, and that he would direct the captains of each remaining ship in the fleet to send a barge in order to tow the Warren to safer waters. Lovell extolled and lauded his plan to create a fortification upstream, arguing that the vessel and its crew could play a vital role in that fortification, and he pleaded with the commodore to spare the flagship of the Penobscot Expedition. Saltonstall just shook his head and, turning to Lieutenant Little, vacuously inquired what more could he have done.

With that, George Little flew into a defiant rage.51 He cast an accusatory glare on the commodore and, with fury resonating in his voice, shouted that he had done absolutely nothing as of yet. Little then edged closer to Saltonstall and balefully questioned “why he did not fire his Stern Chasers Coming up the River to Cover the Transports.”

“What good would It [have] done, the Enemy would fire again,” replied the commodore.

Seething with anger, Little charged that with the slightest show of resistance from the warships—just a defensive line formed at the narrows—the transports could, perhaps, have survived the retreat and made it up the river. The defiant lieutenant now looked across the water to the burning Samuel and to the two menacing sloops of war beyond and advised the commodore to swing all of the eighteen-­pound guns portside in defense of his ship. Again Saltonstall protested that if he fired the guns “the Enemy would git the Ship by that means . . .”

At that point, the Warren’s second lieutenant came to the commodore’s aid, telling Little that there were men aboard the ship “as good or better” than he and that if the commodore ordered the Warren to be burned he would follow those orders. The second lieutenant than glared defiantly at Little and asked if he knew what ship he was on and that he should watch what he said aboard her. As the men verged upon blows, General Lovell put a stop to the matter and once again assured Saltonstall that the Warren could be saved and that the other ships in the fleet would send men and boats to aid her.

For the moment, the commodore acquiesced.

The general and his band of willing sailors and officers then parted from the Warren and journeyed back upriver to consult with each of the sea captains, but the news was not good. Aboard the Vengeance, Captain Thomas almost scoffed at the appeal to assist the commodore. His men had all gone ashore, and Thomas was preparing to burn the privateer. Upon the general’s protest and his order to head north to refortify, “Replied Captain Thomas you may have my Ship—on Answer the General Said he would accept her Rather than have her Burnt.”⁵² As Lovell searched in vain for men to commandeer the Vengeance, however, he soon recognized that Captain Thomas would have to be left to his own devices.

One by one, Lovell came alongside the hull of each ship and begged the captains not to destroy them. The valuable cannon aboard the vessels, he urged, could be sailed north and offloaded at a point of fortification. He assured them that reinforcing troops were on their way and that the French would, no doubt, be sending ships. It was “shocking,” claimed Lovell, “to think of destroying such a fleet when it might easily be defended.”53

As General Lovell frantically endeavored to rally his men into some form of defense, Paul Revere had made up his mind what to do next. By nightfall he had taken refuge on the beleaguered Vengeance and was told by Captain Thomas that the ship was to be burned by morning.⁵⁴ Major Todd, Captain Williams, and several others passed by the vessel and saw the men on the deck busying themselves with tasks. “[T]hey told us that they were going to set fire to their shipping and were preparing for the Same,” Williams recalled.

“Colonel Revere Told me he was going home.”⁵⁵

Dodging burning Rebel ships and toiling against calm winds and shifting tides, Captain Mowat and Admiral Collier slowly made their way up the Penobscot River. Despite the remonstrations of General Lovell and the best efforts of several sea captains to maintain order and to gather their men in defense, the crews of the American fleet, aware that the enemy was at hand, had lost heart, and most abandoned their ships and fled into the woods.

By the early morning of Monday, August 16, the faithful captains and fairly intact crews of the Continental vessels Diligent and Providence, and the state brigs Tyrannicide, Active, and Hazard, were still prepared to make a stand and defend their ships. Lovell had informed them, perhaps falsely, that the commodore was willing to save the Warren, and according to Captain Philip Brown of the Diligent, the news had “put new Life in [the] Officers, & men.”⁵⁶

Many of the American warships had, by now, congregated in an area south of a waterfall about twenty miles upstream in the Penobscot—a point beyond which the vessels obviously could not pass.⁵⁷ At about 8:00 A.M., to the dismay of the remaining captains, the privateers Hector and Black Prince were set ablaze without any orders or prior notice, “not half pistol Shot from Many ships.”58

With the guns in each of the surrounding vessels fully loaded and with stockpiles of explosive powder stored in their hulls, panic and chaos now enveloped the remainder of the fleet. “I thought myself in as much Danger as if I had an Enemy to Engage,” recalled Philip Brown.⁵⁹

Waterman Thomas and George Little, who had earlier attempted the valiant rescue of the Samuel, now sprang into action. They leaped into a flatboat and immediately rowed for the shore to warn the gathering hoard of men to run as fast and far as they could. Meanwhile, the crew of the Hazard was “crying out for god sake to Fetch them off . . . [the] boat . . . expect[ing] every moment to be set on fire by the two ships.”⁶⁰ In the panic, Captain Brown was heard shouting in vain for someone to assist him in getting a boat over to the stricken ship. Finally, General Lovell himself rowed to his aid and began removing the men.

Suddenly the Hector and Black Prince exploded, shooting grapeshot and timber into the Rebel fleet and across the river. Flames blanketed the ships, and panicked men dove into the water and swam for their lives. Though many of the sea captains had resolved to defend their ships until reinforcements arrived from Boston, it was now clear that the fleet could not survive. John Cathcart, captain of the Tyrannicide, later wrote, “I was Compelled to share the fate of the other Vessels.”⁶¹

One after the other—the Providence, Hazard, Active, Diligent, Charming Sally, and others—all comprising the pride and promise of the Penobscot Expedition—were abandoned by panic-­stricken crews and burned in the river narrows. Barely escaping the blistering inferno, Lieutenant Little and Captain Thomas rowed frantically downstream rendering aid and assistance where they could. Lamenting the hulking remains of the American fleet as they passed, the remnants of exploded powder and burning timbers suffused the air and scorched their lungs.

With the British fleet now upon them, the men rowed for shore and disappeared into the woods, leaving behind the smoldering skeleton of the Warren settling in the water and sighing its last.