New Brunswick at War, 1812-1814
In June 1812, the United States of America declared war on Great Britain, and American privateers immediately began preying on British shipping in the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy. For the next four months, New Brunswick fought an undeclared war off its southern coast to defend local shipping from American depredations. Meanwhile, Britain — embroiled in a long-term conflict with Napoleonic France — hoped the Americans would just go away. Instead, American armies invaded Upper Canada, and in October Britain reluctantly declared war on the United States. Over the next three years, New Brunswickers and New Brunswick-owned vessels would participate actively in the war at sea, employing letters of marque entitling them to seize American shipping, while a flotilla of three small Royal Navy vessels plus a vessel owned and sailed by the colony operated from Saint John to both defend shipping and attack American ships.
Although New Brunswick was part of the most powerful maritime empire in the world, its coasts and ships were virtually unprotected against American attacks in the summer of 1812. The Royal Navy was stretched just trying to protect its merchant trade from attacks by the French, and it could spare only twenty-seven vessels for the whole area from Newfoundland to the Caribbean. Many of these vessels were small, old, or unseaworthy, and almost all of them were focused on protecting British shipping in and out of Bermuda. The US navy was not much better prepared for war in early 1812, but American entrepreneurs wasted no time fitting out privateers. Within days of the American declaration of war, dozens of captains and ship owners from Baltimore, New York, and Salem, Massachusetts, besieged their governments for letters of marque.
New Brunswick seafarers also knew the rules governing privateering. A formal declaration of war was usually followed by a prize act that allowed governors to issue “letters of marque and reprisal,” which permitted private individuals and businesses to wage war on the King’s enemies at sea. By the early nineteenth century, this was a highly regulated activity. “Prize courts” determined if captures were legal and if the enemy vessel’s crew and cargo had been properly treated. In British North America, Governors John Coape Sherbrooke of Nova Scotia and George Stracey Smyth of New Brunswick were responsible for issuing letters of marque, while the Vice-Admiralty Court in Halifax monitored legal matters and acted as the local prize court. Once a prize (and its cargo) was awarded to the captor and auctioned off, the investors, officers, and crews of the capturing vessel received their agreed-upon shares reasonably quickly. If court costs, salvage fees, and the costs of arming and equipping the privateer were kept to a minimum, profits could be substantial: the New Brunswick privateer Dart is said to have earned her crew roughly five hundred dollars each during her first cruise, a considerable amount in an age when the average seaman earned fifteen to thirty dollars a month.
The news that the United States had declared war on the British Empire first reached Halifax on June 27, 1812, when the frigate H.M.S. Belvidera arrived with several dead and wounded aboard. She had been attacked three days earlier off Nantucket by the US frigates President and Constitution and three smaller vessels. That same day, a boat from St. Andrews carried the news of war to Saint John.
Although war with the Americans was not a great shock, many in the Maritime colonies hoped they could avoid the worst of it. On June 30, 1812, an Extraordinary Issue of the Royal Gazette and New Brunswick Advertiser reprinted the American declaration of war, but two days later, Governor Sherbrooke of Nova Scotia issued a proclamation urging residents of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to “abstain from molesting the inhabitants living on the shores of the United States” as long as the Americans left them alone. To secure the goodwill of Americans, Admiral Herbert Sawyer, commander of British naval forces in North America, ordered his captains to treat any prisoners of war from the New England states with “great indulgence” and urged his men to avoid capturing small vessels of no value. Also, by offering economic incentives to the merchants in nearby Maine to trade with the Maritimes, he hoped they would be less likely to turn to privateering and would help to secure their continued trade with the British Empire. Sawyer convinced the Nova Scotia Executive Council to admit American goods duty free at Eastport on Moose Island, Maine. Then, British military, naval, and civilian authorities began to issue licences to American ships willing to carry flour and provisions to feed British troops fighting Napoleon in Spain and Portugal.
Since New Brunswick could barely grow enough to feed its own population of 7,000, let alone supply extra for British forces, it was critical that the existing trade between Maine and New Brunswick continue. Not only did the citizens of St. Andrews depend almost entirely on American flour, the market at Saint John relied heavily on American oats and hay. In return, New Brunswickers traded lumber and fish in New England markets. Neither side wanted a declaration of war to interfere with their longstanding, usually legal, commercial activities.
During the first two and a half months of undeclared war, some five hundred licences issued to Americans ensured a steady supply of flour and other provisions to British North America and the West Indies, to British troops in Europe, and to British fleets in American waters. As early as July 15, 1812, the commissariat in Saint John advertised for fresh beef for His Majesty’s ships, and many of those who responded were Americans. At a time when money was scarce and British forces were offering hard cash, practical Yankee farmers felt that if the Royal Navy was buying beef it might as well be American. While some Americans balked at supplying enemy troops in North America, both the US Treasury Department and the US attorney general’s office ruled that licensed trade with British troops in Spain was not illegal. Whether or not it was moral was up to the conscience of the supplier.
Despite these attempts to keep Americans from slipping into privateering, war descended upon New Brunswick almost immediately. Within days of the declaration of war, the American coast was bristling with privateers ranging from heavily armed ships of several hundred tons carrying more than one hundred and fifty men to open whaleboats manned by a few men armed with muskets. Small open boats were a particular threat in the Gulf of Maine and Bay of Fundy. Their crews were little more than brigands who extended their attacks to settlements ashore. The appropriately named Weazel, a small vessel out of Castine, Maine, terrorized inhabitants along the Fundy coast in the summer of 1812 with frequent raids and thefts of food, fishing gear, and even women’s clothing.
The Royal Navy attempted to sweep these small privateers from the sea. In early August 1812, Maidstone and Spartan tried to seize the small Portland privateers Mars and Morningstar near Quoddy, Maine. The privateers fought back fiercely, killing or wounding twenty men before being forced to lower their flags. A few days later, the British ships Indian, Plumper, Spartan, and Maidstone sent two hundred and fifty men in five barges to capture the US revenue cutter Commodore Barry and the privateers Madison, Olive, and Spruce. In addition to the Commodore Barry, the Royal Navy took the US Navy brig Nautilus, thirteen privateers, fifteen ships, four brigs, ten schooners, and a sloop in the first months of the undeclared war.
In the meantime, the governors of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were caught in a legal bind. Without a British declaration of war, they could not issue letters of marque, and so the early policing actions of 1812 were the work of Royal Navy vessels. Merchants and ship owners in both colonies protested that the navy would capture all the prizes before they could get to sea. The Nova Scotia governor’s solution was to issue carefully worded letters of marque under his own authority, initially against France and the Batavian Republic (the Netherlands). This was expanded in August to include unspecified “other enemies of the King of England” in a letter issued to the famous schooner Liverpool Packet, which eventually became Canada’s most successful privateer. Governor George Smyth of New Brunswick followed suit late in the summer of 1812 as New Brunswick began to fight back.
As the war progressed and attacks by American privateers and the small but surprisingly feisty US Navy started to interfere with British shipping, the Royal Navy began to apply a tourniquet to American trade by blockading the main ports along the eastern seaboard. Beginning with Chesapeake Bay in December 1812, the British gradually sealed off shipping southward from Rhode Island, closing the Potomac, James, York, and Rapahannock rivers. By March 1813, British warships had pushed to the Mississippi River, leaving the New England ports the last to be closed in November 1813. By then, the Royal Navy had succeeded in blockading some two thousand miles of coastline. This strategy struck at the heart of the American economy and went a long way toward turning American thoughts to peace.
One of Governor Smyth’s first responses to the American declaration of war was to build a small fleet of bateaux and gunboats to defend the course of the St. John River. The river was part of the Grand Communications Route that linked the distant colonies in the interior with the sea, especially during the winter months when the St. Lawrence River froze over. The creation of a flotilla to defend the route was not a new idea: “garrison bateaux” — flat-bottomed boats about thirty-eight feet long, driven by a single sail or oars and steered by a large sweep — were already in use on the St. John River to transport supplies between Fredericton and the military posts farther upriver, and the army wanted more. In the opinion of Captain Gustavus Nicolls, Royal Engineers, “the principal defence to be made in New Brunswick, by an inferior Army [that is, the British] must be on the River Saint John and its Banks, and that by means of a superior Flotilla.”
The creation of the St. John River Flotilla became official in late July 1812, and by early August eight bateaux and one large gunboat equipped to carry two 24-pounder cannon were nearly complete in Saint John. By the end of August, a further ten bateaux were reported ready at Fredericton, five of which carried a 6-pounder cannon, two had a 3-pounder cannon, and one was fitted to carry thirty troops; the details of the other two were not mentioned. By the end of September, at least fifteen bateaux were armed and ready for service. Also pressed into use as armed vessels were two St. John River woodboats — two-masted sailing vessels, bluff bowed and round bottomed, about forty-two feet long. They were designed to carry forty tons (twenty-eight cords) of firewood but also moved general cargo on the river. The two used by the flotilla had their holds decked over and were equipped with two 24-pounder carronades.
Although the flotilla was built primarily to command the river and support and move garrison troops, its first official function was to participate in the celebrations held at Fredericton on September 10, 1812, to observe the capture of Detroit. Indeed, because the Americans never attacked or even threatened the St. John River, the flotilla spent most of the war transporting troops and supplies. The records show, for example, that the flotilla was used to move a detachment of the 104th (New Brunswick) Regiment of Foot to Saint John in April 1813 and to carry a relief party to the Upper Posts (Presqu’Ile and Grand Falls) the next month. The last entry in the Royal Engineer papers relating to the flotilla is dated October 22, 1814, when some bateaux were being sent to Saint John for repairs.
In 1812, Governor Smyth was also forced to create his own small flotilla to protect shipping in the Bay of Fundy. The Royal Navy’s initial response to depredations along the New Brunswick shoreline in the summer of 1812 was to assign a small, four-gun, 80-ton naval schooner, H.M.S. Bream, to Saint John. When she proved insufficient, Governor Smyth took matters into his own hands. In early September 1812, he purchased the former US revenue cutter Commodore Barry, captured just a few weeks earlier by the Royal Navy on the Maine coast and now lying at Saint John awaiting condemnation as a prize.
The ship that would become the armed sloop Brunswicker was con-structed as a part of a twelve-ship expansion of the US Revenue Service between 1810 and 1812. Purchased at Sag Harbor, New York, in 1812 by the US government, the Commodore Barry was destined for service off the coast of Maine and was stationed at Eastport. The cost of the ship, including equipping and outfitting, came to $4,480.20, with most of the outfitting completed in Maine in June 1812. The surviving evidence suggests she was a two-masted sloop, or top-sail schooner, of approximately 80 tons and appears to have carried six guns, although she was pierced for ten. Although it is not known what type of armament the Commodore Barry carried, similar American revenue cutters were equipped with six 9- to 12-pounder carronades and perhaps some light swivel guns.
The US Coast Guard’s “Record of Movements,” which includes those of the revenue cutters, makes no mention of the Commodore Barry’s activities through June and July 1812. In early August, however, she was captured by the British frigates Maidstone and Spartan and brought into Saint John. The frigates’ captains, Burdett and Brenton, were anxious to obtain the benefits of their work and get away, and local Saint John businessmen were only too willing to oblige. The Commodore Barry was sold to a group of the city’s private citizens — William Pagan, Hugh Johnston, and Nehemiah Merritt — for £1,250, but since the ship had not yet been assessed by the Vice-Admiralty Court in Halifax, the sale was illegal. Moreover, Britain had not yet officially declared war against the United States, so all prizes taken under such conditions were automatically condemned to the Crown — no profit for anyone. The local purchasers must have been aware of these circumstances as they requested further indemnification. Captains Burdett and Brenton agreed to obtain the necessary papers through the Vice-Admiralty Court to allow the Commodore Barry to be placed on the British registry of ships. Perhaps being a bit more wary of the deal, Captain Burdett later refused to sign the agreement.
Despite having only Brenton’s signature on the indemnification, the sale proceeded and the Commodore Barry passed into the hands of the purchasers. They then immediately sold the ship for their original purchase price of £1,250 to the colony of New Brunswick. Dubbed a “privateer-chaser,” rather than a naval vessel or a privateer, the ship was rechristened Brunswicker and became the colony’s first (and only) ocean-going warship. She would operate with a specially issued letter of marque charging her to protect the colony from His Majesty’s enemies, particularly the United States, and to reinforce H.M.S. Bream. She was to observe all of His Majesty’s instructions for commanders of naval vessels of war and privateers and to leave unmolested any unarmed American vessels licensed to trade with Britain.
An 80-ton revenue cutter of the 1815 era similar to the Commodore Barry, which became the armed sloop Brunswicker. Drawing from Howard Irving Chapelle, The History of American Sailing Ships. New York: W.W. Norton, 1935
While Brunswicker prepared for sea, Governor Smyth immediately petitioned the Colonial Office in London for reimbursement of her costs, along with the necessary funds to equip and operate her. The estimates included wages for a captain, mate, and eight seamen, rations for a regular crew of ten, and sailing expenses, for a total of £1,500. In the meantime, the ship was entrusted to the care of Colonel George Leonard, quartermaster general of the New Brunswick Militia, to be fitted out with all the necessary equipment and armament to make her an effective privateer-chaser. Her first captain, James Reed, received very specific instructions on his new command from Smyth. Brunswicker was not to put to sea except on the specific instructions of Smyth or Colonel Leonard. While in harbour, Reed would be subject to the orders of the Saint John commandant and take actions to preserve the safety of his ship. He was authorized to recruit a first mate and six able-bodied seamen to man her in harbour and would fill that crew out to ten to put to sea. His first duty at sea would be the care and security of his vessel. He was not to engage unless he clearly had the advantage, and he was not to sail west of Passamaquoddy Bay unless engaged in an actual pursuit. In the absence of direct orders from Smyth or Leonard, he was to take such counsel as required from British naval officers in Saint John or on board ships with which he might be sailing. The expectation was that the ship and her crew would conform to the regulations of the Royal Navy, including the wearing of colours and pendants.
Money was a central concern throughout Brunswicker’s short tenure in the service of the colony. Captain Reed was specifically enjoined from making any purchases or incurring any debt for the vessel without approval from either Smyth or Leonard. Since there was no specific allocation in the colony’s budget for the purchase and upkeep of Brunswicker, including wages, economy was paramount in Smyth’s mind, especially given the reply, in October 1812, from the Colonial Office to his request for compensation “that so far from being able to discover in your letter any ground for incurring an expense of so unusual a nature, without the previous sanction of His Majesty’s Government, I find every reason to doubt its necessity.” Worse still, Smyth was specifically instructed to incur no further expense in this regard without special authorization, and if he was unhappy with the defence of the Bay of Fundy he was to take it up with the commander of the ships on station.
Faced with such requirements, Smyth became even more concerned about the expense of maintaining Brunswicker. While the ship lay at Dipper Harbour over Christmas 1812, the governor would allow only the paying of extra wages to a seaman for carpentry work and the cost of extra spirits for the crew when it became apparent that such an expense would not exceed that normally incurred by a British warship. Since there was no chance of her seeing service during the winter months, the request for extra seamen was denied. Smyth conceded to Captain Reed at this point that, unless Brunswicker was taken on by the Royal Navy, she would have to be taken out of service due to lack of funds.
The governor’s concerns were quickly realized. The New Brunswick House of Assembly was advised on January 21, 1813, that Brunswicker would not be employed in the service of His Majesty’s government. Nonetheless, and despite the rejection of his request for Colonial Office funding, Smyth submitted estimates of the cost of equipping and keeping Brunswicker in the colony’s service at its expense. The request would have added considerable strength to Brunswicker: ten additional seamen, a gunner (being a military man), and rations for twenty-seven men for three months. The vessel also would have had a detachment of marines.
Despite these problems with the upkeep of Brunswicker, she did put to sea sporadically in late 1812 in the company of H.M.S. Bream, and the two ships did yeoman work. In late November the pair chased American privateers off Point Lepreau and, in a separate action, drove four privateers from the Bay of Fundy; another report describes a chase under way at the same time in Passamaquoddy Bay, but this might be the same event. Brunswicker returned to port on November 24 and was laid up, but in December, again with Bream, Brunswicker helped establish security around the wreck of H.M.S. Plumper, which had been lost in a storm while carrying approximately £20,000 in coin; Bream and Brunswicker recovered £5,000. Brunswicker was also active in and around Passamaquoddy Bay and Saint John in March 1813. After that date, however, Brunswicker’s murky legal status seems finally to have caught up with her — and with Governor Smyth.
Apparently Burdett and Brenton did not take the necessary steps with the Vice-Admiralty Court in Halifax to clear up the ownership issue. In March 1813, Smyth directed the attorney general of New Brunswick to inquire into the state of the proceedings, only to discover that none had been started. Information was requested by the court in Halifax, and in May proceedings began. On June 16, 1813, the Commodore Barry was condemned to the Crown, in keeping with practice for prizes taken when no state of war existed. The court took formal possession of the vessel, and the short — but interesting career — of New Brunswick’s first and only provincial warship came to an end. She remained tied up in Saint John until her final sale at auction on July 4, 1815.
Although the Colonial Office had not sanctioned Governor Smyth’s action, there was no question that the commissioning of Brunswicker in summer 1812 had filled a pressing need. Newspapers in both New Brunswick and the United States eagerly noted the comings and goings of the two sides’ privateers. When, in late November, the Saint John Royal Gazette mentioned that Bream and Brunswicker were chasing two American privateers off Point Lepreau (by which time Britain had declared war), some twenty men from different ships in Saint John harbour offered to join the hunt. Boston’s Columbian Centinel later told its readers that the privateers Fame and Revenge of Salem and Industry of Lynn had been driven out of the Bay of Fundy on November 23 by Bream and the sloop “New Brunswick,” and that their fate was unknown. In fact, the Revenge was captured on December 4 by H.M.S. La Paz and went on to become the Nova Scotia privateer Retaliation.
Brunswicker was not the only vessel Smyth commissioned in 1812. The fourteen-gun sloop Comet under Captain John Eddington was also engaged for escort duty during the undeclared war. It did not take her long to get into action. The Saint John Royal Gazette of September 14, 1812, published a segment of Comet’s log from September 10-11 describing an attack by the American privateer Teazer of New York. According to Comet’s log, she was escorting the ship Ned, a 400-ton, copper-bottomed cargo vessel with a crew of sixteen, bound for Saint John from Glasgow, when an unidentified ship approached flying one too many British flags. Suspicious, Comet and the Ned exchanged shots with the vessel before it finally ran up the American flag and threatened to board the Ned. Eddington “gave him our seven larboard guns, which made him heave about, and prevented him from boarding.” After a brief chase, Comet watched the Teazer haul down her colours and “set all sail before the wind.” In return for their efforts, the Ned sent Comet two barrels of gunpowder.
A few weeks later, Comet’s Saint John owners, Messrs. John Black and Company, advertised “generous wages” for twenty able-bodied seamen and landsmen to complete Comet’s crew for her next cruise under Captain Eddington. No more is heard of Comet, leaving one wondering whether she continued to sail as a letter of marque or was eventually captured.
We do know, however, what happened to the Ned after she left Saint John in fall 1812 with a cargo of lumber and no escort: she fell prey to the Salem privateer Revenge. At 57 tons, the Revenge was puny by comparison, but she carried many more men than the Ned and they were undaunted by the enormous size of their potential prize. The Ned’s crew made the best of it. After a five-hour chase that started off Grand Manan, the two vessels finally engaged in a three-hour exchange of fire that ended with the rigging and sails of both vessels cut to shreds and the privateer nearly out of ammunition. But after all that the spectre of a dozen privateersmen armed with pistols and cutlasses preparing to board her was too much for the Ned’s beleaguered little crew and she struck her colours. The Revenge, in her turn, was captured on December 4, 1812, by H.M.S. La Paz and sent to Halifax as a prize. Bought by Liverpool, Nova Scotia, businessmen, she went back to sea as the privateer Retaliation.
At the end of 1812, Smyth augmented his little fleet with a second privateer-chaser, the armed schooner Hunter, on loan from the super-intendent of trade and fisheries. She was used to escort vessels through the gauntlet of American privateers hovering around the Bay of Fundy and the Nova Scotia coast. On Christmas Eve Hunter arrived in Halifax with a brig from Saint John, and on December 30, citing “Intelligence from Eastport,” the Boston Patriot reported her back at Saint John with a convoy from Halifax. With no prizes to her credit and no further references after 1812, Hunter also seems either to have retired or returned to her original duties. Perhaps she, too, was caught up in the Colonial Office’s failure to fund Smyth’s fleet.
Although Royal Navy ships captured at least half the privateers preying in the Bay of Fundy and upper reaches of the Gulf of Maine in 1812, a handful of colonial and naval vessels could not protect the entire Atlantic coast in the early months of the war. And so Smyth added to his forces by issuing his own special letters of marque to New Brunswick’s first real privateer, the aptly named General Smyth. The vessel — a single-masted sloop of 48 tons, boasting four guns and a crew of sixty — represented a heavy investment by more than a dozen prominent Saint John businessmen, but they would get some of it back — eventually. On her first cruise, General Smyth seized two prizes: the brig Penelope, originally out of St. John’s, Newfoundland, and loaded with a valuable cargo of rum, sugar, coffee, and molasses, was captured in mid-August 1812 from the American privateer Orlando, and a couple of weeks later the Maine schooner Fortune, with a cargo of boards and rum, was taken. Since both ships were seized prior to the official British declaration of war, however, they were condemned to the Crown, so General Smyth’s investors earned no prize money from her first cruise.
They fared no better on the next. The first prize taken, the Reward, on October 10, was carrying flour, peas, potatoes, and dried fish from Salem, Massachusetts, to Lisbon, but it was for the British army commanded by General Sir Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) in the Iberian Peninsula. As a result, the Reward was tangled in the courts for six months until both the ship and her cargo were restored to their owner. It was only after Britain declared war in late October that General Smyth’s crew finally took a prize they were allowed to keep: the 90-ton schooner Lydia on her way to Baltimore with a cargo of fish and lumber; she was appraised at £889 17s 6d.
Described in the Boston Patriot of October 17, 1812, as one of several “non-descript annoying machines” bothering American trade, General Smyth does not seem to have taken any more prizes that year. But she was back to sea in 1813 and lost one of her prizes in a dramatic action that was reported in the Boston Patriot on August 7. The sloop Reliance, bound from St. George River, Maine, for Boston, had just left port in company with five coasting vessels when she was taken by a privateer described as “General Smith.” A prize master and very small prize crew were put on board the Reliance, and the sloop, three other prizes, and General Smyth turned north for New Brunswick. When the American privateer Siro, from Portland, hove into sight, General Smyth and her prizes headed out to sea. The Reliance was unable to keep up, and as she fell farther behind her original captain wrested the sword from the prize master, secured him, and brought the Reliance into Portland.
New Brunswickers refused to stand idle following the American declaration of war. Licences, letters of marque, and illicit trade helped keep the colonial economy going until Britain declared war in October. One vessel that was issued a letter of marque was Union, a small one-gun ship owned by George Younghusband, Samuel Miles, William R. Boyd, and John Atkinson of Saint John. On November 20, 1812, Atkinson and William Ward, both merchants, posted a £1,500 bond for the vessel’s good behaviour. Given its diminutive size and armament, Union was clearly meant to be an armed trader, concentrating on normal commerce but eligible to capture prizes of opportunity, and does not appear to have captured any ships.
Another New Brunswick privateer was Sir John Sherbrooke, formerly the 187-ton American brigantine Vernon. She was purchased by brothers Robert and William Pagan and William Ritchie of Saint John and outfitted as an armed trader with a powerful armament of twelve guns and a crew of thirty. Although Sir John Sherbrooke was registered in New Brunswick, her bond was put up by Halifax merchants William Lawson, Enos Collins, and Joseph Allison, who had interests in a number of Nova Scotia privateers. Commissioned at the end of November 1812 under Master Thomas Robson of Saint John, the privateer seems to have made just a single trip to Jamaica via Bermuda, returning home in March 1813 without a prize. In February 1813, Collins and Allison posted a bond for a second, much more successful privateer, also named Sir John Sherbrooke, this one a 273-ton brigantine that had once been the American privateer Thorn from Marblehead, Massachusetts. After March 1813, it was this Sir John Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia owned and operated, that brought in the prizes.
The first — and unsuccessful — Sir John Sherbrooke was the last privateer to receive a letter of marque from the governor of New Brunswick. By the middle of 1813, the Court of Vice-Admiralty had seen enough dubious captures, questionable privateering, and financial practices, and had received enough letters of complaint from aggrieved merchants, to suggest that New Brunswick was either furnishing letters of marque to fraudulent privateers or her enthusiastic privateers were spoiling the traffic in smuggled goods. Whatever the reason, Governor Smyth was forbidden from issuing any more letters of marque.
Undaunted, New Brunswickers simply obtained their letters of marque from Nova Scotia for the balance of the war. The original Sir John Sherbrooke, for example, sailing under Captain Thomas Robson of Saint John, continued in the lucrative West Indies trade as an armed trader under a letter of marque issued by Sir John Sherbrooke himself. There is no evidence that she captured any prizes, but her distinction lies in her capture by American privateers following an intense fight against heavy odds. After departing Richibucto in October 1813, the ship vanished, and her fate remained unknown for several months until a letter from Captain Robson dated December 12, 1813, reached her owners from Kingston, Jamaica. In a matter-of-fact account, Robson explained how he had battled three ships — an American brig-of-war, a packet, and the Baltimore privateer Saucy Jack — “at close action for one hour and thirty minutes.” Sir John Sherbrooke’s gunners set one American vessel on fire twice, beat the Saucy Jack to a complete wreck, and defeated three boarding attempts. Sir John Sherbrooke was on the point of escaping when Robson was shot in the head. As he reported it, “The ball entering the mouth, passing out behind the left ear, which nearly caused my death.” With the mate and four others wounded and three men dead, their gallant captain now (apparently) mortally wounded, and outnumbered roughly five to one, Robson’s men finally surrendered.
By early 1813, defence of British shipping in the Bay of Fundy fell largely to the armed sloop Brunswicker and the Royal Navy’s Bream and Boxer operating out of Saint John, supported, however briefly, by Hunter and Comet. As a result, carrying the war to the enemy fell increasingly to privateers.
New Brunswick’s best-known privateer, Dart, was commissioned in early 1813. Famous for her impressive total of eleven prizes carried into port, Dart is also better known than her fellow privateers thanks to the survival of a set of Articles of Agreement signed by her crew, the log detailing her two cruises under Captain John Harris of Annapolis, Nova Scotia, and her nefarious end in Long Island Sound.
A 47-ton sloop, Dart was small for a privateer, but her four car- ronades — lightweight guns of large calibre, easily handled by a small crew and devastating at short range against wooden ships — two swivel guns, and forty-five man crew made up for her lack of size. She was also aggressively handled by both her captains. By the time she was captured off Rhode Island in October 1813, Dart had made three cruises off New England.
Originally the American privateer Actress from New Haven, Connecticut, Dart had been captured by H.M.S. Spartan on July 18, 1812, and had sat in Saint John harbour until April 22, 1813, when she was bought by Robert Shives, John Hay, Sr., and James Thorpe Hanford. Two weeks later they requested a letter of marque, and on May 4 Dart received her first commission. Her Saint John owners appointed Captain Harris, a Nova Scotian, as her first captain. Dart’s journal opens on May 22. Six days later, her boat chased the Eastport schooner Sally out of Little River only to discover that she was in ballast and had a British licence. That night Dart came upon the frigate H.M.S. Rattler escorting a prize back to Saint John. Thinking Dart must be an enemy privateer, Rattler fired two shots at her, hitting her below the water line. The frigate then realized the mistake and sent a carpenter to help plug the hole.
Dart cruised south, and the day after the epic duel off Boston between the British frigate H.M.S. Shannon and the U.S.S. Chesapeake, she seized her first prize: the schooner Joanna under Captain Alex Newcombe of Martha’s Vineyard, apparently carrying a licensed cargo of 1,500 bushels of his own corn to Halifax. Mistaking Dart for the American privateer she had once been, Newcombe later claimed that he hid his British licence for fear he would be arrested for trading with the enemy. Once he was sure his captors were British, he tried to show them his licence, but Harris refused to accept it. The Vice-Admiralty Court awarded the prize to Dart.
Over the next few days of early June 1813, Dart made futile attempts to capture some small vessels, chased a suspicious sail that turned out to be an old boat not worth taking, and finally took two vessels from Portland, Maine — the Superb, a small boat carrying a cargo of salt, and the schooner Washington, “a Beautiful Pilot Boat of 65 tons burthen entirely new pierced for Guns comfortably fitted, and I expect was intended for a privateer.” After manning the Washington with a prize crew bound for Saint John, Harris put a female passenger along with the crews of the Joanna and the Washington aboard the Superb and sent her on her way to Baltimore.
On June 7, after a five-hour chase and two shots, Dart captured the 176-ton ship Cuba. Prize court documents indicate that David Bishop, the Cuba’s owner, had obtained a licence from Governor Sherbrooke of Nova Scotia to import seven hundred and fifty barrels of flour from New York for Halifax merchants Enos Collins and Joseph Allison and the same amount for himself and the other owners of the vessel. Because the New York customs collector was suspicious of any vessels heading to northeastern ports, Captain Bishop had used the trick of clearing for one port while heading for another lying more or less in the same direction. First, he had told the collector he was sailing for New Haven. Once there, he had cleared for Portland but, when captured by Dart, claimed he was actually heading north to Halifax. He complained that he had made several successful trips to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia using the same technique and had never been detained. Affidavits from the rest of the crew contradicted his statement, however, and once again the Vice-Admiralty Court awarded the prize to Dart.
On June 17, after nearly a month at sea, Harris decided to turn for his home, Annapolis, Nova Scotia, to get his ship in order — “the Crew Sober and some more Officers.” A few days later, he changed his mind and, on June 25, Dart captured the Experiment, a small coasting sloop whose cargo of rum, ginger, sugar, tobacco, and coffee nevertheless was worth sending in. Then, on June 26, Harris spied a fast-sailing ship with eight guns per side. Nearly four times Dart’s size, the 230-ton Union was carrying a cargo of salt, fruit, and block tin from Cadiz, Spain, to Boston. It required only one shot from Dart’s bow gun to bring her to. Her captain readily produced a licence signed by General Wellesley in Spain, but Harris thought the tin might be subject to seizure despite the licence. Harris lost the gamble, though, and the Union was eventually restored to its owners. Dart’s first cruise ended on June 30 in Saint John harbour.
Dart’s second cruise was commanded by James Ross, Harris’s second-in-command. Six prizes were sent in, including the Mequait, out of Bath, Maine, laden with corn, rye, and fish, and the schooner Dolphin, heading from Portland to Boston with a load of cordwood. A third prize, the Cape Ann coasting schooner Three Brothers, was taken a week later. These were followed at the end of August by the Boston schooners Hero and Camden, both taken in ballast, and a schooner off Mount Desert, Maine, which was piloted through a thick fog into Machias harbour by one of its former crew. Ross’s last prize to make it to court was the 49-ton schooner Deborah, seized on September 1 while carrying corn, apples, and salt to Saco, Maine.
Dart’s career as a privateer finally ended in early October 1813, after Captain Ross and his crew took a piratical turn. By the time Ross detained the ship Governor Strong for seven hours at the entrance to Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, he already had a reputation as a bully. He treated the Governor Strong’s crew “in a most rascally manner,” threatening to put them in irons and shoot the captain, and robbed the ship of five hundred dollars in cash. When Dart then fell afoul of the Rhode Island revenue cutter Vigilant, with four 12-pounder guns, two long guns firing 6-pound shot, and six swivel guns firing 2-pound shot, the Americans were content to beat the privateer into submission at long range. By the time the Vigilant came alongside Dart, the remaining twenty-two privateers and their officers begged for quarter and fled below decks without further resistance. In a final dastardly act after the Americans seized the ship, Captain Ross seized a musket and wounded a sentry. The career of New Brunswick’s most successful privateering vessel was over.
But the career of New Brunswick’s most successful privateering sailor was just getting started. In August 1813, following in Dart’s wake, Nehemiah Merritt and others from Saint John obtained a letter of marque for the schooner Star, captained by twenty-six year-old Caleb Seeley of Saint John, a tall, handsome sailor and every inch the gentleman. During his twenty-two day cruise in Star in late summer 1813, Seeley took at least three prizes, although none earned his owners enough to persuade them to continue investing. The first prize was the sloop Elizabeth, taken at anchor and in ballast on August 25 near Moose Island. A week later, Star took the 58-ton sloop Resolution, laden with iron ore ballast worth less than £400. The last prize was the fishing schooner Flower, which was bought in December by Star’s owner and later sold for £175.
Following his success in Star, Seeley invested some of his prize money as part owner and master of the Nova Scotia privateer, Liverpool Packet. She was already a famous vessel. Captured by the Royal Navy before the war for slave trading, the sleek, fast ship was outfitted for privateering by a group of Halifax investors. Under Captain John Barss, Liverpool Packet was the scourge of the New England coast in early 1813. Her capture in June by the American privateer Thomas of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was a much-celebrated event. The Americans turned her around and, as the Portsmouth Packet, she was recaptured in the Bay of Fundy by H.M.S. Fantome in October 1813. Her original owners, with some of Seeley’s prize money, then repurchased the ship and sent her back to sea again as Liverpool Packet.
Seeley proved to be a gifted privateer. His first cruise took Liverpool Packet off Cape Cod for a month in December 1813. In four days he captured prizes worth an estimated $100,000 and manned so many ships that he brought Liverpool Packet home with only five crewmen left aboard. In January 1814, he returned to the entrance to Long Island Sound in company with another Nova Scotia privateer, the ex-American privateer Revenge, now called Retaliation. By the time he was finished, Seeley sent in at least fourteen prizes in eleven months, earning the respect of both his fellow privateers and his foes. He was particularly noted for his courage, fairness in the treatment of prisoners, and gentlemanly manner. Many of the vessels he stopped at sea were allowed to proceed on their voyage simply because he had neither the men nor the inclination to take them. Under Seeley’s command, Liverpool Packet once again became the subject of legend. In October 1814, he settled in Liverpool, Nova Scotia, and became a successful ship owner and pillar of the local community. Caleb Seeley died on Valentine’s Day 1869.
Saint John’s Caleb Seeley, one of Canada’s most successful privateers. After successfully commanding the New Brunswick privateer Dart, he went on to fame as captain of Liverpool Packet, which sailed out of Nova Scotia. Queen’s County Museum, Liverpool, N.S. (QCM)
Captains of other New Brunswick privateers were neither as skilled nor as lucky. The largest privateer, the 300-ton Herald, originally the American privateer York Town of New York, was outfitted as a letter of marque trader in early September 1813 with only ten guns and twenty-five crewmen. She was lost during a gale in November, driven ashore on Wolfe Island, New Brunswick, but most of her crew was saved. Captain Simmonds went on to become the speaker of the New Brunswick House of Assembly.
Hare, the ex-American privateer Wasp of Salem, captured two prizes in January 1814: the sloop Hero, laden with cordwood, and the brig Recovery. Hare’s last cruise ended dramatically and badly when she was ambushed by American sailors and some local inhabitants of Sawyer’s Cove, Maine, while trying to cut out a prize from its anchorage. Hare got away, but several men were wounded and eventually captured. Hare never sailed again as a privateer.
New Brunswick’s last privateer, the 160-ton Baltimore clipper Snap-dragon,was a famous privateer in her own right. As the Snap-Dragon she was North Carolina’s most famous privateer, sending in prizes worth between $250,000 and $2 million — accounts vary widely. Her commander, Captain Otway Burns, is one of the state’s naval heroes and his stone crypt bears one of the Snap-Dragon’s guns. After the ship was captured in June 1814, Messrs. Curry and Hanford of Saint John purchased her. Rechristened Snapdragon, she was sent off to hunt the dwindling American merchant fleet, but captured no prizes during two cruises in 1814.
It is often said that the War of 1812 was a non-event in eastern Canada, but the war at sea was significant and its history is little known. In particular, New Brunswick’s connection to the naval war is often obscured by the focus on the Royal Navy and the dominance of Nova Scotia in the privateering war — and in privateering literature. But New Brunswick was fully engaged in the war at sea. Indeed, the importance of Saint John as a commercial port forced New Brunswick’s Governor Smyth to raise his own fleet to defend shipping in the Bay of Fundy when the Royal Navy was too stretched to do the work. The legacy of that “independent” New Brunswick navy is the current Saint John naval reserve division, H.M.C.S. Brunswicker. New Brunswick’s own modest, but eventful, privateering campaign was a noteworthy chapter in the War of 1812.