The British Isles.
While conflict unfolded in New York, American commissioners in France would send two ships’ captains to raid the British Isles in the summer of 1777. Captains Lambert Wickes and Gustavus Conyngham faced difficulties that later captains would not. No French alliance existed for them as France and Spain remained neutral, subject to British threats, which made them ultimately expel these two American raiders from their ports. While both raiders would be successful from the standpoint of taking merchant prizes, this emphasis would be dangerous to the commissioners who promoted them. The French court was not ready for Wickes and Conyngham and it would take another year for France to ally itself with the rebellious colonies.1
The British Isles.
In October 1776, Captain Lambert Wickes of the Reprisal was ordered by Congress’s Marine and Secret Committees to carry Benjamin Franklin and his two grandsons to France. Wickes’ orders directed him not to digress from getting Franklin to France by taking prizes. Franklin was so sick from the voyage that he had Wickes allow him and his grandsons to disembark at the first fishing boat they could find, which landed them at Auray.2 It was the beginning of a career in Europe in which Franklin could claim equal honors with Robert Morris as being the father of the Continental Navy.
Franklin was to join Silas Dean of Connecticut and Arthur Lee of Virginia to form the commission whose goal was to obtain a political and commercial alliance with France. It never seemed to bother them that France was an absolute monarchy without an English constitution to prevent the arbitrary power of a monarch.3 The initial expenses of the new commission were to be paid for by a cargo of indigo which had been shipped to Nantes, France; Franklin was to see to its sale. It was at this time that Dean met with James Aitken, the incendiary who planned to burn British dockyards. Here was the inauspicious beginning of the American Commissioners in France, who would become the focal point of American naval activity in Europe.
While seeking an alliance with France, the American commissioners could not resist the pleas of Continental and privateer captains to raid the rich pickings in European waters. Even if some French were sympathetic to the American cause, the commissioners had to be careful because the French Foreign Minister, the Comte de Vergennes, was determined to remain neutral. It was Vergennes opinion that France was not ready for war with Britain. Thus, he would impound ships and imprison crews operating under the auspices of the commissioners.4 The diplomatic crisis created by these two captains angered Vergennes and made him break off contact with the commissioners, and their threats to begin negotiations with Britain did not help.5
The commissioners did facilitate less blatant activities. Munitions were always in short supply in the colonies and, whenever possible, Continental warships were to return to America with them. Congress hoped that this would be done quickly as the war effort was constantly stalled without them. From the standpoint of its captains, however, delays in Europe made speed impossible and the munitions trade was not lucrative. Higher aspirations existed among some commissioners that proved impossible to fulfill. In May 1777, Benjamin Franklin dreamed, ‘We have not the least doubt but that two or three of the Continental frigates sent into the [North Sea] with some lesser swift sailing cruisers, might intercept and seize a great part of the Baltic and Northern trade.’6 He was referring to seizing naval stores, which Royal Navy dockyards depended upon, from Baltic convoys. Linen trade convoys in Irish waters might also be targets. The disruption of any trade in the British Isles proved enticing.
The commissioners could offer Congressional privateer letters of marque to merchant vessels in France. Silas Deane specialized in privateers and, with French business partners, actually selected privateer captains in whom they might invest.7 Of course, the more privateers, the less able were Continental ships to gather crews and devote themselves to operations that profited from the sale of prizes. In Europe, this created the impression that Continental warships were in fact privateers because the commissioners’ limited funds led them to act as such.
Ultimately, Franklin, Deane and Lee did not get along.8 Lee exposed several of Dean’s dubious financial transactions. Lee bombarded Franklin with written allegations of corruption to the point that Franklin admitted he did not answer them and had some burned. Lee threatened he would report on Franklin’s disloyalty to Congress where he had the strong support of his brother Richard Henry Lee. The dissention was finally solved in February 1779, when Congress dissolved the commission and named Franklin alone minister plenipotentiary to the court of France.
Captain Lambert Wickes followed his orders from Congress to the letter, informed the American commissioners of his location often, and meticulously kept his ship’s log. He would be an ideal Continental captain because he respected Congress and did not embellish his deeds. From an old Maryland Eastern Shore family, he was born in 1735 at the family homestead Wickcliffe, near Shipyard Creek and Chestertown.9 From his few letters it appears that he was not well educated. He became captain of the for-hire merchant ships Neptune and Ceres, trading wheat, flour and staves from the Chester River, Annapolis and Oxford to Spain’s Canary Islands, Falmouth, Cornwall and London. He returned to the Chesapeake with European manufactures and indentured servants; he had become familiar with the British Isles’ waters and would make his reputation through wartime cruising, most of it in Europe.
In May 1776, with the support of Robert Morris, Wickes had been made captain of the 18-gun, 130 men, Continental brig Reprisal. After returning to Philadelphia for repairs from a collision with another frigate, Wickes’ Reprisal, with two other ships, was able to elude the Liverpool and get to Cape May by traveling in shoal water ‘where [the Liverpool] could not follow them’.10
Wickes was then ordered by the Secret Committee to transport young Philadelphia merchant William Bingham to French Martinique in the West Indies. There he would act as the crucial agent responsible for getting the best prices for colonial staples and the lowest prices for munitions. On his return, Wickes was to carry munitions for the Continental army.11 He sailed from Philadelphia, but his cruise was interrupted in the Delaware River, where he came upon the Continental 6-gun brig Nancy, which was being chased by six Royal Navy ships. It carried 400 barrels of needed gunpowder and its captain decided his only option was to run the Nancy aground and try to salvage as much of the cargo as possible. The Reprisal and another Continental ship begun to unload the gunpowder on to their ships as the British closed in. Wickes’ brother Richard, his third lieutenant, led the unloading, during which, however, the remaining powder exploded, killing him. Still, the Reprisal continued on, clearing the Delaware Capes and ultimately delivering Bingham to Martinique. Reprisal did have to escape the challenge of HMS Shark at Martinique, but it had the support of the French fort’s guns in St Pierre Harbor because Captain General d’Argout felt the Shark was the aggressor, disturbing the peace.
Wickes’ next assignment from the Secret Committee was the aforementioned delivery of Franklin to France, but he could not stay for long as French authorities, under pressure from the British, asked him to leave. He returned to Philadelphia by way of Martinique, carrying not only the munitions Bingham had obtained but goods like rum and molasses that Bingham had acquired on account for Willing, Morris & Co. Of course, Robert Morris was a member of both the Marine and Secret Committees and, along with Bingham, reaped a personal profit from this sale.12 The mixing of public and private interests would continue throughout the war.
From Philadelphia, the Congressional committees now sent Wickes and the Reprisal back to France, hoping to foster trouble between France and Britain. Early in 1777, based in France, the Reprisal cruised to the Bay of Biscay. After a forty-minute battle and the loss of one killed and two officers wounded, it took the mail packet Swallow, which traveled between Britain and Portugal.13 The Swallow was not a merchant ship but rather part of the mail service and thus the British described the attack as piracy because they did not recognize American independence. When Wickes attempted to return to France with his prizes and put in at Lorient, French authorities ordered him to leave within twenty-four hours. He claimed his ship was in danger from a leak and it needed to be careened for hull repairs, an excuse, but also a reality.
On April 27, the Lorient authorities again ordered the Reprisal out and forbade Wickes to take any prizes on the French coast – ‘on any pretense whatsoever’.14 However, Wickes refused to sign the French orders, claiming they were not consistent with his orders from Congress and asserting that he had never taken prizes on the coast of France. Clearly his arguments were an effort to delay, but he knew he could not stay and finally he proposed to go to Nantes.
While at Lorient, Wickes faced an all-too-common experience: the mutiny of Reprisal’s crew. After his arrival, the entire crew had refused to go to sea until they received their prize money. He prevailed upon them to go to Nantes for the prize money and he affirmed that they would be paid there. As their one-year service had now expired, Wickes hoped the commissioners would be punctual in ‘giving orders to Mr Morris for paying them’, as he hoped ‘to prevent any dispute between me and Mr Morris’.15 The crew did promise to continue on the Reprisal, provided they received their compensation. If they were not paid, however, Wickes felt he would have to sail directly to America with only a portion of the crew, perhaps thirty or forty men.
Wickes gained his crew’s trust and late in May 1777, he followed orders from Franklin and Deane to sail from France to Ireland, with the aim of capturing the Belfast linen convoy. His squadron consisted of the Reprisal, 14-gun Lexington under Captain Henry Johnson and 10-gun Dolphin under Captain Samuel Nicholson. Samuel, James Nicholson’s brother and Wickes’ Maryland neighbor, had been unemployed in London when the war broke out, but at the end of 1776, Congress commissioned him a lieutenant in the Continental Navy. They went around Ireland’s west Atlantic coast and entered the Irish Sea by way of the North Channel, cruising southward along the eastern Irish coast. The squadron sailed between Dublin and Holyhead on the Welsh coast and then south to the port of Wexford on the Irish coast, avoiding the Royal Navy patrols. In a month, while they missed the linen convoy, they took eight prizes, including the sloop Jason from Whitehaven, the Peggy from Cork with butter and hides, a Scottish sloop with wheat from Prussia, and the snow, Lizard, with a load of cork from Gibraltar.16 The only valuable prize amongst them was the Grace from Jamaica with sugar, rum, cotton and tobacco. One prize was actually stolen by a French prize master and three vessels belonging to smugglers were released. Seven vessels, including three in ballast and three coal brigs heading for Dublin were scuttled, after taking their crews on his ships. Finally, he sent one of his prizes to Whitehaven with 110 captured mariners. In response, Whitehaven authorities requested the Royal Navy send warships, but by that time Wickes was gone.
On July 4, 1777, Whitehaven’s General Advertiser commented how restrained Wickes had been in his cruise, especially as he had never raided the English coast:
We are told, that vessels were frequently seen, and passed without molestation. The people in general speak in the warmest terms of the humane treatment they met with from the commander of the Reprisal and Lexington, both of whom endeavoured to make the situation of their prisoners as easy as their unhappy circumstances would admit.17
On June 26 near Ushant, the 74-gun Royal Navy Burford gave chase to Wickes’ squadron and he drew off in the Reprisal to enable the other ships to reach port safely. The Reprisal narrowly escaped the Burford by jettisoning its cannon and swivels so that it could sail more rapidly.18 The Dolphin arrived at St Malo, but it had been so heavily damaged by the Burford that it was beyond repair and had to be converted into a packet ship.
Wickes obtained refuge at St Malo, where he was detained by French authorities as they feared his further cruise would cause Britain to declare war. On August 19, British Ambassador Lord Stormont demanded that Wickes’ squadron be expelled, threatened France’s Newfoundland fishing fleet and ordered a blockade of shipping in the French West Indies. Wickes was concerned to sell his prizes illegally and Franklin suggested that they might be sold along the coast outside of a regulated French port. When the prizes were finally sold it was at a great loss, and Silas Deane admitted the cruise had not been profitable. While Wickes waited, he replaced Reprisal’s lost ordnance and had it careened. Finally in September, Wickes was allowed to leave France for Boston or Portsmouth. He wrote to Johnson, who was at another French port, hoping they could meet and sail together. However, the Lexington was captured by the cutter Alert near Ushant and Johnson was sent to Mill Prison at Plymouth. Reprisal sailed alone across the Atlantic and on October 1 it foundered off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, with the loss of all hands except the cook.19 After only eighteen months, Wickes’ distinguished career as a Continental captain was over. British diplomats were elated; Wickes was gone and the commissioners’ path to an alliance was blocked as upset Vergennes broke off contact with them.
Gustavus Conyngham was a most controversial captain. Like John Paul Jones, he came from the vicinity of the Irish Sea, where he had been a merchant mariner. He was born in either 1744 or 1747 at Larganreagh, near Londonderry, County Donegal, Ulster.20 As a teenager, he moved to Philadelphia, where he worked for his cousin Redmond Conyngham in partnership with John Nesbitt, and then was apprenticed to Captain Henderson, who indulged him, giving him command of the merchant ship Charming Betty. In the fall of 1775, as a private citizen, Conyngham took that ship to the Dutch Republic, where he quietly arranged to purchase arms for the rebel cause. However, Conyngham and the Charming Betty were picked up by the British on a tip from one of his sailors and ordered to England under a prize crew. He and his crew were able to overpower the prize crew, escaping to the Dutch Republic. There, they were stopped from sailing by Dutch authorities and he was forced to sell the Charming Betty to the Dutch government. However, the Dutch never paid him for the ship and he languished in Holland, having failed to obtain any munitions. He might have given up, but instead he decided to find another ship.
Conyngham headed for the French port of Dunkirk, which was notorious for smuggling and raiding, so that in negotiations at the end of the Seven Years’ War, it had been forced to destroy its fortifications and accept a British agent to watch its waterfront. He contacted Franklin, who had blank commissions for captains in the Continental Navy, and he supposedly offered one to Conyngham on March 1, 1777. Franklin then sent him back to Dunkirk to discreetly find another ship. This was a small swift lugger, which Conyngham named the Surprize.21 He actually purchased the lugger in Dover, England and recruited its crew from idle American sailors, detained in French ports, plus an assortment of French nationals, although the French government had refused to allow him to recruit. While Conyngham believed the Surprize was a Continental warship, legally it turned out to be no more than a privateer or even a private ship, as the American commissioners could only offer a ship a letter of marque. Even Conyngham’s commission from Franklin had been limited to this single voyage and his name did not appear in Congress’s October 1776 list of Continental captains.
The Surprize sailed from Dunkirk into the English Channel and was at the mouth of the River Thames in early May 1777, capturing a British mail packet, Prince of Orange, and the brig Joseph carrying a cargo of wine. Conyngham ordered his prize crews to make for land with them, where they were to be refitted and sold.22 When Surprize and the prizes approached Dunkirk’s harbor, however, they encountered a pair of Royal Navy ketches. The British vessels rammed the Surprize multiple times, trying to goad Conyngham into a fight, but he proceeded into the protection of demilitarized Dunkirk.
France had a treaty with Britain that forbade the selling of commandeered goods in French ports, and Lord Stormont protested Conyngham’s prizes and demanded that France return the Joseph.23 To emphasize the point, the British sent the 18-gun sloop Ceres to blockade Conyngham. What Conyngham did not realize was that the Comte de Vergennes was equally upset. He bowed to Stormont’s demands, turning over the Joseph and arresting Conyngham and his crew. They were sent to prison under charges of piracy. The French seized the Surprize and confiscated Conyngham’s Continental Navy commission. This document was crucial to him because without it, Conyngham was illegitimate. It was never again found and for the rest of his career Conyngham remained open to charges of being a pirate. Moreover, both British and French authorities referred to the Surprize as a privateer, not a Continental warship.
While Conyngham languished in prison, Franklin set about obtaining a new ship for him. Royal Navy ships were watching the construction of new ships and were prepared to destroy vessels that were being built to aid the American cause. In mid-1777 at Dunkirk, Franklin arranged the building of a cutter called Greyhound for Conyngham, which had false buyers to confound British authorities. One of these investors, William Hodge, had it outfitted and armed with fourteen carriage guns, as it awaited an opportunity to slip past the British. On July 16 it sailed, its guns having been removed, but once outside the port they were returned and Conyngham boarded it, taking command and renaming it the Revenge.24 For Hodge’s part in the subterfuge, the French threw him into the Bastille.
Conyngham and his crew had been allowed to sail by Vergennes with the stipulation that Revenge would leave Europe and sail to America. Conyngham received written instructions in July 1777 from a commissioner stating that he must sail directly to America and ‘do nothing which may involve your security or occasion Umbrage to the Ministry of France …’ and only ‘if attacked first by our Enemies’, could he defend himself.25
Conyngham ignored these orders, instead raiding the British Isles for the next two months, going into the North Sea and then the Irish Sea.26 His journey carried him to Irish waters almost at the same time as Wickes. Yet, no evidence of coordination between them exists. And while Wickes was always a Continental captain, it is not clear Conyngham was one or even a privateer. It has been argued that arrogant William Carmichael, a protégé of Silas Deane, had verbally countermanded Conyngham’s original orders. As Carmichael was hostile to the French, he may have become a British agent, using the countermand as a means of undermining the commissioners.
As Conyngham’s voyage around the British Isles developed, he went first to the North Sea and then pretended to be a private vessel going to Bergen, Norway in order to shake Royal Navy ships shadowing him. They drew back as they thought him to be a French privateer and they wanted to continue French neutrality.27 Conyngham scoured the shipping lanes off the English coast for prizes, finally capturing the schooner Happy Return, two brigs Maria and Patty, and the merchantman Northampton. This last prize proved to be his undoing because it was recaptured and taken to Yarmouth, England. There the British authorities found that the majority of the Northampton’s prize crew were Frenchmen and they protested to French authorities. They also discovered a new commission for Conyngham from Congress’s president John Handcock, evidently having been sent to support the commission Franklin had given him; one that he would never receive.28
Unaware of this, Conyngham sailed north, rounded Scotland’s Shetland Islands and sailed south on Ireland’s west coast. Like Wickes, he was not interested in ravaging communities and when he stopped at Broadhaven Bay on the Atlantic coast, it was for supplies, which brought him close to his boyhood home.29 He then returned to the Irish Sea and blatantly landed at Kinsale, a little-used naval dockyard near Cork, to take on water. When the Revenge was badly damaged by a storm, he sailed it into an English port to be repaired, reverting to his native Irish brogue to maintain anonymity. He was able to disguise his ship and hide its intentions, acting as an unmarked smuggler. At this moment, he had kept only five prizes, several ships having been burnt as not being prizeworthy.
Finally, Lord Stormont asked French authorities to issue orders to arrest the ‘Dunkirk pirate’ if he returned to France.30 British warships were placed to prevent his return. Conyngham also remembered from his earlier voyages that he had been unsuccessful in disposing of prizes in neutral France, so that rather than returning to France with his prizes, he decided to head for Spain. He was pursued by a Royal Navy ship, which exchanged shots with the Revenge, damaging her maneuverability. Feeling vulnerable, Conyngham avoided a fight with the unidentified ship and then sailed to Ferrol, Spain to resupply and replace his crew. Manning was a problem because prize crews had depleted his ship’s company and most of his crew, being Europeans, lacked respect for his unknown republic. He claimed the crew overruled him, forcing him to act like a pirate, seizing several prizes in Spanish waters, including a French brig. He also became a confidant of Silas Dean, who was pleased to help dispose of his prizes in neutral Spain. British authorities protested to the Conde de Floridablanca, who assured them that Conyngham’s abuses were known and that he had been sent out of Ferrol and would not be permitted to enter any Spanish port.
Shut out from Spain in February 1778, Conyngham decided to sail for Spain’s colonies in the West Indies, where he continued to act against the British as a privateer. This ended when he captured a ship carrying munitions, which, remembering his original reason for his European voyage, he deemed worthy of escorting to American shores. He arrived in Philadelphia on February 21, 1779 with his prizes and goods in tow. Though some local newspapers hailed him as a returning hero, the Continental Congress was less than pleased with his disobedience to orders and his loss of his commissions, which opened him to charges of piracy. Congress’s Marine Committee had already met to discuss his voyage and it found he had sold prizes in foreign ports without paperwork to back up the sales.31 Former crewmen who preceded him home claimed that they had not been paid their promised wages. And his involvement with Silas Deane, now accused of various financial wrongdoings in France, did not help him. Richard Henry Lee of Virginia alleged that both Surprize and Revenge were privateers and several partners along with Deane had profited handsomely from the prize money derived from Conyngham’s cruises. Conyngham claimed he had only sought to harass British commercial shipping in their home waters, a priority which Congress had yet to make. Adding to this, as Conyngham was not the owner of the Revenge, Congress took it from him and it was sold at a private auction, further indicating that it had been a privateer rather than a Continental Navy ship.
Conyngham’s only consolation was that the Revenge was bought by none other than his cousins in the Conyngham and Nesbitt Company. They again gave him command of the Revenge to sail as a privateer, as he no longer claimed a position in the Continental Navy.32 In April 1779, he and his crew were unable to outrun the British frigate Galatea off the coast of Delaware and were taken prisoner. Since he held no commission at the time, he was arrested on charges of piracy and sent to the English Pendennis Castle prison. He escaped from there, only to be caught again and transferred to Mill Prison, Plymouth. He was kept in irons continuously, although he was able escape to Texel, the Dutch Republic, where, despite being blockaded, John Paul Jones was able to find him a place for a few months on his Alliance. While returning to America on board the Experiment in March 1780, he was recaptured by the British and sent back to Plymouth’s Mill Prison. He remained there until his release in a prisoner exchange in June 1781.
Although a firm count is impossible, it appears that Conyngham had been able to keep more prizes than any other navy commander. He was not an articulate self-promoter like John Paul Jones and thus his feat in accumulating prizes went unrewarded. Before the French alliance, Conyngham was an embarrassment to both the French and American governments. ‘The only party that had anything to gain by publishing [his activities] was the British’, because they were regarded his efforts as illegal.33
Wickes’ and Conyngham’s cruises introduce us to the early prize game, which requires further explanation. Congress’s Marine and Secret Committees consistently made it clear to their captains that trade in munitions and the fostering of alliances with France or Spain took precedence over cruising for prizes.34 They might order warships to cruise in specific areas like the Irish Sea – where the possibility of taking prizes was great – but were pleased only if revenue came to the navy from the sale of prize cargos.
Congress hoped for prize money to finance the war. In Europe, conditions for the sale of American prizes and their cargos were difficult. It was not only that no courts were available to adjudicate, but that until France declared war on Britain in mid-1778, all prize transactions had to be done illicitly. This meant that sales opportunities were clandestine and returns were only a fraction of expectations. Furthermore, one of the American commissioners, Silas Dean, was accused of personally profiting from these sales.35
The failure for prize money to meet expectations also affected Continental crews, who were recruited with the promise of pay for a year, although not coming till the end of a voyage. Crews found even this in arrears, their only realistic hope of remuneration being a share of a prize. The failure of a captain to obtain prize money was a cause of discontent among crews, as we have seen with Wickes’ crew at Lorient. Prize money was especially important if a mariner had a family he was supporting at home.36 If a crew was kept beyond the year of service, far from home, without compensation from prizes it had risked its life in taking, it understandably became mutinous.
Prize claims actually continued after the war. Of the three captains in Wickes’ Irish expedition, only Samuel Nicholson would live to witness the post-war effort of the three crews to share in the prize money they felt due them. The Marine Committee found the commissioners had no records of the sales of their ships and cargos.37 Congress finally agreed to compensate them for only the Irish cruise and the figure was much lower than the value of the prizes taken. Wickes’ estate never collected any prize money from Congress.
Similarly, when Conyngham returned to the United States, he sought to obtain his share of the thirty-one prizes he claimed to have taken. But he was plagued by his lost commission and by Congress asserting that it had intended his commission to be ‘for temporary expeditions only and not to give rank in the navy’.38 And the case was delayed so long that his best witness to counter that claim, Benjamin Franklin, passed away.
Overall, Lambert Wickes in the Reprisal and Gustavus Conyngham in the Revenge had separately sailed around the British Isles and into the Irish Sea. The disguised object of the two squadrons was to take enough British merchant shipping to cause war between Britain and France. As France and Spain were still neutral, they had to be restrained enough to capture only British ships and make no effort to attack British ports. Wickes’ and Conyngham’s activities were often secretly financed by the French, but this did not mean they could expect French government support when they needed refitting and supplies. Their efforts would not add much to the reputation of the new Continental Navy, instead being confused with the action of privateers and even pirates.39 It was their reputation that the next important Continental captain in Europe, John Paul Jones, would seek to avoid.