Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s Massachusetts Tour

Prof. Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy of the University of Virginia will give two public talks in Massachusetts next week, both on his book The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the Revolutionary War and the Fate of Empire.

Here’s a précis of the book:

The loss of America was a stunning and unexpected defeat for the powerful British Empire. Common wisdom has held that incompetent military commanders and political leaders must have been to blame, but were they? O’Shaughnessy dispels the incompetence myth and uncovers the real reasons that rebellious colonials were able to achieve their surprising victory.

On Tuesday, 10 April, O’Shaughnessy will kick off the American Antiquarian Society’s Spring Public Lecture Series. That free event starts at 7:00 P.M. in Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street in Worcester.

On Wednesday, 11 April, he’ll deliver the Lexington Historical Society’s Cronin Lecture. This free talk is co-sponsored by the Friends of Minute Man National Park and His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot. The evening starts at 6:00 P.M. with a reception in the Lexington Depot, and the lecture is scheduled for 7:00 P.M.

At both events copies of The Men Who Lost America will be available for sale and signing. The book has won many awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, the New-York Historical Society Annual American History Book Prize, The National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.

It’s also a handsome, nicely packaged book. I’ve started to read it multiple times, and I keep running into the problem that Prof. O’Shaughnessy and I have fundamentally different ideas about how to use commas. But obviously other readers haven’t been stopped that way, and sooner or later I’ll try again.

The Secrets of H.M.S. Hussar

Many news outlets are carrying the story, first reported by the local C.B.S. station and then spread by the Associated Press, of New York’s Central Park Conservancy finding that one of the park’s monuments had contained a loaded cannon.

The cannon was donated to Central Park about the time of the U.S. Civil War and remained on display, its mouth plugged with cement, until 1996. Then it was removed for preservation. Conservators who started to work on the gun recently discovered that underneath the plug was cotton wadding, iron ball, and 800 grams of black powder. A New York police explosives unit took over the job and removed the dangerous material with no harm to anyone.

Now Boston 1775 dives deeper for more of the story.

That cannon, the news outlets reported, came from H.M.S. Hussar, commissioned in 1763. The Hussar was part of Adm. George Rodney’s fleet in New York harbor in 1780. On 23 November, Capt. Charles Morice Pole sailed the ship out of the East River to Long Island, where the admiral had ordered the fleet to anchor. Crossing the difficult Hell-Gate narrows, the Hussar hit a landmark called “Pot Rock” and sank in sixteen fathoms of water.

An 1827 letter in the Edinburgh Observer from one of the ship’s officers said the wreck claimed “107 brave fellows, part of her crew.” A 1780 article in the Boston Gazette said eighty people survived. That sudden sinking during a move when French ships were known to be hanging about New York is probably why the cannon was loaded when it went down.

But the Hussar also had an afterlife.

TOMORROW: Rumors of treasure and skeletons in chains.

October 1780: The Deadliest Month

The Newfoundland Hurricane of September 1775, latterly dubbed the “Independence Hurricane,” killed an estimated 4,000 people—but it wasn’t the deadliest Atlantic hurricane during the Revolutionary War.

On 6 Sept 1776, a hurricane hit the French island of Guadeloupe and killed about 6,000 people. And that wasn’t the deadliest of the period, either.

The era’s worst storm was the Great Hurricane of 1780, which roared across the Caribbean on 10-16 October. It reportedly knocked down every tree and every house on Barbados, and damaged every fort. About 4,500 people died on that island.

At Port Castries on Saint Lucia, rough seas destroyed Admiral George Rodney’s Royal Navy fleet. A ship landed on the port’s hospital and totaled the building. About 6,000 people died.

A fleet of forty French ships involved in the war in America capsized off Martinique, with the loss of about 4,000 soldiers. The 25-foot storm surge on that island killed about 9,000 more people. Another storm surge on Saint Eustatius took 4,000 more lives.

There was heavy damage on many other Caribbean islands, and historians estimate the total deaths as 20,000 to 27,500 people within one week.

As a comparison, the total number of American fighters dying during the entire Revolutionary War from all causes (most dying in camps or prisons) is about 25,000. Historians think the total number of British military deaths is about 44,000.

The Great Hurricane of 1780 was not only the deadliest storm of the Revolutionary War, but the deadliest hurricane ever in Atlantic history. And two other storms caused 1,000 deaths apiece in the same month.