Six Weeks on the U.S.S. Hancock

Soon after Capt. John Manley guided the Hancock, Boston, American Tartar, and eight other ships out of Boston harbor in May 1777, the privateers sailed off in different directions.

After all, privateer captains didn’t owe Manley any obedience. Capt. John Grimes on the American Tartar, the largest of those ships, headed across the Atlantic and in July captured several British vessels off the Shetland Islands and the coast of Norway. The little ones stuck to the New England coast.

In contrast, Capt. Hector McNeill on the Boston was in the Continental Navy under orders to stick with Manley. Their target would be British fishing vessels and unaccompanied merchant ships in the north Atlantic.

Within days the Hancock and Boston caught a prize: a small brig carrying cordage and sailcloth.

On 30 May the two frigates spotted some military transports. Unfortunately for Manley, those ships were guarded by H.M.S. Somerset, the same 70-gun warship that had sat in the Charles River in the spring of 1775 (and that wrecked on Cape Cod in the fall of 1778).

The Somerset went after Manley’s Hancock, which had only half as many cannon. McNeill’s Boston then closed on the more lightly armed transport ships. That forced the Somerset to break off and return to protect the convoy, allowing both Continental ships to sail away intact.

On 7 June, Manley and McNeill’s frigates chased another promising ship. The Hancock caught up first, and Manley discovered his quarry was the Fox, a British privateer carrying 28 guns. The two ships fought for half an hour. Then the Boston arrived. Between them, Manley and McNeill forced the Fox’s surrender. Its mainmast and wheel were shot off, four men killed and eight wounded.

On board the Hancock, a black sailor named John Brick “on fortunetly Lost his Left Legg” in this fight, as a second lieutenant attested. Dr. Samuel Curtis thus did his first major operation as a combat surgeon.

Capt. Manley took a few days to make repairs to the Fox. He put a prize crew aboard and divided its crew as prisoners between the Hancock and Boston. This three-vessel Continental fleet then captured a coal sloop off Cape Sable Island at the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia.

By Sunday, 6 July, Manley’s four ships were near Halifax, a major British base. Two large warships came out of the harbor. Capt. Manley turned and headed back toward New England as fast as his fleet could sail.

TOMORROW: Commander over the Rainbow.

Dr. Samuel Curtis Goes to War

When, last September, I left Dr. Samuel Curtis of Marlborough, his wife Lydia and their two babies had all died in December 1774.

Lydia Curtis had been married before, to Dr. Ebenezer Dexter. Three teen-aged sons from that first marriage were still alive. The oldest, William Dexter, married in Shrewsbury in early 1775, so he was probably already in that town, training under another medical doctor.

I suspect the younger two boys were living with Lydia’s parents, who were wealthy and influential in Marlborough.

Dr. Curtis had served on Marlborough’s committee of correspondence since 1772 and represented the town at the 1774 Middlesex County convention. After his wife’s death, he may have thrown himself even more into the Patriot movement. In March 1775, as I recounted here, Curtis took the lead in hunting for British army spies seeking refuge at Henry Barnes’s house.

There are no records of how Curtis responded to the outbreak of war the next month. His name doesn’t appear in militia records. He continued to serve on town committees, and in the fall of 1775 the Massachusetts legislature appointed him a justice of the peace.

(Dr. Curtis was a son of the Rev. Philip Curtis of the second precinct of Stoughton, which in 1775 became the new town of Sharon. Late the following year, Samuel’s younger sister Susanna Curtis married his former trainee, Dr. Daniel Cony [1752-1842, shown above later in life], whose family had moved out to Shutesbury. Dr. Cony spent chunks of the next few years in military service. Eventually the Conys moved up to Maine, where one of his medical colleagues was the midwife Martha Ballard. But I digress.)

William Dexter turned twenty-one in 1776. I believe that meant he came into his mother’s Marlborough property, where Dr. Curtis had been living as a widower. That gave the doctor three reasons to make a life change:

• psychological, after his wife and children’s deaths.
• domestic, as his stepson was taking over the family home.
• political, to help fight the war.

And impulse control might not have been Curtis’s strength.

In March 1777, Dr. Samuel Curtis signed on to be surgeon aboard the Hancock, the first frigate built for the Continental Navy. He would serve under Capt. John Manley, who in the fall of 1775 had proved to be the most stealthy and successful naval officer in the Continental military, winning several important prizes. Manley had been granted the authority of a commodore, meaning that in company with other Continental vessels he could boss their captains.

The Hancock was an excellent product of Newburyport shipwrights. Some British officers would even deem it “the finest and fastest frigate in the world.” It carried 24 twelve-pounder cannon and 10 six-pounders, plus a crew of 290 men. Dr. Curtis spent his first two months in the navy collecting medical supplies for that vessel.

On 21 May the Hancock slipped out of Boston harbor, past the Royal Navy patrols lurking in the ocean. Along with it came the Continental frigate Boston, 30 guns, commanded by Hector McNeill; the privateer American Tartar, 24 guns, under John Grimes; and eight other, smaller privateers. Manley’s target was British fishing vessels and unaccompanied merchant ships.

TOMORROW: Dr. Curtis’s first fights at sea.

“The Clamor made against him of Insanity”

Yesterday I noted how in early 1776 the Rhode Island legislature appointed Col. Henry Babcock, a veteran of the French & Indian War, to oversee the defense of Newport from the Royal Navy. (Click on the thumbnail to the right for a closer look at a 1776 map of the town, courtesy of the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.)

Though Babcock was living across the border in Stonington, Connecticut, he was son of a former Rhode Island chief justice and speaker of the assembly, so he was well known in the colony. Col. Babcock had reportedly spent some time training at the Royal Artillery’s Woolwich Arsenal in the early 1760s, and therefore seemed like a good choice to strengthen and manage the town’s shore batteries.

The first obstacle to overcome was Babcock’s issues with his fellow officers. The Rhode Island legislative records indicate that he had a dispute with another colonel over seniority in February 1776. Then in March the assembly decided it was “highly expedient for restoring peace to the Brigade, and for the Public Good, to give the said Henry Babcock some Instructions and Directions for his Government.” Very specific instructions.

Finally, there were objections from Newport itself. The town didn’t particularly want to be defended, apparently preferring to remain neutral and busy trading with both sides of the war. But Rhode Island insisted, and in early April 1776 Babcock arrived with troops and cannons (perhaps the same cannons that had been pulled back to Providence in late 1774, to keep them out of royal government hands).

And none too soon. As the 19 Apr 1776 New London Gazette reported, on the evening of 11 April four ships under control of the Royal Navy entered Narragansett Bay:

• the warship Scarborough, with twenty guns, coming north from Georgia.
• a smaller transport ship called the Cimitar, with sixteen guns.
• a brig and a sloop laden with provisions, captured along the coast.

The locals decided to take back those prizes and their cargoes.

Rhode Island had commissioned two “Row Gallies,” the Spitfire under Capt. John Grimes and the Washington under Capt. John Hyers. Powered by both sails and oars, they had top mobility within the bay. Hyers’s ship fired at the Scarborough while Grimes “boarded and sent off the Brig and Sloop.” Then the battery at Brenton’s Point, under Babcock’s command, fired on the Scarborough and forced her to move off. The newspaper declared:

This bold Action, of taking two Vessels close under the Stern of a 20 Gun Ship, may possibly convince our Enemies that the Yankies are not such Dastards, as the Tories in this Country have represented them.

The newspaper added this passage, supplied “by one who was present”:

We are bound in justice to say that the Disposition on Shore, made by Colonel Babcock, was very Soldierlike, and, notwithstanding his Indisposition, he was on Horseback great part of the Night, fired one of the 18 Pounders from the North Battery himself and hulled the Scarborough, and behaved in so cool and composed a manner as made even the Tories fear him.—

The Sons of Liberty take this Opportunity of returning Colonel Babcock their particular Thanks for the Discipline he has established in the Brigade under his Command. Notwithstanding the Clamor made against him of Insanity, we think him perfectly in his sober Senses.

“He who would free from Envy pass his Days,
Must live at Ease, & never merit Praise.”
BRUTUS & CASSIUS

That dispatch from Newport concluded by saying, “Our bay is now free from pirates,” and that on 14 April Col. Babcock and Col. William Richmond had “joined their two regiments and marched into this town.” Still, it’s never a good situation when your supporters have to publicly proclaim that you’re sane. Within six weeks, Babcock was removed from his position.

TOMORROW: What was Babcock’s problem?