Taking the General Monk

Yesterday I left the Pennsylvania navy vessel Hyder Ally and the Royal Navy sloop General Monk in the middle of a fight in Delaware Bay on 8 Apr 1782.

The young captain of the Hyder Ally, Joshua Barney, told his helmsman to do the opposite of what he ordered and then yelled, “Hard a-port!” The helmsman steered to starboard. Meanwhile, the commander of the General Monk, trying to keep alongside the smaller American vessel, heard Barney and ordered a turn to port.

The General Monk’s jib boom plunged into the Hyder Ally’s rigging. In that position, the Americans could fire their port guns at the British vessel, but most of the British cannons were useless. The Hyder Ally crew rushed to keep the two ships entangled and started to fire. They even turned some of their starboard guns around.

The Hyder Ally cannon blasted canister and grape shot across the deck of the General Monk—thirteen broadsides in all. Barney had recruited riflemen from the Pennsylvania countryside as marines, and they joined in the firing from the rigging. After twenty-six minutes of battle, twenty of the British crew of 136 were dead, thirty-six wounded, including the captain. A British midshipman surrendered the General Monk.

Meanwhile, the Royal Navy frigate Québec was sailing up the main channel of the Delaware River, chasing the battle. That meant Barney and Lt. Justus Starr, whom he sent to command the new capture, had to work fast to separate the two ships and start upriver toward Philadelphia. They bought time by hoisting British flags and exchanging friendly signals with the Québec until it halted.

Once the Hyder Ally and General Monk had left the enemy frigate behind, Barney called over and learned the name of his prize. Lt. Starr also reported back that of the larger ship’s twenty-four guns, six were only “Quaker guns”—logs carved like cannon to intimidate other ships into surrendering. So the fight wasn’t as much of a mismatch as it had seemed.

The 10 April Freemen’s Journal, published in Philadelphia, reported:

Yesterday the Hyder Ally, a vessel fitted out for the protection of this river and its trade, returned to Chester after a severe conflict with a vessel of superior force, which with great gallantry and good conduct, on the part of captain Barney and his crew, has been captured and brought into port.

The General Monk was eventually made a Continental Navy ship, once more called the General Washington. Philip Freneau wrote a poem on the fight, which became known as the Battle of Delaware Bay. Years later, Barney commissioned Louis-Philippe Crépin to paint “Hyder Ally Captures the General Monk,” shown above; that picture is now owned by the U.S. Naval Academy Museum.

Barney went on to a long naval career, which included capture by British privateers in 1793, service in the navy of Revolutionary France, and a command in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812. He was wounded at the Battle of Bladensburg and died, reportedly of complications from that wound, in 1818.

During the same war, with America once again awash in anti-British sentiment, a privateer named Hyder Ally was launched from Maine. This ship thus indirectly preserved the name of an Indian government official who had died decades earlier.

Hyder Ally on Patrol in Delaware Bay

In April 1782, the port of Philadelphia was under the protection of an armed ship named Hyder Ally, after Hyder Ali Khan, the sultan of Mysore in India.

When I first read this fact, I was struck by how Americans were honoring the Muslim governor of a monarchy on the other side of the world. Hyder Ali had succeeded in fighting off Britain’s attempts to take over Mysore, so he had become an emblem of anti-British resistance all over the world. John Willcocks had even chosen that name for a ship he used to trade with the Caribbean.

By early 1782 Willcocks and his fellow Philadelphia merchants were losing a lot of ships to the Royal Navy and Crown privateers waiting at the mouth of Delaware Bay. So they agreed to pool their money, buy the Hyder Ally, and fit it out for fighting. The last step of their plan was to ask the Pennsylvania government to reimburse them; the legislature did so on 9 April, after the ship had already left port.

Willis J. Abbott’s Naval History of the United States (1890) says of the Hyder Ally, “She was in no way calculated for a man-of-war; but…she was pierced for eight ports on a side, and provided with a battery of six-pounders.” The exotic name remained.

To command this small, slow armed vessel, the state appointed Joshua Barney (1759-1818, shown above). A Maryland native, he had embarked on a naval career in early 1776, when he was only sixteen, serving under Esek Hopkins, the Rhode Islander who was first commander of the Continental Navy. In 1779 Barney was captured and imprisoned in Britain, and in 1781 he escaped back to America, ready to go into the fight again.

Barney’s version of what happened next was printed in his daughter-in-law’s A Biographical Memoir of the Late Commodore Joshua Barney in 1832. A more recent study is Hulbert Footner’s Sailor of Fortune: The Life and Adventures of Commodore Barney, U.S.N. from 1940.

On 7 April, the Hyder Ally led a fleet of seven Philadelphia merchant ships out of the city harbor and down into Delaware Bay. They anchored at Cape May to wait for better winds. An eighth merchant vessel joined them. Barney’s mission was to get all those ships safely to sea and then return to the bay for the next batch.

Meanwhile, the commanders of the British frigate Quebec and armed sloop General Monk spotted this fleet and its lone protector. The next morning they brought in another armed vessel, the privateer Fair American. That ship had been an American privateer under the same name until the previous fall, when it had been captured; now it was financed by Loyalists in New York City. Likewise, the General Monk had been the Rhode Island privateer General Washington.

At ten o’clock Barney glimpsed the three British ships. By noon it was clear that the two smaller ones, the General Monk and Fair American, were heading for his fleet while the big frigate kept to deep water and maneuvered to cut off the route to the sea. The young captain signaled for all the merchant ships to sail back up the Delaware, staying as close to the shore as possible. One, the General Greene, was equipped with twelve cannons, and its master offered to stay with the Hyder Ally and fight. As the two Crown vessels bore down, those two smaller American ships lingered behind the trading ships to protect them.

That plan worked right up until the battle started. The Fair American approached, guns primed. Instead of fighting, the General Greene tried to slip out of the bay. It ran aground, its crew jumping off over the bowsprit. The Fair American fired broadsides at the Hyder Ally as it raced upriver after the merchant prizes—but then it ran aground, too.

That left the Hyder Ally and the General Monk still under sail in the bay. The Royal Navy ship was clearly larger, faster, and more maneuverable. It had twenty-four guns, the Pennsylvania ship sixteen or eighteen. The General Monk approached the Hyder Ally, expecting a surrender since Barney’s gun-ports weren’t even open yet.

But then Barney ordered a broadside. The two ships exchanged cannon fire at the distance of a pistol shot, sailing closer. According to Footner, the General Monk’s guns were six-pounders rebored to accommodate nine-pound balls; some were overheating and jumping out of their carriages. Still, it was the stronger ship.

Barney told the Hyder Ally helmsman, “Follow my next order by the rule of contrary.” Then the General Monk came up close beside them. Barney shouted, “Hard a-port your helm—do you want him to run aboard us?” His helmsman made a sudden turn to starboard.

TOMORROW: Well, that’s enough for one day, don’t you think?