The Fights After the Fight off Fairhaven

Yesterday I started describing the 14 May 1775 fight outside Buzzard’s Bay between the newly-armed whaler Success from the village of Fairhaven and two trading sloops that the Royal Navy had recently captured.

When I broke off, provincial militia captains Nathaniel Pope and Daniel Egery had recaptured one of the prize sloops and were heading after the other, owned by the Wing family of Sandwich.

The Royal Navy junior officer left in charge of that vessel, Midn. Richard Lucas, spotted the provincials and ordered his crew to sail away.

But the prize sloop couldn’t move off fast enough. The provincials caught up. Both sides fired their swivel guns and muskets. According to one American:

the Success had but one carriage gun, a swivel, which, having lost its trunnions, was then loaded, lashed to a timber head, and when chance brought it in range, fired, but proving yet loyal to the king, it kicked out of the traces and went overboard at first fire.

A Fairhaven mariner recalled the British commander “was a North Briton or Scotchman…[who] kept most of the time during the action in the cabin, occasionally showing his head from the companion-way to give orders to his men.” A provincial marksman, probably Joseph Shockley, “was ordered to stand by the mast and ‘drop the dodging officer.’”

The next time Lucas stepped outside, Shockley shot him in the head. Fortunately for the midshipman, Shockley had loaded the gun with buckshot:

He had received a buckshot directly in front, on the retreating line of his forehead, which, piercing to the bone, slid on its surface, cutting the scalp in its course, and was found flat, thin and sharp on the back of his head.

Lucas reportedly “took his mishap philosophically, saying his kin had been characterized as a thick-skulled family.”

With the British commander down, the fight ended quickly. Pope and Egery brought their ships up alongside the Wings’ sloop. The militiamen swarmed over the rails, recapturing the prize. In addition to Lucas, two of the British crew were wounded, but no one killed. The provincial crews triumphantly sailed all three vessels back to Fairhaven.

Then they worked fast, expecting that the leaders of the larger town of Dartmouth would not be pleased by the fight. Those men were mostly Quaker, tied into British trade networks, and fearful of retaliation from the Royal Navy. According to Capt. Pope’s son:

Joseph Rotch, Edward Pope, and many others, came from [New] Bedford on Monday morning, and held counsel with some of the timid at the house of Esquire [Lemuel] Williams, and concluded to send the prisoners and captured sloops, with an apology, back to the Falcon; but the captors were on the qui vive, and marched off the prisoners for Taunton before the council rose. Thus defeated, the council sent a committee to Captain [John] Linzee, at Taunton Court, with an apology, “making the best story they could.” Colonel Edward Pope and ’Squire Williams were of this committee.

Four prisoners were left in Dartmouth: Midn. Lucas, wounded sailors Jonathan Lee and Robert Caddy, and surgeon’s mate John Dunkinson, probably caring for the others. Most of the sailors found on the captured ships were set free; Pope’s son recalled that some “were very clever fellows, and I think some of them remained” in Massachusetts.

On the morning of 16 May, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Watertown received “a verbal information of the capture of three vessels, by a king’s cutter, at Dartmouth, and the retaking two of them, and fifteen marines prisoners.” Capt. Egery appears to have brought that news after leaving Taunton. Other men from Dartmouth may have brought the same news with a different spin. The legislature, as usual, formed a committee to sort things out.

The next day that committee recommended “that the inhabitants of Dartmouth be advised to conduct themselves, with respect to the prisoners they have taken, agreeably to the direction of the committee of inspection for that town.” The legislature would thus grant authority to the local Patriot activists. A “long debate” followed before the congress confirmed that recommendation and sent “the gentlemen from Dartmouth” back home.

That wasn’t the end of the matter. On 7 June the congress had to consider “what is best to be done with the four prisoners brought from Dartmouth, via Cambridge”—Lucas and his men. The legislators decided they should “be sent to Concord, to the care of the selectmen of said town, to be by them secured and provided for, agreeably to their rank, at the expense of this colony, until they receive some further order.”

Meanwhile, there was a dispute between the owners of the sloops, Jesse Barlow and Simeon Wing, and the Fairhaven men who had rescued them. On 1 July a congress committee found:

Messrs. Wing and Barlow applied to the Dartmouth people, who took the vessels, for them again: the people offered them their vessels, upon Wing’s paying them eight dollars, and Barlow ten dollars, with which they complied, and Wing paid the money; after which, the Dartmouth people detained the vessels until the orders of Congress could be known, and refuse to give them up, without Barlow and Wing paying forty-five dollars, and giving bonds to indemnify the Dartmouth people.

That afternoon the congress decided to “leave the matters in dispute to arbitration.”

At some point, Richard Lucas was exchanged. He was commissioned a captain in the Royal Navy in 1782, commanded the 74-gun warship Arrogant in 1796, and died the following year.

The Fight off Fairhaven

Fort Phoenix in Fairhaven overlooks the site of what’s often called, especially in Fairhaven, the first naval fight of the Revolutionary War. (People in Machias, Maine, disagree.)

As Derek W. Beck described in this article for the Journal of the American Revolution, the action started on 11 May 1775 when “a barge from Capt. Linsey’s brig”—H.M.S. Falcon under Capt. John Linzee—stopped a sloop in Buzzard’s Bay. (Linzee shown here courtesy of the Linzee Family Association.)

That sloop was owned by Simeon Wing of Sandwich and commanded by his son Thomas. According to a June report from the Sandwich committee of correspondence, the Wings’ ship

hath been plying, as a wood boat, between Sandwich and Nantucket for some years, and it hath been the usual practice to settle with the custom house once a year, the officer always giving them their choice of paying twelve pence per trip, or the whole at the year’s end: and this hath been, we find, on examining, the common practise with other vessels which have followed the same business at the same place.

That arrangement meant, however, that the sloop had no clearance papers for that particular voyage. Linzee seized it. The historian Richard Frothingham later understood that the captain planned to use vessels he captured to “freight sheep to Boston” from Martha’s Vineyard, feeding Gen. Thomas Gage’s besieged garrison.

Following normal protocol, Linzee transferred some of his crew onto the Wings’ sloop to sail it into a friendly harbor. Midshipman Richard Lucas was put in charge of “eight seamen, three marines, a gunner, and a surgeon’s mate,” as Beck (using British naval sources) recounts.

Then the British officers learned about another vessel ripe for seizure. The Sandwich report stated: “An Indian fellow, on board of Wing’s vessel, informed Capt. Linsey of said [Jesse] Barlow’s vessel, which had brought a cargo lately from the West Indies, and was laden with provisions, in Buzzard’s Bay.” That Native American sailor evidently saw a better future allying with the Royal Navy.

Linzee sent the Wings’ sloop after “Barlow’s vessel” and the provisions it carried, quite possibly intended for the provincial army. But by the time Midn. Lucas had caught up with that ship in Dartmouth harbor, it had been unloaded. He seized it anyway. Then “both vessels, with all the crews and passengers, were taken, and proceeded to the cove to Captain Linsey.”

Barlow, a young man from Sandwich, was determined to get his sloop back. He “made application to some people at Dartmouth” for help. At the time, that town still encompassed modern New Bedford, Acushnet, and Fairhaven. Dartmouth was dominated by Quaker merchants who were not enthusiastic about the war and how it disrupted their trade. Barlow therefore went to men in the Fairhaven village, who were reportedly having a militia drill on the afternoon of Saturday, 13 May.

Barlow offered to put up half the money to arm the 40-ton whaling ship Success with two swivel guns and an extra large crew for fighting. Two militia officers—Daniel Egery and Nathaniel Pope—gathered twenty-five to thirty volunteers, including drummer Benjamin Spooner. In the shorter of two accounts later published by local historians, Pope’s son related that the bulk of the men hid below deck as the Success sailed out of Fairhaven on Sunday morning:

Father had the deck, managing affairs there, and Captain Egery, with the drummer, was in the cabin. Captain Egery came on deck to counsel, at father’s foot-rap. There was one other man and a boy, I think, on deck.

The Success spotted Barlow’s sloop in the waters between Buzzard’s Bay and Martha’s Vineyard. Only one sailor and one armed Marine were on deck. Pope steered his ship close before stomping for Egery. Spooner’s drum sent the militiamen charging up onto the Success’s deck.

The Marine set down his gun and ran to cut the anchor cable of the prize sloop so it could move off, but the Success was too close. Pope shouted for the British men to stay still or be shot. His crew grappled the two ships together and boarded the prize. Pope’s son wrote, “the thirteen prisoners were disarmed and placed below, their position secured by the weight of cable and anchor put over the gangway.”

Egery and Pope then consulted on what to do next. Pope’s son later wrote that they sent the recaptured prize back to port, but British sources suggest that the provincial officers took the Success and Barlow’s sloop together out to look for the other captured ship—the Wings’ firewood boat. Midn. Lucas was on board that sloop along with most of his loyal sailors and Marines.

TOMORROW: Shots fired, and the aftermath.