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 MacNeill 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. MacNeill’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 MacNeill’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 MacNeill 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.

Extracts of Letters from Boston?

On 29 Dec 1774, Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer ran the following items:

Extract of a letter from Boston.

“Every thing is at present quiet here, and the governor takes all possible precautions to keep things so. The people are continually tampering with the soldiers to desert; a corporal of the 38th regiment was last Monday addressed by one of their Agents, he pretended to consent to go off with him, upon which the fellow took him to a house, gave him a suit of plain cloathes and put his regimentals into the saddle-bags, he then put the corporal upon his horse and got up behind; they rode on together till they came to the Fusileers barrack, into which the corporal turned, the fellow instantly jumped off and made his escape, leaving the horse, saddle-bags and clothes, all of which have been given to the corporal as a reward for his wit and spirit.[”]

A Gentleman in Boston, writes to his friend here, of the 12th instant;—

Two ships of the line, viz. the Asia and Boyne, are arrived here, and the Somerset is now firing guns in the offing. The day before yesterday it was moved in Provincial Congress, that arms be immediately taken up against the King’s Troops; but one of the members got up and told them such a move was infamous, when at the same time the Members knew, that neither Connecticut nor any of the southern colonies meant to oppose his Majesty’s arms, on which account the Congress immediately dissolved, and a new one is to be chosen, to meet the tenth of next month.

At Plymouth they are now beating up for volunteers to attack the troops; the parties sent for a parson to pray for them, who refused to comply; but he was obliged to attend on being sent for a second time, on penalty of being shot.

James Rivington was then a strong supporter of the Crown, on his way to being put out of business by a Patriot mob and then sponsored by the royal government in occupied New York through the war.

On 1 Jan 1774, Nathaniel Mills and John Hicks reprinted the entire article in their Boston Post-Boy. In the preceding May they had taken over from Green and Russell and turned the Post-Boy into a strongly pro-government paper.

On 5 January, Isaiah Thomas printed the part about plans to attack soldiers instead of to suborn them in the Patriot Massachusetts Spy, crediting “the New-York Gazette,” but he added at the bottom:

[A d——d lie.]

And indeed there’s no evidence supporting the article’s claims about the congress. If Rivington had actually seen a letter from Boston with that story, he fell for an alarmist rumor—and it’s quite possible he just made it up.

Even so, the letter from “A Gentleman in Boston” was reprinted in several British magazines in early 1775, helping to shape public opinion there.

[ADDENDUM: Follow-up from Don Hagist.]

Capt. Ebenezer Bancroft and the Embrasures

With the anniversary of Bunker Hill coming up, I’m going to share some accounts of that battle, said to be from eyewitnesses. And in most cases I’m sure they really are from eyewitnesses.

The first comes from Ebenezer Bancroft (1738-1827) of Dunstable, Massachusetts, who was a captain in the provincial army. It was reportedly “written from dictation in 1826” by Bancroft’s grandson John B. Hill of Mason, New Hampshire, and printed for the first time in The Granite Monthly in 1878.

That magazine said it had taken the text from proofs of Hill’s Sketches of Old Dunstable, which was never published as a stand-alone book. Instead, Hill’s material was appended to a much shorter address that nevertheless gets top bibliographic billing: Bi-Centennial of Old Dunstable, by S. T. Worcester.

Here’s the start of Bancroft’s account:

On the night of the 16th of June, 1775, my company was ordered out with the detachment to take possession of the heights of Charlestown. This detachment consisted of three regiments commanded by Col’s [William] Prescott, [Ebenezer] Bridge and [James] Frye, and amounted in all to between 1000 and 1200 men. These regiments were principally from Middlesex county, Col. Prescott from Pepperell, Col. Bridge from Chelmsford, Col. Frye from Andover. I was that evening on a court-martial and could not get liberty to go with my company, but in the morning of the 17th General [Artemas] Ward granted me permission to join my company, though the court-martial was not through.

Soon after I reached the hill our men left work and piled their intrenching tools in our rear, and waited in expectation of reinforcements and refreshments, but neither reached us, if any were sent. The reinforcements halted at Charlestown Neck. Whilst I was standing by the redoubt before the action began, a ball from the Somerset passed within a few inches of my head, which seriously affected my left eye so that it finally became totally blind.

When the works were planned no calculation was made for the use of cannon, and of course no embrasures were left for them. But on the morning of the 17th two ship cannon were sent up and a platform with them. About ten o’clock the British troops began to make their appearance at the wharves in Boston.

General [Israel] Putnam, who had been incessant in his exertions through the morning to bring reinforcements, now rode up to us at the fort and says: “My lads, these tools must be carried back,” and turned and rode away. An order was never obeyed with more readiness. From every part of the line volunteers ran and some picked up one, some two shovels, mattocks, etc., and hurried over the hill.

When the pile of tools was thus removed I went through the lines to form an estimate of the number of men in the redoubt, at the same time stating that those who had gone with the tools would come back, though I was by no means confident that they would. I estimated the number then left in the redoubt at 150, but was afterward informed by one of the captains of Col. Frye’s regiment that he counted them, and the whole number, including officers, was 163. I was not certain that any reinforcements after this time came into the redoubt; thus the number of our effective force was very materially reduced. General Putnam had given his orders and gone, and nobody seemed to think it belonged to him to stop the men and execute the order in a proper way.

The artillery-men had all gone with the tools, and Col. Prescott came to me and said, “If you can do anything with the cannon I wish you would. I give you the charge of them.” I directed the men to dig down the bank in order to form an embrasure, which they were forced to do with their hands, for the party that had carried off the intrenching tools had not left us a single shovel or mattock. Men never worked with more zeal. Many of them dug till their fingers bled. To loosen the earth I loaded the cannon and fired into the gap, and they dug again, and I fired a second time. Both these balls fell in Boston, one near the meeting-house in Brattle square, the other on Cornhill, as I was afterward informed by Boston gentlemen.

The first time I read a retelling of that anecdote, it sounded like the provincials fired point-blank into the earthen wall to create the embrasures, and I recall at least one author expressing doubt that anyone would ever do that. Bancroft’s (or Hill’s) words suggest that the men started the excavate the openings by hand, and he fired the cannon through the narrow hole they opened in order to make it easier for them to widen. As to whether those shots reached all the way into central Boston, that still seems dubious.

TOMORROW: What effect did those cannon have on the battle?

The Admiral’s Plan to End the War, and the End of the Somerset

On the evening of 19 Apr 1775, Gen. Thomas Gage was absorbing news of his troops’ bloody withdrawal from Concord. According to his later report, Adm. Samuel Graves came to offer this helpful advice:

In an interview this Evening with General Gage the Admiral advised the burning of Charles town and Roxbury, and the seizing of the Heights of Roxbury and Bunkers Hill, (indeed the latter had begun to be fortified, but that work was discontinued for some reasons with which the Admiral was unacquainted);

to this Proposal the General objecting the weakness of the Army, the Admiral replied that he would strengthen it to the utmost of his power by landing what few Marines remained aboard his Fleet, and, if the General would withdraw the 64th Regiment from Castle William, he would garrison it with his Seamen and be answerable for its safety.

Such a plan pursued, at the same time that the three Line of Battle Ships lay opposite to the town full of Rebels and their Goods, would probably have chequed the most daring and have given such am Appearance of activity to our Operations that things might have continued a long time quiet.

It was indeed the Admirals opinion that we ought to act hostiley from this time forward by burning & laying waste the whole country, & his inclination and intentions were to strain every nerve for the public Service.

Having been recalled to England when he wrote this, Graves was defending himself against criticism. He was also writing with the assurance of a man whose plan was passed over in favor of another and could thus say, “If people had only listened to me at the time…”

Gage opted for less punitive measures, with threats instead of actual destruction. The admiral recorded one step:

Capt. [Edward] LeCras was ordered to acquaint the Select Men of Charles Town that if they suffered the Rebels to take possession of their town or erect any works upon the Heights, the Somerset should fire upon them

The Somerset was still guarding the Charles River on 17 June when the British forces spotting provincials building a redoubt on the lower portion of Bunker Hill called Breed’s Hill. Its gun crews immediately went to work, set fire to Charlestown, and made the first kill of that battle.

The warship was part of the evacuation of 1776, returned to England, and was back along the North American coast in 1778, fighting Continental and French ships. During that mission the Somerset ran aground off Truro on 2 November. Twenty-one members of the crew died, and the rest became prisoners of war.

The Massachusetts authorities salvaged all they could, including cannons used to fortify Boston and “several Casks of Oatmeal” assigned to “for the Use of the State Hospital” the following April. The shipwreck itself is now considered the property of the British government.

The Somerset in the Battle of Lexington and Concord

On 18 Apr 1775, the warship Somerset was moored in the Charles River at the narrow point between Boston’s North End and Charlestown. Its guns never fired and its sailors took no part in any fighting the next day, but the warship was significant in the Battle of Lexington and Concord in several ways.

First, the Somerset, like most of the other Royal Navy ships around Boston that day, supplied boats and crews to ferry Lt. Col. Francis Smith’s column across the Charles to Cambridge.

Second, the ship with its 68 guns (according to a January count) stopped the usual ferry from crossing the river, thus preventing travelers from carrying news of evening preparations for the expedition out of Boston to the countryside.

Paul Revere had prepared for just such an obstacle, however. He had confederates send a signal to the Committee of Safety in Charlestown by hanging two lanterns in the Christ Church steeple. And, to be safe, he had two friends row him across the Charles—which meant passing the warship. In 1798 Revere recalled:

two friends rode me across the Charles River, a little to the eastward where the Somerset man-of-war lay. It was then young flood, the ship was winding, and the moon was rising.

Donald W. Olson and Russell L. Doescher discussed how the angle of the moonlight aided Revere’s passage in this 1992 article for Sky and Telescope.

The action then shifted to the mainland, and the west. The journal on board H.M.S. Preston records this order for late on 19 April:

at 1/2 past 5 hoisted a Red flag at the Main Topmast head and fired a Gun as a Signal for all the Marines of the fleet to go on board the Somerset

About ninety minutes later the British column and its reinforcement under Col. Percy reached Charlestown from the west, many of the men exhausted and their ammunition depleted. Adm. Samuel Graves later wrote of his own preparations:

the Admiral ordered all the Marines on Board to be ready to land at a Moments Warning upon a Signal for that purpose, and by desire of General [Thomas] Gage, they were landed in the afternoon at Charles Town under the command of Captain Lieut. James Johnson to cover the retreat of our harrassed Soldiers.

But it was the Somerset alone that preserved the detachment from Ruin. The vicinity of that formidable Ship to Charles Town so intimidated its Inhabitants that they (tho’ reluctantly) suffered the Kings Troops to come in and pass over to Boston, who would otherwise have been undoubtedly attacked, and in their defenceless conditions such a proceeding must have been fatal to all the Land Forces on that side…

Graves went on to claim that his navy ship had saved all the army troops in Boston as well. After having “massacred those poor harrassed Soldiers” at the end of their march, he said, the Charlestown people would have crossed into Boston, found “19 out of 20” men ready to help them, and destroyed the rest of the redcoats as well. I doubt army officers saw the navy as that crucial.

TOMORROW: Adm. Graves’s plan to put down the rebellion, and the end of the Somerset.

The Somerset Repaired for “Considerable Service”

H.M.S. Somerset arrived in Boston harbor in December 1774, carrying 68 cannon and a contingent of British Marines under the command of Maj. John Pitcairn. By the end of that year all those men had been landed and housed in barracks. As for the ship itself, Adm. Samuel Graves reported to London in January:

The Somerset was so leaky at Sea that two Hand Pumps were continually at Work, and it is the constant Employment at present of one hand to pump to Keep her free.

This Somerset was thirty years old that year, as described on this website of a group that reenacts its crew.

Spring weather allowed the navy to do some repairs. On 31 March, Graves wrote to Gen. Thomas Gage that he wanted to take off all the ship’s guns and most of her cargo “that by heeling her, when lightened, they may caulk as much of her bottom as possible.” The general and admiral weren’t on good terms, but they tried not to actively interfere with each other’s work, so Gage assigned the navy two transport boats to move its heavy equipment.

On 11 April, Graves reported to the Admiralty in London about the Somerset:

Upon stripping the sheathing from her Bottom, we found the Ocham in her seams entirely rotten and the Butt Ends open; these Defects have been repaired, her Decks and sides well caulked and I have placed her, where the Lively and Canceaux formerly lay, between Charles Town and Boston. It is very likely that in this situation she will be of considerable service.

In a long, self-justifying report Graves wrote later, he explained what sort of “considerable service” he had in mind:

as the situation of things became more and more critical, and he was solicited to guard Boston against any attempt [i.e., attack] from Charles Town side, he caused the channel of the [Charles] river to be sounded, and, finding there was room enough for a large ship to swing at low water, ordered Captain [Edward] Le Cras to place the Somerset exactly in the Ferry way between the two towns, which he accordingly did.

This information is useful in understanding the mindset of the British military commanders in Boston 235 years ago. They weren’t expecting an imminent attack by rebellious provincials, but they felt they had to guard against one.

In fact, the navy had stationed one or two warships at the mouth of the Charles since the Powder Alarm of the previous September. But the Lively had twenty guns, the Canceaux eight. By replacing them with the Somerset’s 60+, Graves was making a very intimidating statement.

TOMORROW: The Somerset on 18-19 Apr 1775.

(The photo above shows H.M.S. Victory a full century after our Somerset had wrecked on Cape Cod. As I understand it, the two warships were about the same size, but if anyone has pictures of a ship of the Somerset’s class please let me know.)

Preserving the Somerset Digitally

The currents on Cape Cod have uncovered the wreck of H.M.S. Somerset, “about two miles east of the Race Point Beach ranger station in Provincetown,” according to the Cape Cod Times. The National Park Service is taking the opportunity to have the wreck scanned. As this Boston Globe article reported:

federal park officials are seizing the moment by having the wreck “digitally preserved,” using three-dimensional imaging technology.

“We know the wreck is going to disappear again under the sand, and it may not resurface again in our lifetimes,” said William P. Burke, the historian at the Cape Cod National Seashore, noting that the last time any part of the HMS Somerset III had been sighted was 37 years ago.

The technician doing the work above is from the Harry R. Feldman company. The Somerset timbers also appeared in 1885, and souvenir-hunters took away some pieces. Here’s hoping today’s more preservationist mindset can keep more of the ship intact.

TOMORROW: The Somerset’s place in the start of the Revolutionary War.