Patriot Pirates Read Online Free

traversing shoals that moments later snagged its pursuer. The jubilant crew then mooned the British goodbye, “their faces to the opposite point of the compass from those with whom they were parting.” When
Hannah
’s skipper docked at Providence that evening and told his boss about trapping
Gaspee
, Brown launched phase two of his answer to Montagu.
    Seven hundred of Providence’s four thousand inhabitants were men above age sixteen. They resided with their families in close-set houses or in rooms above their shops along the town waterfront. Drumming a call to arms outside a popular tavern, Brown quickly mustered a band of sixty compatriots to strike a blow against His Majesty’s taxman. Eight longboats pushed off shortly after 10 p.m. to row the seven miles to where
Gaspee
lay aground. Two and a half hours later, they closed on their target.
    The schooner was seventy feet long with a crew of nineteen, its armament an array of fixed cannon bored for a six-pound ball and small swivel guns used to rake the topsides of enemy vessels with antipersonnel shot. Its low freeboard above the waterline made the vessel vulnerable to boarding, and British lookouts hailed the longboats and warned them to stand off.
    Dudingston appeared on deck “in his shirt” carrying a pistol and sword. His demand that the intruders declare themselves was met with a shout. “I am the sheriff of the county of Kent, goddamn you. I have a warrant to apprehend you.” Brown was the sheriff of Bristol County. One of his shipmasters, Abraham Whipple, was the sheriff of Kent under whose jurisdiction
Gaspee
now lay. Witnesses later differed as to who gave the shout, though certainly it fit Brown’s character to claim authority, valid or not, personally to clap Dudingston in irons.
    The longboats pulled fore and aft of the schooner where its carriage guns couldn’t aim. The lieutenant discharged his pistol down into the dark before receiving a musket ball in the groin fired by someone below. Raiders swarmed aboard and subdued the crew with barely a fight. Three hours later, Brown, checking around to make sure his men had left behind no evidence of their identity, was nearly struck by spars and rigging that fell to the deck.
Gaspee
had been set afire, probably by tipping over the galley stove and scattering its embers in the hold. Documents had been ransacked, petty valuables stolen, its crew and wounded skipper deposited on shore, where they heard the vessel’s powder explode as it burned to the waterline.
    The last of the longboats rode the incoming tide northward to Providence, arriving at daybreak. The raiders dispersed, “little conscious of the crime they were committing and the penalty they were incurring.” One young man was seen later that day “parading himself with Lieutenant Dudingston’s gold laced beaver on his head.”
    If the raiders were oblivious to the severity of their act, local officials were not. Fearing that Rhode Island’s unique freedoms under its charter might be rescinded by a vindictive Parliament, Governor Wanton immediately launched an inquiry involving proclamations, rewards, sworn depositions, and a lot of gaudy outrage at “this daring insult upon authority.” At the same time, he and the entire Providence community hindered the process at every turn, converting an obvious case against the attack’s ringleaders into a fog of conflicting testimony that implicated many and singled out none.
    Like the attack itself, the yearlong inquiry showed how quickly Americans could mobilize into group action in which private interest and anti-British sentiment coincided. After all, these were people who often bitterly feuded. On a broad level, for example, other colonies long had resented Rhode Island’s “intent to take an advantage of sister colonies” by violating their collective boycott of certain British goods in protest of the Navigation Acts. In 1770, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston had refused to do business