368 : The Atlantic 



before Boston and desperately lacking arms and military supplies. 

 The quickest, though perhaps not the safest way to acquire the 

 arms and stores that he needed, was to take them from the British. 

 As a first step he ordered a Captain Broughton of the army and a 

 detachment of soldiers to man and arm a schooner, Hannah. On her 

 first cruise Hannah took several prizes and captured from them a 

 small supply of arms and munitions for Washington's militia. The 

 general had no authority to acquire ships or send them to sea, yet he 

 finally had at least six ships in his unofficial navy and they kept a 

 trickle of captured arms flowing his way. At the end of November 

 Captain John Manly in the little Lee captured the brigantine Nancy 

 and took among other supplies 100,000 flints, 2,000 muskets and a 

 large brass mortar. 



Then the Congress began to take an interest in naval affairs drawn 

 forward by Washington's success and pushed from behind by the 

 fact that Admiral Graves had already on October 17th burned Fal- 

 mouth (where Portland, Maine now stands) and threatened other 

 ports. In October, Alfred and Columbus were to be bought and 

 fitted out. In November a marine corps was created. On Decem- 

 ber 13 the building of thirteen frigates was authorized, $100,000 hav- 

 ing already been appropriated to purchase four men of war, and 

 before the year closed a list of eighteen officers to command these 

 vessels had been drawn up. Of this list only Nicholas Biddle and 

 John Paul Jones could be regarded as competent naval commanders 

 establishing in the newborn navy an heroic tradition. The other offi- 

 cers of the navy were generally outnumbered and also outfought so 

 that at the close of the Revolution, the U. S. Navy consisted of only 

 two ships left afloat, Alliance and Hague, which were prompdy sold 

 by Congress. 



It was the privateers and the raiders who carried the war to Eng- 

 land. By 1 78 1 449 American privateers were at sea and 300 or so 

 were still afloat at the end of the war. England had lost to privateers 

 nearly 2,000 vessels — the losses involving ^^ 18,000,000 and 12,000 sea- 

 men captured. In 1780 the Pickering, the Salem letter-of-marque, set 

 some sort of all-time record even for a privateer. Under her Captain 

 Jonathan Haraden of Gloucester, age thirty-five, with a crew of 

 forty-five men and boys she sailed for Spain. She was armed with 

 only fourteen six-pounders yet she captured a British privateer 

 Golden Eagle — twenty-two guns. She lost Golden Eagle when a Brit- 

 ish forty-two-gun privateer with crew of 140 men suddenly emerged 

 from Bilbao but the next day Haraden outmaneuvered Achilles and re- 



