200 



upon the seventy-five vessels which they employed in the cod-fishery; 

 and though the difficulties with the mother country, if civil war ensued, 

 threatened them with ruin, they espoused the Whig cause with alacrity. 

 When the tidings of the bloodshed at Lexington reached them, sixty of 

 these vessels were in their harbor ; the fishermen, supplying themselves 

 with arms, marched to meet tlie royal troops, and by the time they 

 arrived at Marshfield, their number, by accpisitions from diflerent 

 towns, was nearly one thousand men. The people of Salem and 

 Beverly were like zealous : from the opening to the close of the con- 

 test, they were extensively engaged in fitting out and manning priva- 

 teers ; and in a single season, despatched to sea, to prey upon British- 

 commerce, fifty-two vessels,* which mounted about seven hundred and 

 fifty guns, and carried crews of nearly four thousand men. 



At the revolutionary era, Gloucester was a place of inconsiderable 

 note; yet sixt3^-five men for the Whig army at Cambridge were en- 

 listed there in four days, and two companies of Gloucester fishermen 

 shared in the glories of Bunker's Hill. Upon the ocean they were 

 even more numerous ; and tliirty married men, belonging to that town,, 

 perished in the wreck of a single privateer. 



The privateers owned in Boston, Salem, Marblehead, Beverly, and 

 Newburyport, and other ports in Massachusetts, in the single port of 

 New Hampshire, in Rhode Island, and elsewhere in New England, 

 were among the most efficient instruments employed to harass the 

 enemy, and their success had no inconsiderable influence upon the 

 result of the struggle. It is stated that the private armed vessels ot 

 the Whigs captured more than fifty thousand tons of British shipping 

 in the year 1777, alone; while Curwen, a Salem loyalist, who fled to 

 England, mentions in his journal, that Lloyd's coffee-house books show, 

 that from May, 1776, to February, 1778, the American privateers (one 

 hundred and seventy-three in number) made prize of seven hundred 

 and thirty-three British vessels, which, with their .cargoes, were worth 

 more than twenty-five millions of dollars, after deducting the value of 

 the property retaken and restored. Omitting details, it may be stated, 

 on the authority of other accounts, that from the commencement to the 

 termination of the war of the Revolution, quite two hundred thousand 

 tons of British shipping were captured and destroyed ; that such were 

 the losses, and such was the terror of the "rebel privateers," that the 

 underwriters finaUy demanded, and the merchants paid, premiums of 

 thirty, forty, and even fifty per cent., to insure ships and cargoes fi'om^ 

 England to America; and that the mercantile interest became, at last, 

 so clamorous as to render the war unpopular, and to embarrass the 

 ministry in their measures to continue it. 



The services of the people ol" Marblehead are entitled to particular 

 notice. They were invaluable upon the sea and upon the land. When, 

 in 1774, the port of Boston was shut by act of Parliament, they ten- 

 dered to their suffering brethren of the capital the use of their wharves 

 and store houses free of charge. The first actual avowal of offensive 

 hostility against England which is to be found in the revolutionary 

 annals, is an act passed by the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts 



* " Chiefly owued in Salem and Beverly." 



