First Salute - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [25]
Named for a famed figure in the cause of liberty, the valorous Admiral of Genoa (Andrea Doria in his own country), who led the fight for the freedom of his city against the French in 1528, she was about 75 feet long and 25 feet in the beam, with a mixed or “hermaphrodite” rigging of square sails on her mainmast and a fore-and-aft rig of triangular sails on her mizzenmast. For armament she had sixteen 6-pounders, meaning guns that could fire small 6-pound cannonballs as well as a number of swivel guns mounted on deck for a wider field of fire. She carried a crew of 130.
The importance of sea power as a strategic arm was accepted as understood in the 18th century, well before Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890 formulated it as a fundamental principle, to the surprise of seagoing nations which had risen or fallen by its means through the centuries. Defeat of the Spanish Armada had determined the rise of Britain and the decline of Spain 300 years before Mahan’s discovery, and Nelson’s ships at the Battle of Trafalgar put an end to the threat of Napoleon and altered the balance between Britain and France ninety years before The Influence of Sea Power upon History was published. Nations, like people, are often more pragmatic than they know or can explain.
The American Colonies had no need to wait for a principle. Their need for resupply of arms and powder, and their need to disrupt the enemy’s supply lines and to defend themselves against British naval attacks on and burning of their coastal towns, was imperative. They were fortunate in a Commander-in-Chief who had formed in his own mind the fixed belief that the colonial forces could never achieve victory without sea power to use against the enemy. In August-September, 1775, to interrupt the British supply lines when he was besieging Boston, Washington had chartered and armed several small fishing schooners which had been commissioned by Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut to protect their coasts against British raids. By October 6, schooners commissioned by the Congress were watching the entrance of Boston harbor to fall upon British transports, which, not expecting naval action by the Colonies, carried no naval armament. “Washington’s Navy,” as the schooners came to be known, collected prizes of muskets, ball and powder and one fat 13-inch mortar, badly needed to bombard the British in Boston.
In his dire need of gunpowder, Washington in August, 1775, barely four months after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, asked the Council of Rhode Island to commission an armed ship to go to Bermuda, “where,” he said, “there is a very considerable magazine of powder in a remote part of the island and the inhabitants well disposed not only to our Cause in general, but to assist in this enterprize in particular.”
Rhode Island, with its great bays and long vulnerable seacoast, understandably shared the Commander-in-Chief’s urgency about sea power. Going further than Washington, the colony, together with the associated Providence Plantations, passed a startling resolution in August, 1775, that no less than “an American fleet” should be built, and in the same month presented the resolve formally to the Continental Congress. Washington followed it in October with a request to Massachusetts for two armed ships to intercept two brigs loaded with military stores on their way from England to Quebec. Out of the need to organize this kind of enterprise on a larger scale and to interrupt British supply lines during the siege of Boston, the United States Navy was born. Privateers and fishing schooners manned by merchant seamen and fishermen were regularly commissioned and fitted out by the separate colonies. From this faint start Congress was being asked to authorize a national force responsible to the Continental government.
Because of the 18th century’s fixed method of fighting by ship against ship