The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [149]
This combination of patriotism and profit made privateering quite attractive. One British officer held as a prisoner of war in Boston wrote that “Boston harbor swarms with privateers and their prizes.” America had gone privateering mad, crazed with the profit and wealth that privateering promised.
And the British knew it. The London Chronicle reported in 1777 that American privateers terrorized Scottish officials. “Our seas so full of American privateers that nothing can be trusted upon this defenseless coast,” one said.8 A British writer commented in 1778 that commercial British ship owners now had to employ a fleet of small combat ships just to protect their large, cargo-heavy merchant ships from attacks by Americans, adding “The coasts of Great Britain and Ireland were insulted by the American privateers in a manner which our hardiest enemies had never ventured in our most arduous contentions with foreigners.” British and Scottish parents were so fearful of the American naval commander John Paul Jones that they told their children to stay away from the beaches for fear his crew would kidnap them.9
It was not just the safety of shipping near Great Britain that the Crown worried about, either. The privateers seemed to be everywhere in the Caribbean, too. The governor of British-held Jamaica reported “a constant track of American schooners” in his waters.10 And especially in the Caribbean, small fleets of American privateers set out to capture specific large British ships, often successfully. “A great number [of privateers] in these seas fitted out on purpose to take the Greyhound,” wrote Captain Henry Byrne of one large ship to the British Admiralty just before Christmas, 1776.11 The American raids became so successful that in one single week in Caribbean waters American ships captured fourteen British vessels.12
The ships were extraordinarily successful at harassing British merchant ships. John Adams wrote that the captains and sailors all deserved the fame that they had received. He noted, “Some of the most skillful, determined, persevering, and successful engagements that have ever happened upon the seas have been performed by American privateers.”13
Some American officials opposed the sanctioning of privateers because their owners could use their booty to pay sailors an average of five times what the Continental Navy could offer on its few ships. The privateers, some said, also took on board thousands of men who might have fought for the always recruit-desperate army. American general Charles Lee even suggested that no privateers should be allowed to sail until all army regiments were filled with men.14 The money made many congressional delegates also wonder about the sailors’ true patriotism. William Whipple wrote that the income earned on the privateers would bring about “the destruction of the morals of the people.” He said that sailors would “soon lose every idea of right and wrong.” 15
Whipple, and others, worried that the privateers would seize cargo from friendly ships, too, for the money, and that some would wind up behaving no better than pirates. In a letter filled with sarcasm, John Pickering wrote to his brother Timothy, a congressional delegate, just after the war ended that many sailors and port workers seemed demoralized by the peace because it ended their opportunities to make money on privateers.16
Of course, the punishments for those captured on privateers were severe. Those not killed or drowned in hotly contested sea battles were imprisoned in the wretched British prison ships in New York harbor or, if captured in the waters of the Caribbean, put in irons in hot, rancid jails on malaria-infested islands held by the British there. Some went to prisons in