The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [150]
None of this concerned John Greenwood. The young private had survived the invasion of Canada, smallpox, and the crossing of the Delaware; he would not worry about being captured on the high seas. As every sailor he knew who had sailed with the privateers assured him, the small, sleek American boats could always outrun the lumbering British warships.
In 1778, he signed on to the Cumberland, bound for Barbados in the Bahamas with one hundred thirty men, as a steward but worked as a midshipman. At first, the men were nervous because sea combat was dangerous. Men were killed and their ships sunk or wrecked. One vivid description was written by John Paul Jones after his Ranger took on the Drake: “The Drake being rather astern of the Ranger, I ordered the helm up, and gave her the first broadside. The action was warm, close, and obstinate. It lasted an hour and five minutes, when the enemy called for quarters, her fore and main top sail yards being both cut away, and down on the cap; the fore top gallant yard and mizzen gaff both hanging up and down along the mast; the second ensign which they had hoisted shot away and hanging over the quarter gallery in the water; the jib shot away and hanging into the water; her sails and rigging entirely cut to pieces, her masts and yards all wounded and her hull also very much galled.”17
Captain Nathaniel Fanning was just as graphic in recounting his sea battle with the British ship None Such, a privateer that not only carried valuable cargo, but 127 British soldiers bound for America. He wrote, “We soon got within reach of her guns, when she began to fire upon us. But we after this soon got astern of her . . . We now [fired on] the privateer, brought our broadside to bear upon her stern and poured it into them.”18
The Cumberland’s first encounter was easy pickings. The vessel seized a sinking British ship, wrecked by a storm that suddenly appeared, and, with an officer appointed as prize master, repaired her, and sent her on to French-held Martinique for the sale of her goods so that the crew could pocket the money. The Cumberland’s crew, delighted at such early and effortless success, could not wait until it reached the busy shipping lanes of the Caribbean, where British vessels carrying valuable cargo could be found rather easily. For days they moved over the water with no other ships in sight, the men lounging on the deck of the ship as its sails filled up with wind and its boards creaked. The hot winter sun of the region beat down on them, their hats and rolled up bandanas covering their foreheads giving them little refuge from it. Their idyll amid the rolling waves of the Atlantic south of Florida ended suddenly just after dawn on January 26, 1779, however, when they spotted the Pomona, a thirty-sixgun British frigate with three hundred men, one of the Crown’s most famous ships. The Pomona bore down on them, its mast continually bobbing up and down as the ship cut through the waves.
The Pomona began firing her decks of cannon several hours later, their smoke nearly engulfing the sides and deck of the vessel. The cannonading killed an officer sitting on top of the Cumberland’s main mast with his spyglass. The captain of the Cumberland knew that his ship was no match for the British ship and wanted to sail away with as much speed as his ship could muster. To lighten the vessel, he ordered eight of the ship’s eighteen heavy cannon tossed into the water, but the Pomona was already too near, sailing in behind her, and closing fast.
Greenwood wrote, “The frigate, being right in our wake within short distance, kept her course and shooting close up under our larboard quarter, gave us four or five double headed and round shot. Some flew among our rigging and one ball striking us abaft the forechains, went through and through the ship, making her shake again.”
The captain of the Cumberland devised a desperate plan that depended on ingenuity and sheer luck. He would let the Pomona crash right into the Cumberland’s side. That would enable the men of the Cumberland, armed with cutlasses,