The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [152]
His scheme almost backfired. Somehow, Spanish inmates in their prison obtained knives and used them during an altercation among themselves on the floor above the dungeons where the Americans were held. Guards, local police, and a mob of townspeople rushed the jail to put down the revolt and some charged toward the American cells, thinking they were responsible for the melee.
“Prepared to sell our lives as dear as possible, we prepared to meet them,” Private Greenwood wrote. “We first brought close up to the door a half barrel or tub which had been placed in the room for the accommodation of several of our men who were at the time very sick and five or six of us stood ready with tin pots to greet the enemy if they attempted to unlock the door. We were likewise armed with junk bottles which, holding by the necks, we intended to dash against the grated door so that the fragments would fly among them. They saw our warlike preparations and when we stirred up our ammunition, afraid . . . they soon left the doorway clean.”
That stroke of bad luck was offset by another of good fortune a short time later when the prisoners were ordered released and put on a schooner bound for Martinique. By chance, on that island Greenwood was spotted by an old schoolmate from Boston who was an officer on a ship bound for New York. That ship’s captain turned out to be a cousin of Greenwood’s father. He took Greenwood to New York, where he was certain he could hide from British troops occupying the city.
The voyage was a nightmare. The old and battered ship, badly in need of repairs, continually took on water and had four feet in the hold during most of the trip north. The crew was struck by yellow fever halfway up the coast; most fell ill and several men died. Then, off of Long Island, they were intercepted by a British privateer carrying numerous guns. Greenwood’s ship had port holes for guns, but no cannon on board. The ingenious private scampered about the deck in search of all the wood he could find and then, wielding an axe and hammer with as much agility as he could muster, he built fake wooden cannon that jutted out of the port holes enough to look believable. He and other sailors took extra jackets and nailed them near the cannon and on the deck rails to make it appear that the ship’s crew was several times its actual number. The ruse worked. The English vessel sailed close enough so that it’s captain could see what appeared to be a long train of cannon and a large crew and turned away.
Once on shore in Boston a few days later, free at last, Greenwood was relieved. “No emperor or king could feel so happy as I then was, and there is a good and true saying that no person ever knows what happiness or pleasure is without first seeing adversity,” he wrote.
Restless as always, Private Greenwood could not relax. He was soon hungry for the war again. “I could not long content myself while my fellow countrymen were abroad, contending for their freedom,” he wrote.
He signed on for another voyage aboard a privateer, this one the wellarmed Tartar (there were several ships of that name), with twenty-eight guns and a crew of one hundred fifty, commanded by Captain David Porter of Boston. It was Porter’s third ship in two years. After a stormtossed sail south, the Tartar moved into the warm waters of the Caribbean and immediately began to take British ships. It was a small miracle, because the Tartar was a war-weary vessel. Greenwood lamented, “Our ship was so old, crazy, and leaky that we were obliged to nail strips of rawhide over the sides of her upper works in order to keep the oakum in place.”
To make up for its lack of speed, the captain of the Tartar and his crew relied on ingenuity. Every few weeks they painted the hull of the ship a different