The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [153]
The Tartar soon became one of the chief targets of the British fleet in Jamaica and three warships were sent out with the sole mission of sinking her. They found her, too, and Porter, knowing he could not take on three ships at once, raced for French-held Port-au-Prince, in Haiti, but did not make it. The three ships closed in on him and he turned into an inlet short of Port-au-Prince. There the Tartar ran around on some rocks and sank; the crew fled.
Greenwood found passage on another privateer, the General Lincoln, bound for New York, but the Lincoln was stopped at sea by a British warship. Prior to its seizure, the captain had asked if any of the crew could help repair the ship. The private volunteered and spent the entire voyage trying to fix the leaks that caused several feet of water to spill into the hold of the Lincoln every day. The crew started to good naturedly call him “the carpenter.”
When the British seized the ship, their captain asked around for the man everyone called “the carpenter” and told Greenwood, when he found him, that he needed someone to stay with the Lincoln to keep up with repairs as the British sailed it to New York as their prize; the rest of the crew would be put in irons. Greenwood, by then tired of prisons of any kind, kept up his appearances as “the carpenter” and stayed with the Lincoln all the way up the coast. A crowd of several hundred curious people waited for the Lincoln to dock at Manhattan, preparing to board her for the ritual inspection of the public that the British permitted because they thought it built up Loyalist morale. Greenwood waited until half the curious crowd had surged across the gangplank and on to the deck and then slowly, unobtrusively, slipped between them and walked away in a calm and very successful escape to the congested streets of Manhattan.
He had fled into British occupied New York, though, and had to avoid capture. The English would soon be looking for “the carpenter.” There were only two New Yorkers whom he knew, Ahasuerus Turk Jr., the instrument manufacturer who had sold him several fifes just before he traveled north to Canada with his regiment in 1776, and a friend of his father’s named Francis Hill. Turk offered him refuge until he located Hill. He lived in New York for six weeks, constantly ducking any British soldiers he saw, always trying to figure out a way to get out of the occupied city and back to Boston. Finally, Hill and a chaplain that he knew concocted a ruse. The chaplain persuaded someone in the military to simply add Greenwood to a group of prisoners scheduled for immediate parole and about to sail to Boston. Young Greenwood was free again.
Cleverness seemed to run in the family. Greenwood’s older brother Isaac, who served on the crew of another privateer, was captured and imprisoned in the West Indies. He escaped by feigning sickness to enter and then escape from a prison hospital and then, dressed as a British naval officer, made it on board a merchant ship and fled to the U.S.
Despite his numerous escapes, John Greenwood had yet to learn his lesson about the dangers of sailing on privateers. Upon his return to Boston, he sought out more privateers and signed on as a seaman on the Aurora with his former captain, David Porter, at the helm, for an expedition to Port-au-Prince that nearly resulted in his death. This time it was not at the hands of the British or local jailers, but misfortune.
The Aurora sailed to Port-au-Prince without incident, but an explosion in port sunk her. Private Greenwood, ill, had earlier taken medicine that made him groggy. Unable