The First American Army - Bruce Chadwick [155]
Greenwood spotted a farmhouse on shore when another bolt of lightning hit and illuminated it and went there to get help for his ship. The farmer would not go out into the storm and told Greenwood to sleep in his home. By morning, the tide had lifted the boat off the sandbar and the captains prepared to sail to the ironworks. The men soon discovered that they never secured the corn ears, which had now floated into the pumps and clogged them, preventing any movement. Finally, the corn removed and the pumps fixed, the ship limped upriver to the ironworks with its battered cargo and similarly battered crew. The voyage had been such a catastrophe that Myrick quit and sold his share of the boat to another man in Baltimore.
Private Greenwood made one last voyage and it should have been a calm one. He was the first mate for a repugnant captain on the Resolution, a six-gun schooner bound for St. Eustatius with a load of flour and orders to buy salt to bring back for Maryland merchants. The voyage took place without incident and upon his return Greenwood was happy to hear that the obnoxious captain had been fired and he had been given charge of the schooner for another run to St. Eustatius.
This trip was no pleasure cruise, however. In the middle of their passage between the islands of Antigua and Saint Bartholomew a large, fast ship bore down on them. Greenwood let out all of his sail in an effort to outrun the monster ship coming at him. “I let out the reefs of the mainsail and clapped her away four points free,” he wrote. “She sailed like a bird, but in two or three hours the pursuing vessel came up with us, firing, one after another, seven shots at us, and at last got so close that I could see the buttons on the men’s coats.”
The ship, the Santa Margaretta, looked fearsome. Originally a Spanish ship, the Santa Margaretta was a sleek, fast-moving, forty-four gun warship that carried two hundred twenty sailors, half of them musket men. She had been cruising up and down the Atlantic seaboard, bagging several prizes, before departing for the warmer waters of the Caribbean. Suddenly, the guns of the Santa Margaretta opened up.
“They then got ready a six-pound cannon from the quarterdeck loaded with grapeshot and fired point blank into us, cutting away our jib sheet blocks, forepeak tie, and other rigging forward,” a frantic Greenwood noted.
The Resolution had been turned into the wind and toward the British warship. Greenwood was certain that if he did not surrender, the huge ship would ram his, cutting the Resolution in half and sinking her and his crew. He struck his colors and gave up.
The captain and officers of the Santa Margaretta were a casual crew, far more interested in their prize cargo than prisoners. They let all of the crew of the Resolution go free when they anchored in Kingston, Jamaica. In fact, it was the British, not the Americans, who brought Greenwood home. The sailing master of the Santa Margaretta knew Captain Henry Nicholls, in charge of the British privateer Barracouta, headed for New York in a few days. He told him Nicholls would take him on as a passenger (probably for a price).
Several weeks later, “Captain” Greenwood said goodbye to the commander and crew of the Barracouta in New York and made his way back to Boston in the spring of 1783 on board one of the ships carrying prisoners to their homes as the war wound down.
Greenwood worked as a mate on merchant ships sailing out of Boston and was the captain of a schooner out of Baltimore on three trips during the last few months of the Revolution. The end of hostilities meant an end to privateering and, for awhile, the profitable merchant trade between New