(cont'd from page: Volume 1)

In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Continental Agent John Langdon was desperately seeking cannons for his thirty-two gun frigate Raleigh, scheduled for launching in May 1776. It would have made perfect sense for Langdon to contract with his cousin, Geoffrey Frost, to fetch New Providence cannons home to Portsmouth. (In a revolutionary society nepotism is natural–a result of the desire to work with trustworthy people during a time of crisis: in our Revolution only Washington refrained from practicing nepotism.) Sadly, it took Langdon another year to collect the hodgepodge of cannons to outfit Raleigh. Even more sadly, Raleigh, under the command of John Barry, was captured by HMS Experiment and Unicorn after Barry was forced to run her aground in Penobscot Bay. But that’s another story altogether.

Maintaining discipline on a privateer or Continental Navy vessel during the Revolutionary Era was not easy. Mutinies were common: J. P. Jones crushed his share, and that great privateer captain of Washington’s Schooners, and subsequently second in seniority on the first list of Continental Navy officers, John Manley, once resolved a mutiny amicably–and singlehandedly–by brandishing a cutlass under the chins of the would-be mutineers. He doubtlessly learned this tactic from his colleague, Geoffrey Frost.

Americans taken prisoner-of-war by the British–and there were thousands–were in perilous situations. The British, obviously, did not recognize their rebellious colonies as a co-belligerent, therefore prisoners-of-war were embarrassments. Consequently, their captivities were brutal. A soldier in the Continental Army might legitimately hope for eventual exchange via a cartel. American seamen could not. They were confined aboard hulks in New York of Halifax–or transported to England’s Forton or Mill Prisons. In mid-1776 several dozen American prisoners-of-war in the Halifax hulks were removed to Sydney, Nova Scotia, to be forced laborers in the Sydney coal mines.

In October 1776 J. P. Jones was ordered by Commodore Hopkins on his second independent cruise to the waters of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. In addition to raiding commerce, Jones was instructed to attack Sydney and free the captive American seamen. Unlike the American seamen turned New Hampshire militia under Marcus Whipple at Breed’s Hill, who were languishing in Louisbourg when Geoffrey Frost freed them, the American seamen in Sydney, disdaining to labor in the coal mines, gained their freedom by enlisting in the Royal Navy.

Our Revolution was an exceedingly complex affair: the great wonder is we won it at all. The rôles played by Geoffrey Frost, Ming Tsun, Struan Ferguson, Darius Langdon, Hannibal Bowditch, Nathaniel Dance, Caleb Mansfield and his woods-cruisers, and the crew of ex-Jaguar are difficult to sort out, but no less important than the rôles played by Adams (John Adams really should be recognized as the father of the United States Navy), Hancock, Hopkins, Jones, Langdon, Manley, and Washington.