The Bridge Spring 2022

THE BRIDGE:

Rhode Island Historical Society 110 Benevolent Street Providence, Rhode Island 02906

A Joint Edition of the Journals of Rhode Island History and Newport History the bridge: a joint edition of the journals of rhode island history and newport history

support for the bridge was provided by :

Spring 2022

The Bridge: A Joint Edition of the Journals of Newport History and Rhode Island History

www.rihs.org

www.NewportHistory.org

FRONT COVER: The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles DeWolf Brownell, 1893, oil on canvas. RIHS Collections AN 1893.10.1.

BACK COVER: Copy of the first page of the testimony of Aaron Briggs. RIHS COLLECTIONS, MSS434B1F4.

The Bridge: A Joint Edition of Rhode Island History and Newport History SPRING 2022

The Bridge: A Joint Edition of Rhode Island History, scholarly journal of the Rhode Island Historical Society, and Newport History, scholarly journal of the Newport Historical Society, replaces Rhode Island History, Spring 2022, Volume 79, Number 2; and Newport History, Winter/Spring 2022, Volume 96, Number 285.

Richard J. Ring, (Editor), Deputy Executive Director for Collections and Interpretation, Rhode Island Historical Society C. Morgan Grefe, Executive Director, Rhode Island Historical Society Ruth S. Taylor, Executive Director, Newport Historical Society Ingrid Peters, Deputy Director & Academic Services, Newport Historical Society Gayle Bordlemay, Designer JD Kay, Digital Imaging Specialist, Rhode Island Historical Society Kaela Bleho, Photo Archivist and Manager of Digital Initiatives, Newport Historical Society For a full list of staff and trustees, visit www.newporthistory.org or www.rihs.org.

support for the bridge was provided by :

Heritage Harbor Foundation Rhode Island Society of the Sons of the Revolution National History Day

We wish to thank Phoebe Bean and Dana-Signe Munroe at the Mary Elizabeth Robinson Research Center of the Rhode Island Historical Society for assistance with research related to this issue.

The Rhode Island Historical Society and the Newport Historical Society assume no responsibility for the opinions of contributors to The Bridge: A Joint Edition of the Journals of Newport History and Rhode Island History.

This issue and all issues of Newport History and Rhode Island History are peer-reviewed. Newport History and Rhode Island History are published two times a year by their respective institutions: the Newport Historical Society at 82 Touro Street, Newport, Rhode Island 02840 and the Rhode Island Historical Society at 110 Benevolent Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02906. For information on subscribing or submitting to Newport History, visit www.NewportHistory.org. For information on subscribing or submitting to Rhode Island History, visit www.rihs.org.

COPYRIGHT © 2022 by the Newport Historical Society, 82 Touro Street, Newport R. I. 02840; (401) 846-0813.

(ISSN 0028-88918 [Newport History] and ISSN 0035-4619 [Rhode Island History]).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Richard J. Ring “But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Abby Chandler

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1

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Charles R. Foy The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 David Stuart

Portrait of John Brown (1736-1803), 1794, by Edward Greene Malbone (1777-1807). Watercolor on ivory. Overall: 3 3/16 x 2 1/2 inches.

Purchase, The Louis Durr and Arthur Jones Funds. NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 1948.469.

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Stephen Hopkins, The Grievances of the American Colonies Candidly Examined (London, 1766).

RIHS COLLECTIONS, RHI X174524.

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introduction

q

The Gaspee Affair has been commemorated and mythologized in Rhode Island for the 250 years since its occurrence. A celebration, on its second anniversary, was attended by George Washington on June 10, 1774, in Williamsburg, Virginia (with accompanying fireworks), but recognition of this important event was soon localized, with enthusiasm, within this state.

Rhode Islanders renamed Namquid Point “Gaspee Point” as early as 1777. The Rhode Island Historical Society obtained its charter in the General Assembly on the fiftieth anniversary of the Gaspee Affair in 1822. In 1826, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, four men who had been in on the raid of the Gaspee participated in the Fourth of July celebrations (see page 26 of a flag that survives from that celebration). The annual Gaspee Days Parade has taken place in Cranston’s Pawtuxet Village since 1965. Many accounts of the event have been published since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet it remains less known as a part of our national narrative, and exists as a kind of mythic moment: the story is often told, but less often analyzed, challenged, or placed within any historical framework.

This issue of The Bridge intends, certainly, to commemorate the Gaspee Affair, but not by retelling the story—rather, by using this moment as an opportunity to place the event in larger contexts, and as a point of departure for broader interpretive work.

Rebellion against British authority waged by the colonists themselves in the North American colonies had a long history before the 1760s and was not entirely centered in New England. A select timeline of such events would include Bacon’s Rebellion (1676, Virginia), Culpeper’s Rebellion (1677, North Carolina), the Boston Revolt (1689), Leisler’s Rebellion (1689–91, New York), Cary’s Rebellion (1711, North Carolina), the Mast Tree Riot (1734, New Hampshire), and the Knowles Riot (1747, Boston). The Gaspee Affair, centered on maritime trade, occurred within, and as part of, historical trends that extended beyond the American colonial world.

We invite our readers to contemplate these larger issues as the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution approaches in 2026. And, while some may seek to draw parallels to modern situations — words like sedition, insurrection, and treason certainly were used by the British — we do so at our peril without the full story.

We thank the authors, our anonymous peer reviewers, and also Steven Park, author of the most recent and authoritative book on the Gaspee Affair, published in 2016 — The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule before the American Revolution.

Richard J. Ring EDITOR

Introduction v v

John Collet, J. Bayley, and Samuel Hooper, A Compleat Map of North-Carolina from an Actual Survey (London: S. Hooper, 1770).

COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION, UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL.

“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History Abby Chandler Abby Chandler is Associate Professor of Early American History at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her first book, Law and Sexual Misconduct in New England, 1650-1750: Steering Toward England, was published by Routledge in 2015. Her second book project examines political rebellions from the 1760s in Rhode Island and North Carolina, and this article draws from that research.

H

q

is Majesty’s schooner Gaspee was stranded off the Rhode Island coast with her crew on June 9, 1772. The ship burned to the waterline the following day, and local colonists, who often had harassed customs officials in Narragansett Bay, soon were credited with setting the fire. Hundreds of miles to the south, North Carolina Governor Josiah Martin spent the early 1770s engaged in a battle of wills with his colonial legislature. The stalemate came to a close on May 31, 1775, when the Mecklenburg Committee of Safety voted to adopt the Mecklenburg Resolves, which effectively ended British rule in North Carolina. These actions placed Rhode Island and North Carolina in the vanguard of colonial efforts to politically sever the North American colonies from Britain.

The roots, however, for the burning of the Gaspee and the creation of the Mecklenburg Resolves lie in Rhode Island’s and North Carolina’s colonial pasts, even as they point to the future.

Despite their geographic differences, one in New England, the other seven hundred miles to the south, Rhode Island and North Carolina brought shared concerns to the revolutionary era. Their residents were long accustomed to struggling to preserve local control in the face of demands for a more centralized authority, whether these demands came from their neighbors, other colonies, or the British Empire itself.1 Many came from neighboring British colonies where, as retired historian Patrick Conley notes, they often were “outcasts” known for their “individualism and separatist tendencies.”2 Early government structures in Rhode Island

and North Carolina welcomed a multiplicity of religions, and later efforts to increase the role of the Anglican Church in North Carolina were met with resistance from non-Anglican colonists.3 Furthermore, whether in the colonial period or in contemporary scholarship, Rhode Island and North Carolina often have been overshadowed by their immediate neighbors. Political fervor on both sides of the imperial crisis led to early action in Rhode Island and North Carolina, but most accounts of this period are focused on Massachusetts and Virginia.4 Many Rhode Island and North Carolina residents hoped for independence but not necessarily union, a point further underscored by both states’ reluctance to ratify the United States Constitution in 1787.5 News of the Gaspee reached London within the month.

An unknown London editor wryly observed on July 18, 1772, that “in all disagreements between the parent state and her children,” the children “are more affected by views of private interest than by the prosperity of their country.”6 Dating back to the earliest settlement period, British colonists always had run goods along the Eastern Seaboard to the many ports in the Caribbean. Rhode Island’s ties to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the sugar plantations made it particularly easy for captains engaged in the legitimate funneling of people and comestibles between New England and the Caribbean to pick up illegal goods, all activities central to Rhode Island’s developing economy.7 British North American merchants believed that the risks they took as colonists in a multinational world entitled them to the resulting profits. Most Parliament members

“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History v 1

Virginia Gazette, “London, July 18, 1772,” Unsigned editorial on the Gaspee.

COURTESY OF THE ROCKEFELLER LIBRARY COLLECTIONS, COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG.

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believed, however, that British commerce needed to support the collective empire rather than its individual players.

The first Navigation Act was created in 1651 by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell during the Interregnum.8 Like its successors, it was intended to restrict trade in the British North American colonies, but colonial merchants found these laws easy to ignore since they were operating thousands of miles away from London. For their part, Dutch, French, and Spanish merchants were eager to trade with British colonists without the expense and hassle necessitated by the requirement that all foreign goods be logged and taxed in London before being resold into the colonial market.9 The prospect of additional taxes accelerated tensions even further in the mid-eighteenth century. If “trade carried on by the Northern Colonies with the French and Dutch Sugar Colonies … [was] injurious to the British [sugar colonies],” wrote an unknown Rhode Island colonist in 1764, the solution was not for Parliament to tax the mainland British colonies to prop up the Caribbean colonies.10 Instead, Parliament should support the trading activities of all of its colonies, not just the ones in the Caribbean, but this argument was promptly countered by Parliament. The British Empire was in debt from the recent Seven Years’ War to protect the British North American colonies. Tax money to cover the costs of the war was needed, so Parliament passed the Sugar Act in 1764 and the Stamp Act in 1765.11 The Sugar Act ended an earlier tax on molasses and placed a nominal tax on white sugar, but its primary stated goal was to “break the hold of local commercial influence over customs enforcements by … [shifting smuggling cases] to distant imperial Vice-Admiralty Courts.”12 To aid in these efforts, the Commissioners of Customs began placing officials in coastal communities in 1763 to monitor ships carrying contraband goods. Money from the Stamp Act was intended to “defray the expences of defending, protecting, and securing the British colonies and plantations” from the possibility of attacks from foreign powers in North America.13 Such statements suggested that colonial merchants would be paying to have their economic activities surveilled rather than contributing to the debt from the Seven Years’ War. Unsurprisingly, the Sugar and Stamp Acts created a maelstrom of responses, both negative and positive, in the British colonies. Growing numbers of Sons of Liberty chapters

spread outward from Massachusetts as the primary conduits for organizing resistance movements. Furthermore, Rhode Island’s governor and legislature viewed the new taxes as direct attacks on their own sovereignty. Rhode Island’s status as a legitimate political entity within the British Empire came from the charter issued to the colony by King Charles II in 1663.14 Since it stated that “that no freeman [could] be … outlaw’d, or exil’d, or otherwise destroy’d, nor shall be oppressed, judged or condemned, but by the Law of this Colony,” they believed that the surveillance provisions in both the Sugar and Stamp Acts could not be applied to vessels in Rhode Island waters.15 Tensions in Rhode Island also stemmed from the activities of the Newport Junto, an organization best known for its efforts to have Rhode Island’s status as a chartered colony repealed in 1764.16 Its members included George Rome, colonial agent for the London firm of Hopkins and Haley, and John Robinson, Newport’s customs collector.17 For both Rome and Robinson, the Sugar and Stamp Acts were necessary, if dangerous, tools for expanding greater control over Newport’s thriving community of merchants.

The first step toward the eventual burning of the Gaspee took place in the spring of 1765, when Robinson seized the Rhode Island vessel Polly in Massachusetts waters, claiming that she was carrying illegal supplies of sugar and molasses.18 He then left her in Massachusetts and returned to Newport for reinforcements. During his absence, a mob of men broke into the Polly to steal her cargo and equipment before leaving her stranded at low tide. Massachusetts surveyor general John Temple managed to get the Polly afloat with the assistance of the Royal Navy man-of-war Maidstone. The Polly was then returned to Newport, where she was placed under the control of the Royal Navy vessel Cygnet in Newport Harbor with plans to deliver her to the Halifax Vice-Admiralty Court for additional prosecution.

Newport was roiled by a new controversy in early June when the Maidstone returned to Rhode Island waters early in the summer of 1765. Naval vessels were usually undermanned, and impressing sailors in local ports was a common practice.19 Governor Samuel Ward successfully brokered an agreement with Captain Charles Antrobus that he would not impress men from ships located within the confines of Newport Harbor. Desperate for new crew, Antrobus “impressed all the Men out of a Brigantine from Africa, last from Jamaica” in

“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History v 3

early June.20 In retaliation, a group of men described by Ward as “consisting altogether of the dregs of the people” destroyed the Maidstone’s longboat later that same day.21 Rhode Island and Massachusetts were fully consumed by the Stamp Act crisis by the end of the summer of 1765.

As riots broke out in Newport, most members of the Newport Junto, including Robinson, took shelter on the Cygnet on August 26.22 While waiting for the riot to end, Robinson was informed that he would be attacked when he returned to shore unless he delivered “the Sloop Polly and her Cargo, now under Prosecution before Doctor Spry at Halifax.”23 Robinson’s role as Newport’s customs officer meant that no ship could legally leave or enter Newport Harbor bound for waters outside Rhode Island unless he was at work. Trade slumped to a standstill until mid-September, when Robinson finally returned to the customs house.24 Local pressure also led to his agreeing not to use stamped papers when clearing vessels after the Stamp Act took effect on November 1, though this would become a moot point when the Stamp Act was repealed in March 1766.25 Tensions between customs collectors and local merchants escalated further after the Townshend Acts were passed

in 1767.26 With even more imported goods subject to tax duties, Parliament ordered additional surveillance in southern New England. By the summer of 1769, the coast was patrolled by the Liberty, a recommissioned Royal Navy vessel confiscated from Massachusetts merchant John Hancock the previous year.27 The Liberty had seized two vessels from Connecticut for customs violations and was towing them back to port when she was captured by New London merchant William Packard and a group of Rhode Island men. Shortly afterward, the Liberty was burned to the waterline in Newport Harbor.

Within days of arriving in Narragansett Bay in February 1772, His Majesty’s schooner Gaspee seized twelve barrels of undeclared rum from the Greene family’s trading vessel Fortune.28 The Gaspee’s commander, Lieutenant William Dudingston, promptly sent both ship and rum to Boston for trial in the newly organized Vice-Admiralty Court.29 Believing that the Rhode Island charter protected their right to move goods in Narragansett Bay, the Greene family appealed to Governor Joseph Wanton for redress. Wanton ordered Lieutenant Dudingston to “produce me your commission and instructions … which was your duty to have done when you first came within the jurisdiction of this Colony” in

Portrait of Governor Joseph Wanton (1705-1780), REDWOOD LIBRARY AND ATHENAEUM, NEWPORT, RHODE ISLAND, PA.143. Gift of Angelica Gilbert Gardiner.

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hope of brokering an agreement.30 Dudingston summarily refused on the grounds that British law stated that colonial laws “could not be contrary or repugnant to the laws of England.” 31 Individual colonies could only create new laws to address situations for which there was neither reason nor motivation to create an equivalent law in Britain. Admiralty courts were allowed to supersede local laws in both Britain and the colonies when prosecuting charges that fell under their jurisdiction, which this did. Nevertheless, Rhode Island colonists continued to believe that the protections conferred by their charter would stand up in a court of law, so the impasse continued.

Captain Benjamin Lindsey saw the packet Hannah through customs inspection in Newport in early June 1772 and headed up Narragansett Bay to its home port of Providence.

When the Gaspee chased after the Hannah on June 9, Lindsey reportedly lured the Gaspee onto a sandbar during an outgoing tide.32 Lindsey and the Hannah returned to Providence, where Lindsey told merchant John Brown about the Gaspee’s plight.

Brown and sea captain Abraham Whipple began making plans for an attack on the Gaspee before high tide lifted her from the sandbar. Eight longboats loaded with armed men rowed out to the Gaspee, using muffled oars between midnight and one in the morning.33 Dudingston ordered his men to shoot the attackers, but he was wounded almost immediately. He then agreed to surrender the Gaspee as long as he and his men were not further harmed. A ballad composed about the attack later reported that “Some Narragansett Indian men/Being sixtyfour, if I remember/Which made the stout coxcomb surrender/ And what was best of all their tricks/They in his breech a ball did fix.” 34 Dudingston and the Gaspee’s crew were bound and taken ashore, while the attack’s leaders removed most of the documents from the ship before setting the Gaspee on fire.

A spark reached her powder magazine early in the morning of June 10, 1772, and she sank a few hours later.

As news of the attack on the Gaspee reached the mainland, Rhode Island officials sprang into action. Historian Peter Messer notes their process “followed a clearly identifiable script that sheds light upon the colonists’ sense of both the legitimate boundaries of imperial authority and their right to correct imperial officials who transgressed those boundaries.”35 Deputy Governor Darius Sessions interviewed three of the Gaspee’s crew on June 10 in an effort to identify the attack’s leaders.36 Governor Wanton assured Admiral John Montagu,

the commander-in-chief of the North American Squadron, on June 12 that he could “rely upon the utmost & continued Exertions of the Officers of this Colony to detect & bring to Justice the Perpetrators of this Violent Outrage.” 37 Admiral Montagu, by contrast, invoked Lieutenant Dudingston’s description of his assailants as “the Piratical People of Providence.”38 The Gaspee’s attackers were extradited to London for trial. Three months later, King George III would authorize the use of treason charges on September 2.39 In the end, however, none of the men involved with the attack on the Gaspee were sent to London for trial.

Once the Boston Tea Party had taken place on December 16, 1773, an attack on a British naval schooner seemed almost trivial in comparison.40 Nevertheless, the “Gaspee Affair” and its aftermath lingered in the memories of many British colonists. In a sermon delivered on December 3, 1772, Boston minister John Allen asked, “Are not the Rhode Islanders subjects to the King of Great Britain? Has not the King his attorney, his courts of judicatory to decide matters between the King and the subjects? Why then must there be New Courts of admiralty erected to appoint and order the inhabitants to be confin’d, and drag’d away?”41 The following year, the colony of North Carolina created a Standing Committee of Correspondence to “obtain the most early and authentic intelligence of all such Acts and resolutions of the British Parliament.”42 The committee’s first task was researching the justifications used

by Parliament to explain why the investigation into the attack on the Gaspee needed to be held in London. An attack on one historically vulnerable colony’s sovereignty was an attack on them both, and the committee believed that Rhode Island was in need of their support.

The committee reported early in the winter of 1774 on colonial efforts to respond to the Coercive Acts, the series of laws issued by Parliament in 1774 to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party.43 By that time, the North Carolina legislature was locked in a battle of wills with their royal governor, Josiah Martin.44 Like his predecessor, William Tryon, during the Stamp Act crisis, Governor Martin tried to forestall any formal response from North Carolina by dissolving the legislature.45 Instead, Colonel John Harvey, the Speaker of the House, responded by calling a convention to “Act in conformity with our neighbouring Colonies & ellect Deputies to attend the General Congress at Philadelphia.”46

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The resulting three-day gathering on August 25–27, 1774, was the first meeting of the Provincial Convention or Congress of North Carolina.47 It took place in New Bern, North Carolina’s colonial capital, and was attended by seventy men who represented twenty-nine of North Carolina’s thirtyfive counties. They swore an oath of loyalty to George III, but it was accompanied by the caveat that it was their duty “in the present alarming state of British America … to declare our sentiments in the most public manner, lest silence should be construed as acquiescence.” The Congress appointed Richard Caswell, Joseph Hewes, and William Hooper “to attend the General Congress to be held at Philadelphia sometime in September next.” It also agreed that boycotting British goods was the best method available for them to express their concerns, a conclusion shared by the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia the following month.48 Governor Martin was increasingly frustrated in the spring of 1775. His efforts to thwart Harvey and the other assembly members from sending representatives to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia had failed. His condemnation on March 1 of the Committees of Safety as “cabals and illegal proceedings … which can only tend to introduce disorder and anarchy to the destruction of the real interest and happiness of the people” was greeted with silence in public and worse in private.49 Determined to regain some control over the colony, Martin ordered the legislature to meet on April 4. Instead, Harvey organized a second meeting of the Provincial Congress on April 3, which was held in the legislative chambers located in the other half of the Governor’s Palace in New Bern.

He was then elected president of the Provincial Congress, which solidified his position as the most powerful man in North Carolina in 1775. News of the skirmishes between Massachusetts colonists and British troops in Lexington and Concord added to Governor Martin’s challenges in May. He still had the support of a handful of wealthy families and the majority of the Highland Scots in the Cross Creek region, but they were increasingly silent.50 Martin sent his family to safety in New York and took shelter in Fort Johnston at the mouth of the Cape Fear River on May 31.

That same day, the Committee of Safety in Mecklenburg County composed the Mecklenburg Resolves, which declared “all Commissions, civil and military, heretofore granted by the Crown … [to be] null and void.”51 Once the other Committees

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of Safety signed the document, the royal government was effectively dissolved in North Carolina, the first British North American colony to take this course of action. Just before fleeing to New York in June, Martin condemned “these evil minded persons … [and their] most wicked, vile, false, and inflammatory suggestions, and insinuations,” but the statement was little more than a public opportunity to vent his frustrations.52 The following day, the Provincial Congress formally dissolved the last remnants of North Carolina’s royal government, including its court system.53 Eleven months later, North Carolina’s Halifax Resolves made North Carolina the first colony to instruct its delegates to the Second Continental Congress to vote in favor of independence from Britain on April 12, 1776.54 The following month, Rhode Island would be the first British colony to formally renounce its allegiance to the Crown on May 4, 1776.55 These actions claimed sovereignty for Rhode Island and North Carolina, both of which now saw themselves as independent entities. They also demonstrated that Patriot leaders in both states were in the ascendency, even as both Aquidneck Island and portions of North Carolina were occupied by the British army in the final years of the American Revolution.56 Over time, the endless shifting between Patriot/American and Loyalist/British powers only deepened long-standing questions about political identities and loyalties in both Rhode Island and North Carolina. John Shy notes that the British and Patriot occupations created a “triangularity of the struggle” in which two sides “contended less with each other than for the support and the control of the civilian population.”57 William Hooper, one of the three North Carolina men who signed the Declaration of Independence, wearily commented to Governor Abner Ash on June 7, 1779, that “there is a lethargy about us in this place that to me is unaccountable,” and this lethargy would continue after the war.58 The years following the Treaty of Paris and the end of the American Revolution in 1783 were challenging ones.

The United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which allowed each state to retain “its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States.”59 Both the federal government and the individual states owed hundreds

of thousands of dollars to the European bankers who had supported them during the war, but the Articles of Confederation offered limited means for raising these funds via taxation.60 Inequities in political representation and tax structures were roiling residents in the western parts of many states, most notably in Massachusetts, where Shays’s Rebellion erupted in the winter of 1786.61 These challenges, and others, brought fifty-five men from all states except Rhode Island, which refused to take part in the discussions, to Philadelphia in 1787 to decide how the United States should proceed as a nation. Despite the challenges facing the country in 1787, many Americans were hesitant to exchange the protections for individual states provided by the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution’s vision of a newly empowered federal government.62 With the debates on the Constitution completed, the fifty-five delegates returned to their home states to organize conventions at the state level. Some were determined to champion the Constitution; others wanted the country to continue with the Articles of Confederation. Article Seven states that “ratification of the conventions of nine states, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this constitution between the states so ratifying the same.”63 If nine or more states voted in favor of ratification, it would be used to govern these states, but the remaining states would be governed under the Articles of Confederation. The only path toward the Constitution becoming the law of the land throughout the United States was for all thirteen states to vote in favor of ratification. No states were more hesitant than North Carolina and Rhode Island to lose their positions as sovereign states under the Articles of Confederation.64 The Mecklenburg Resolves are best known for dissolving the royal government in North Carolina in 1775. They also proclaimed that “the Provincial Congress of each Province, under the Direction of the Great Continental Congress, is invested with all legislative and executive Powers within their respective Provinces.”65 Just as Governor Wanton had argued in 1772 that Rhode Island’s charter protected the men accused of attacking the Gaspee from being tried in London, the Mecklenburg Resolves offered the protections of their own laws to the residents of North Carolina.

As the state conventions dragged on through 1788 and into 1789, old battle lines from the colonial period

emerged once more. Pauline Maier notes that “many North Carolinians [were] acutely conscious of how much their welfare depended on being governed by officials who were accountable to the people, under laws written by legislators who knew the circumstances of their constituents.”66 Governor Samuel Johnston, who wanted North Carolina to ratify the Constitution, agreed to hold the ratifying convention in Hillsborough to appeal to residents in the western parts of the state who were largely opposed to the Constitution.67 This first effort at ratification failed late in the summer of 1788, but North Carolina eventually agreed to ratify the Constitution after the addition of the Bill of Rights in 1789.68 Similar to North Carolina, many of the ratification battles in Rhode Island fell along geographic lines. The men who supported the Constitution largely were based in Providence and Newport, while the Country Party that dominated the assembly in 1788 represented the large farming families from southern Rhode Island.69 News of Rhode Island’s refusal to ratify the Constitution soon reached Federalist colonists in neighboring Massachusetts and Connecticut who “condemned the wickedness and folly of ‘Rogue Island,’” but this only “hardened [Rhode Island’s] determination to go their own way. Why should Rhode Islanders link arms with people who habitually denigrated them?” 70 In the end, like North Carolina before it, the promise of a Bill of Rights finally persuaded Rhode Island’s delegates to ratify the Constitution on May 29, 1790.

Rhode Island’s and North Carolina’s interlocking experiences support a deeper study of the political and ideological shifts that underscored the turn from imperial crisis in the 1760s to revolutionary era in the 1770s, and, eventually to the ratification debates of the 1780s.71 Questions about the intersecting balance of local and imperial interests and identities remain central parts of both Rhode Island’s and North Carolina’s political identities to the present day.

The attack on the Gaspee is but one piece in a much larger story.

“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History v 7

George Washington’s letter notifying Congress that Rhode Island had ratified the Constitution, June 1, 1790, RECORDS OF THE U.S. SENATE, NATIONAL ARCHIVES.

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Endnotes 1

Bernard Bailyn describes Rhode Island as “one of the most faction-ridden colonies in America” even before the revolutionary era began in the 1760s. Bailyn, “Introduction to Hopkins, Rights of Colonies” in Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, Volume I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 500.

2

Patrick T. Conley, Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island’s Constitutional Development, 1776–1841 (Providence, RI: Rhode Island Historical Society, 1977), 111.

3

See John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 3–4, and Paul David Nelson, William Tryon and the Course of Empire: A Life in British Imperial Service (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 23.

4

See Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Richard Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); James B. Bell, Empire, Religion and Revolution in Early Virginia, 1607–1786 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Eric Hinderaker, Boston’s Massacre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Milton Klein and Jacob Cooke argue, however, that if the history of Rhode Island is often “dwarfed by that of its better-known neighbors,” this is because “its pioneering accomplishments [are often] taken for granted.” Klein and Cooke’s “Editor’s Introduction” to Sydney James, Colonial Rhode Island: A History (New York: Scribner, 1975), xiii.

5

Pauline Maier notes that “how a convention [for ratifying the Constitution] developed depended on the characters of the state, its history and traditions, the relative strength of the contenders, the strategies they took.” Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), xi.

6

“London, July 18,” republished in Virginia Gazette (October 15, 1772, Issue 1107).

7

See Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 25–29.

8

See John Reeves, A History of the Law of Shipping and Navigation (London: Thomas Burnside, 1792) for the histories and texts of these laws before 1792. See Oliver M. Dickerson, The Navigation Acts and the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1951), 7–10; Thomas C. Barrow, Trade and Empire: The British Customs Service in Colonial America, 1660–1775 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 177; and Gautham Rao, National Duties: Customs Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 2016), 26–27.

9

See Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–1830 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 45–48.

10

“An Essay on the Trade of the Northern Colonies,” Newport Mercury (no. 284, February 14, 1764). This essay is thought to have been written by Providence merchant and politician Stephen Hopkins.

11

See “Resolutions of the Committee of Ways and Means for the Year 1764,” William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Volume XV (London: T. C. Hansard Press, 1813), 1426, and “Proceedings on the American Stamp Act,” William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Volume XVI (London: T. C. Hansard Press, 1813), 35.

12

Rao, National Duties, 39.

13

See “Proceedings on the American Stamp Act,” 35–37.

14

See Sydney James, Colonial Rhode Island: a History (New York: Scribner, 1975), 69–72.

15

See James, Colonial Rhode Island, 69–72.

16

See Abby Chandler, “‘Let us unanimously lay aside foreign Superfluities’: Textile Production and British Colonial Identity in the 1760s,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2021, 19 (1): 142–44 for more discussion of the Newport Junto’s political activities in 1764 and 1765.

“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History v 9

17

See David S. Lovejoy, Rhode Island Politics and the American Revolution, 1760–1776 (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1958), 42–49 and Carl Bridenbaugh, Peter Harrison, American Architect (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1949), 75–76 for more information about John Robinson and George Rome.

18

ee Steven Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 45–46 for more information about the seizure S of the Polly.

19

enver Brunsman writes that “impressment was more than a stopgap measure to keep the British navy afloat: it was a D fundamental component of Britain’s early imperial success … the purpose of impressment was not to target the idle, poor, and criminal elements within British society but rather the most skilled Atlantic seafarers.” Brunsman, The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 3.

20

ee “Dear Mr. Hall,” Newport Mercury (no. 353, June 10, 1765). Captain Charles Antrobus also was one of the men S identified by Ezra Stiles as having “gone home” after the Stamp Act riots. See Ezra Stiles, “Stamp Act Notebook,” MS vault film 1523, reel 16, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

21

“ Governor Samuel Ward to Captain Charles Antrobus, July 12, 1765,” in John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, in New England, vol. 6, 1757–69 (Providence, R.I.: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1861), 447.

22

See “William Almy to Elisha Story,” August 29, 1765, in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society 55 (1923): 36.

23

“John Robinson to Commissioners of Customs, September 5, 1765,” in Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, vol. 6, 413.

24

“ John Robinson to Governor Samuel Ward, August 31, 1765, On Board the Cygnet in Newport Harbour” in Ward Family Papers, Manuscript Collection 776, Series Four, Box 1, Folder 26, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.

25

See Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M. Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis, (Chapel Hill, NC: University Press of North Carolina, 1995), 154–158.

26

The Townshend Acts were named for the British chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Townshend. See “Resolutions of the Committee of Ways and Means for the Year 1767,” in Cobbett, The Parliamentary History [. . .] vol. XVI, 331–43, 359–61, 369–75.

27

See Constance Sherman, “An Accounting of His Majesty’s Armed Sloop Liberty,” American Neptune 20 (1960): 243–249.

28

aptain Rufus Greene later sued Lieutenant Dudingston for damages for the loss of the rum. His trial deposition stated that C Dudingston had “thrust him into the cabin, jammed the companion leaf upon his head, knocked him down upon a chest in said cabin, and confined him there for a considerable time” during his search of the Fortune. See “Rufus Greene deposition before Justice Hopkins Cook, January 14, 1773,” in William Read Staples, ed., Documentary History of the Gaspee, 67.

The Fortune was owned by Greene’s cousin, Nathanael Greene, who later would command the Continental Army in the southern states. See Terry Golway, Washington’s General: Nathanael Greene and the Triumph of the American Revolution (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2006), 33–38.

29

illiam Dudingston had served as the captain of the Gaspeefor four years in 1772. Steven Park notes that “very little W biographical or genealogical information is available about William Dudingston.” Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 119n52.

30

“ Captain Joseph Wanton to Lieutenant William Dudingston, March 22, 1772,” in Gaspee Papers Collection, Box 434, Folder 1, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.

31

Mary Sarah Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 3.

32

A later ballad would report that Dudingston “did chase the sloop, called the Hannah/Of whom one Lindsey was commander/they dogged her up Providence Sound/and there the rascal got aground.” Anonymous, “Song on the Gaspee,” in Staples, ed., Documentary History of the Gaspee, 109.

33

he group may have included Captain Rufus Greene from the Fortune. Gaspee crew member Peter May testified that he T recognized Greene from the seizure of the Fortune four months earlier. See “Peter May deposition before Governor Joseph Wanton, January 19, 1773,” in Staples, ed., Documentary History of the Gaspee, 76–77.

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34

nonymous, “Song on the Gaspee,” in Staples, ed., Documentary History of the Gaspee, 109. See Benjamin L. Carp, A “Resolute Men (Dressed as Mohawks),” in Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 141–160, for more information on the use of Native American disguises during colonial protests.

35

Peter Messer, “A Most Insulting Violation: The Burning of the HMS Gaspee and the Delaying of the American Revolution,” The New England Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2015): 582–622.

36

ee statements from boatswain John Johnson and seamen William Caple and Bartholomew Cheevers in Staples, ed., S Documentary History of the Gaspee, 17–19.

37

“ Governor Joseph Wanton to Admiral John Montagu, June 12, 1772,” in “Copy of the Official Documents Relating to the Destruction of the Gaspee, June 10, 1772,” Gaspee Papers Collection, Box 434, Folder 10, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island. See “Montagu, John (1719–1795)” Heritage Newfoundland and Labrador, accessed May 6, 2021, https://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/politics/naval-john-montagu.php.

38

John Montagu, “Journal Entry for June 13, 1772,” in “Copy of Admiral Montagu’s Journal,” Gaspee Papers Collection, Box 434, Folder 2, Rhode Island Historical Society, Providence, Rhode Island.

39

ee George III, “Instructions to our trusty and well beloved Joseph Wanton, Daniel Horsmanden, Frederick Smythe, Peter S Oliver and Robert Auchmuty, Esquires,” September 4, 1772, in Staples, ed., Documentary History of the Gaspee, 40–42.

40

ee Steven Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 99–101, for further discussion on the transition from S investigating the attack on the Gaspee to the attack on the Dartmouth, Eleanor, and the Beaver in Boston Harbor.

41

ohn Allen, An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty, or The Essential Rights of the Americans in Pamphlets of the American J Revolution, 1750–1776, Vol. II, ed. Bernard Bailyn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 240–241.

42

“ Minutes of the Lower House of the North Carolina General Assembly,” December 8, 1773, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Vol. 9, 740–741. Committees of Correspondence were organized in many British North American colonies in 1773 and 1774 to support the exchange of information from one colony to the next. See Craig B. Yirush, “The Imperial Crisis,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, eds. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 94.

43

ee “The King’s Message relating to the outrageous Proceedings at Boston in the Province of Massachusetts Bay,” S “The Boston Port Bill,” “The regulating of the Government of Massachusetts Bay,” and “The Administration of Justice Act,” in William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, Volume XVII (London: T. C. Hansard Press, 1813), 1159–1210. They became known as the Intolerable Acts in the British North American colonies.

44

osiah Martin received his appointment as governor of North Carolina in 1771 from Wills Hill, the Earl of Hillsborough, J the secretary of state for the colonies from 1768 to 1772. See Journal of the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations, Vol. VIII (London: Published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office, April 1704 to May 1782), 218.

45

istorian William Saunders notes that “he thought, having dissolved the existing Assembly on the 30th of March, that he H had the matter in his own hands, and determined, in imitation of the course of Governor Tryon, in 1765, not to allow any Assembly to meet until matters were in better shape.” Saunders, “Prefatory Notes to Ninth Volume,” in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Vol. 9, ed. William Saunders (Raleigh, NC: P. M. Hale, 1886), xxix. Tryon was North Carolina’s governor from 1765 to 1771 and, like Josiah Martin, received his appointment from Lord Hillsborough. See Paul David Nelson, William Tryon and the Course of Empire (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 8.

46

ohn Harvey, “Memorandum concerning the election of delegates for the Provincial Congress of North Carolina,” J February 11, 1775, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Vol. 9, 1125–1126.

47

ee “Minutes of the Provincial Congress of North Carolina,” August 25, 1774,” in Colonial and State Records of S North Carolina, Vol. 9, 1043–1044.

48

ichael McDonnell, “The Struggle Within: Colonial Politics on the Eve of Independence, in The Oxford Handbook of The M American Revolution, eds. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 103–106.

49

“ Proclamation of Governor Josiah Martin,” March 1, 1775, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Vol. 9, 1146–1147.

“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History v 11

50

orth Carolina had a large Scots community in Cross Creek, most of whom had fled Scotland following their failed N efforts to support Charles Edward Stuart at the Battle of Culloden in 1745. See Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1969), 46–48. Further evidence of local support for Governor Martin can be found in an undated “Address” delivered to him by “two hundred and twenty-seven of the Inhabitants of the county of Anson.” See Address of inhabitants of Anson County to Josiah Martin concerning loyalty to Great Britain, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Vol. 9, 1161–1164.

51

“ Resolves Adopted in Charlotte Town, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, May 31, 1775,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy, accessed May 1, 2021, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/charlott.asp.

52

“ Proclamation of Governor Josiah Martin,” June 16, 1775, in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, Vol. 10, ed.

William Saunders, (Raleigh, NC: Winston, 1886), 16–19.

53

he dissolution of North Carolina’s court system also put Newport Junto member Martin Howard out of work. Howard T had been appointed as North Carolina’s chief justice in 1767 and continued to hold the position until 1775. He was able to negotiate a compromise with the North Carolina Provincial Congress, allowing his family to enter a self-imposed house arrest at their plantation outside New Bern, which lasted until the Howard family left North Carolina in 1777. See “Martin Howard to James Iredell, May 15, 1777,” in Life and Correspondence of James Iredell: One of the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, Vol. I, ed. Griffith John McRee (New York: Appleton, 1857), 363–364, and Abby Chandler, “Reexamining the Remarkable Career of Martin Howard,” Newport History, 2019; 90 (1): 1–30.

54

ee “Minutes of the Provincial Congress of North Carolina, April 4, 1776–May 14, 1776” in Colonial and State Records of S North Carolina, Vol. 10, ed. William Saunders, (Raleigh, NC: Winston, 1886), 499–590.

55

ee “May 4, 1776 Act of Renunciation,” State of Rhode Island, accessed May 8, 2021, https://www.sos.ri.gov/divisions/ S Civics-And-Education.

56

ee Donald F. Johnson, Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution (Philadelphia: University S of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 5–15, for a discussion of the political and psychological impacts of British occupations on American cities.

57

ohn Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (Ann Arbor, J MI: University of Michigan Press, 1990), 198–200.

58

“ William Hooper to Abner Nash, June 7, 1780,” in Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, vol. 8, ed.

William Saunders, (Raleigh, NC: Winston, 1886), 843–844. Also see John R. Maass, “North Carolina and Public Spirit in the American Revolution,1775–1783,” Journal of the American Revolution, accessed May 5, 2021, https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/05/north-carolina-and-public-spirit-in-the-american-revolution-1775-1783/, for more information about North Carolina’s experiences during the American Revolution.

59

“The Articles of Confederation,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, accessed May 5, 2021, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/artconf.asp.

60

ee John Ferling, A Leap in the Dark: The Struggle to Create the American Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, S 2003), and George William Van Cleeve, We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

61

ee Sean Condon, Shays’s Rebellion: Authority and Distress in Post-Revolutionary America (Baltimore: John Hopkins S University Press, 2015).

62

“ The United States Constitution,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, accessed May 5, 2021, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/usconst.asp.

63

“ Article Seven,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, accessed May 5, 2021, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/art7.asp.

64

avid Oterson further notes that Rhode Island and North Carolina became “independent political societies that had no D constitutional relationship with the United States” once the first nine states had voted to ratify the Constitution.”

See Oterson, “The Admission of North Carolina and Rhode Island into the Union,” Journal of the American Revolution, accessed May 5, 2021, https://allthingsliberty.com/2021/02/the-admission-of-north-carolina-and-rhode-island-intothe-union/.

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65

This language is very similar to the language used in the Articles of Confederation in 1781. “Resolves Adopted in Charlotte Town, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, May 31, 1775,” The Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, accessed May 1, 2021, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/charlott.asp.

66

Maier, Ratification, 406.

67

ee Maier, Ratification, 408–423, for a detailed description of the ratification debates in Hillsborough that took place S between July 21 and August 4, 1788.

68

ee Carol Berkin, The Bill of Rights: The Fight to Secure America’s Liberties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), S 126–127.

69

ee Maier, Ratification, 223–225, for a detailed description of the debates between the Federalists and the Country Party S in Rhode Island.

70

Maier, Ratification, 225.

71

See Yirush, “The Imperial Crisis,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, 85–102, for more information on the period known as the imperial crisis.

“But by the Law of This Colony”: The Gaspee Affair in American History v 13

14 v The Bridge

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 Charles R. Foy Charles R. Foy is Associate Professor, Emeritus, at Eastern Illinois University. Dr. Foy has published more than a dozen articles on Black mariners and is the creator of the Black Mariner Database, a dataset of more than 43,000 18th century Black Atlantic mariners.

He is completing a book manuscript, Liberty’s Labyrinth: Freedom in the 18th Century Black Atlantic, that details the nature of freedom in the eighteenth century through an analysis of the lives of Black mariners.

T

q

he burning of the schooner Gaspee, on June 10, 1772, has been described as the “first armed confrontation of the American Revolution” and “a singularly important event” in American history.1 Annual celebrations of the affair have helped frame contemporary Rhode Islanders’ view of their ancestors as having played a central role in Americans obtaining independence. The Gaspee Affair played a critical role in spurring colonists from Massachusetts to Georgia to seriously consider breaking away from the British monarch.2 But in combination with the Somerset vs. Stewart decision issued ten days later in London and the outbreak of the American Revolution, the affair also caused enslaved peoples in Rhode Island and elsewhere to see the Royal Navy as an effective means for obtaining freedom and England as a refuge from the harshness of enslavement within the British empire. This essay reframes our understanding of the Gaspee Affair by considering it through the eyes of enslaved people and placing the event within the Atlantic context of Blacks’ struggle for freedom. To do so, it centers the story of Black indentured servant Aaron Briggs of Prudence Island, who provided sworn testimony to British officials regarding the burning of the Gaspee, and other maritime fugitives.3

State of Slavery in Rhode Island Prior to 1772 Prior to the American Revolution, slave labor played a sizable role in Rhode Island’s economy. By 1750, more than 3,300 individuals were enslaved in the colony and constituted ten percent of Rhode Island’s population.4 Special laws singled out Blacks. Lethal force against an enslaved individual was accepted as a “corrective” tool, and Rhode Island masters did not need to fear prosecution for murdering their bondsmen.5 How did enslaved people find freedom in such circumstances? Emancipation was difficult as slave owners were required to post a one-hundred-pound bond for each slave they sought to free. This requirement was to ensure localities did not bear the cost of freed elderly or disabled individuals who could not support themselves.6 In a colony where many residents’ economic well–being relied upon the slave trade and slave labor and slavers “formed the nucleus of Newport society,” petitions such as those submitted by Massachusetts Blacks seeking legislation to free them was not a feasible option.

Litigation to challenge one’s enslavement was costly and required access to an attorney. The result was that in the years before American independence, negotiated manumission and flight were the primary means for Rhode Island’s enslaved to find freedom.7

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 v 15

Julius Scott has vividly described regional networks of information that moved revolutionary ideas about the Caribbean in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and assisted considerable numbers of enslaved peoples to obtain freedom.8 While perhaps not as well-developed as the connections among enslaved peoples later in the century, prior to the American Revolution, well-established networks and connections among Blacks existed in various regions of the Atlantic basin. As N. A. T. Hall has demonstrated, maritime flight and interimperial connections among enslaved people operated long before 1772. Such networks were particularly vibrant in colonies such as Curaçao and Bermuda, where the economies were largely maritime in nature. Bermudian and Coraçaon Black seamen informed other Blacks of uprisings elsewhere and helped to shape some of those insurrections.9 The information that moved through these networks included African maritime and military practices that enslaved peoples utilized to transverse interimperial borders, to engage in violent uprisings, and to seek freedom in other nation’s colonies.10 Colonial Rhode Island’s economy “depended on the sea.”11 Enslaved Blacks, such as Edward Abbie, worked on slave ships.

Quaman and scores of other slave seamen manned Rhode Island’s merchant ships. And hundreds of Black men toiled caulking, rigging, and loading the colony’s vessels. Information regarding ships sailing, ship captains, and opportunities for freedom circulated on the wharves and streets of Newport and Providence among the enslaved population.12 This maritime culture resulted in hundreds of Rhode Island’s bondsmen being knowledgeable about the larger Atlantic and opportunities for freedom via the sea. Black bondsmen such as Moses Perry may not have been to sea before, but he and others believed that the information they gathered in Rhode Island would help them find freedom at sea.13 But prior to 1770 (except for several years during the War of Austrian Succession), maritime flight from Rhode Island was limited with not more than three in any year. The Royal Navy establishing a regular presence in Narragansett Bay not only led to Rhode Islanders burning the Gaspee but also opened a door to freedom for the colony’s enslaved.

16 v The Bridge

Prelude to the Burning of the Gaspee: The burning of the Gaspee was but one of several violent outbursts in and about Narragansett Bay during the decade prior to the American Revolution. These altercations included firing at a naval tender, a mob setting fire to a naval boat, and the dumping of the sloop Liberty’s armaments. Such armed confrontations with British naval vessels reflected American colonists’ growing hostility to the navy, which they perceived as an instrument of tyrannical imperial control. Thus, although the burning of the Gaspee may be the armed confrontation leading up to the Revolution that Rhode Islanders remember, it was not the first such event nor was it an isolated moment.14 Prior to the Seven Years’ War, naval vessels occasionally entered Narragansett Bay. In this era, Royal Navy vessels more typically were stationed at Boston, New York, and Charleston.

After 1763, the Royal Navy regularly stationed armed sloops and schooners in Narragansett Bay to ensure compliance with mercantile laws. John Brown and other American colonists complained of the navy’s “putting his Majesty’s subjects in fear of their lives and liberties, and in a most underhanded manner take every low method to obtain intelligence” about alleged smuggling activities.15 Bondsmen, on the other hand, perceived this unfolding dispute between American colonists and their monarch in a different light. The Royal Navy’s persistent presence, in Massachusetts, Narragansett Bay, and eventually in New York Harbor, as well as Chesapeake and Lowcountry waterways, would provide a door to freedom for many North American Blacks. For a few, such as Briggs, the ticket to that door would be assisting British investigations. For many others, freedom would be obtained by service in the Royal Navy.

And for a third group, the Royal Navy would, without requiring sworn depositions or hauling lines on a vessel, provide taxi rides to freedom. In short, in the period from 1772 to 1783, the navy would be seen by Blacks not as the oppressive force of liberty that white Americans perceived it to be but as one of the best means to obtain freedom.

Burning of the Gaspee: Along with the sloop Beaver, in June of 1772, the Gaspee was stationed in Narragansett Bay. The Beaver and Gaspee were small, and, in contrast to larger Royal Navy men-of-war, could enter local waterways when chasing merchant vessels that refused to heed commands. On the night of June 9, the Gaspee gave chase to the sloop Hannah as it headed from Providence

to Newport. The schooner’s commander, Lieutenant William Dudingston, suffered bad fortune as the Gaspee grounded on a sandbar in the Providence River, allowing the Hannah to sail to Providence uninspected. Dudingston’s fortune only got worse, as later that night, Rhode Islanders in longboats attacked the schooner. During a brief engagement, the lieutenant was wounded. After taking the vessel’s crew and officers ashore, the Rhode Islanders returned to the Gaspee and burned her. British authorities were outraged by the attack, destruction of a naval vessel, and wounding of a naval officer. The British government wished to quickly identify and bring to justice those responsible for this incident. In contrast, most Rhode Islanders wished to hide who was involved. In the middle of this conflict was Briggs, who had his own agenda, obtaining permanent freedom.

Aaron Briggs’s Involvement in the Gaspee Affair: At the time of the Gaspee’s burning Briggs was working on Captain Samuel Tompkins’s Prudence Island farm. Placed there as an apprentice at the age of five, Briggs gained some experience with small boats. Briggs testified that on the night of June 9, he was rowing in Narragansett Bay when he encountered Simeon Potter in a longboat coming from Bristol.

He further stated that Potter compelled him to partake in the attack on the Gaspee. Patrick Earle, a seaman on the Gaspee, informed authorities he helped “Briggs, to row the bow oar” on the boat taking the Gaspee’s crew ashore. However, Briggs’s and Earle’s version of events was contradicted by two servants of Tompkins, who asserted Briggs was at home the night of the attack and did not have access to a boat.16 On June 12, Governor Joseph Wanton issued a proclamation that a one-hundred-pound reward would be paid “to any Person or Persons who shall discover the Perpetrators.”17 Over the ensuing weeks, the governor and British officials jousted over investigating the affair.

In the meantime, no Rhode Islander stepped forward with information concerning the attack.

Several weeks after the Gaspee burned, Briggs took his master’s boat and rowed out to the Beaver, anchored off Prudence Island. When Briggs came aboard the sloop, he encountered an almost exclusively British crew.18 However, the sloop’s crew included at least two Black seamen — John Cato and John Mingo. Cato was a twenty-five-year-old

African-born, able-bodied seaman, while Mingo was a New England-born seaman. Mingo’s and Cato’s presence on the sloop would have signified an acceptance of Blacks by the navy.

The two Black tars also may have been individuals with whom Briggs shared a mess with and helped him become a naval seaman. Finding such a cohort of Blacks aboard ship, as Francis Barber had when he fled Samuel Johnson’s London home for a bunk on the Stag in 1758, would have eased Briggs’s entry into the new world of a naval vessel.19 Why did Briggs board the Beaver? There is no indication Briggs sought the reward Wanton had offered. And it was likely he understood an indentured Black servant making a statement that went against the interest of most whites in the area was not likely to be believed. As Briggs so precisely stated, he “went on board said man of war with an intention not to return again to his master.”20 If, as we should, we take Briggs at his word, why did he flee onto the Beaver? A twenty-one-year-old, whose indenture was believed to expire in four years, Briggs appears to have had his fill of Tompkins and life as his indentured servant.21As an indentured servant, Briggs’s mobility, work, and intimate life were strictly controlled.

And as a Black man, he had very limited legal rights.

Thus, while the end of his indenture in four years promised freedom, his life in 1772 was rather difficult. It also is likely that by living on Narraganset Bay, Briggs was aware Rhode Islanders enriched themselves through the sale of captured Black mariners, some of whom may have been among bondsmen he encountered while out on the bay.22 Thus, Briggs had cause to see life in Rhode Island in 1772 as not hospitable to Blacks. In contrast, entering a Royal Navy ship whose officers were highly motivated to find who attacked the Gaspee, Briggs understood he would be protected.

Ship musters confirm that naval officers were deliberate in their wanting to protect him, as they noted Briggs had “evidence relating to the Gaspee schooner being burnt [and had been] sent round for examination.” And he was protected. When Rhode Island officials came to the Beaver on July 11 with an arrest warrant for Briggs after he had submitted an initial statement, the sloop’s commander refused to turn him over to local authorities. Instead, Briggs was transferred to the Captain to provide “evidence relating to” the Gaspee Affair, entered the ship as an ordinary, and paid wages.23 Briggs had a relatively short tenure on the Captain.

Promoted to able-bodied seaman in November 1773, he

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 v 17

remained on the ship and sailed with it to Portsmouth, England, arriving there in July 1774. The following month, the Captain and Briggs moved on to Chatham. We do not know what thereafter became of him.24 But what we do know is that while his testimony ultimately was rejected by the commission investigating the burning of the Gaspee as coming from one with a “weak or wicked mind,” by proffering it, Briggs was able to end his indenture, gain his freedom, and migrate to a nation from which he could not lawfully be compelled to leave by a master.25

Maritime Flight, 1772–1783 When Briggs rowed to the Beaver, he moved along a path to freedom that enslaved peoples in Rhode Island had trod earlier in the eighteenth century. As early as 1714, Rhode Island slave masters had placed fugitive slave advertisements indicating they believed their bondsmen had “designs to get off to Sea.” Rhode Island maritime fugitives such as Cuffee, Newport, Toby Hazard, and others sought berths on vessels in ports along the North American coastline. This resulted in ferrymen and boatmen being prohibited from transporting any

Copy of the first page of the testimony of Aaron Briggs.

RIHS COLLECTIONS, MSS434B1F4.

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Captain Musters, 1772-1773, TNA ADM 36/7345. COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES, KEW, UNITED KINGDOM.

enslaved individuals lacking a certificate indicating their owner authorized the slaves’ passage and permitting slave owners to search ships for their runaways. Such measures proved ineffective. Instead, in the years before the Revolution, slave owners tended to be more willing to negotiate terms of service and sometimes manumission.26 Warfare greatly expanded the opportunities for maritime fugitives as increased need for maritime labor led ship captains to value muscle and skill over possible status as bondsmen.27 However, in times of peace, when the need for maritime labor was but a fraction of what was required during war, the numbers of maritime fugitives were relatively small. It was with the advent of armed conflict that the scope and nature of flight by enslaved people via the sea changed dramatically. Studies of Chesapeake, New York, and the West Indies maritime regions have demonstrated that enslaved people found increased opportunities at sea during wars throughout the Western Atlantic.28 It was not until the War of Austrian Succession, when privateers brought into Newport captured Spanish Black seamen who were sold as prize goods, that Rhode Island saw a considerable number of maritime fugitives. These formerly free men resisted enslavement by fleeing alone and as part of “a Conspiracy between a great Number of Spanish and other Prize Negroes, to run away with one of the Privateers’ Sloops” in Newport harbor.29 The Revolutionary era, with its persistent presence of the Royal Navy in Rhode Island, saw a significant increase in the number of Rhode Island maritime fugitives.

Why might enslaved Rhode Islanders have chosen to flee via the sea when to do so often meant leaving family, friends, and community behind? For bondsmen who ate “corn meal,

stale bread and watery stew,” the rumble of an empty belly was a daily reminder of what life would continue to be while enslaved. The quality and quantity of food on navy ships was far better than that which eighteenth-century working men and women typically ate, meaning that maritime fugitives typically experienced a significant upgrade in their diet when entering a naval ship.30 But the primary attraction of maritime flight was that it offered permanent freedom. Once a runaway secured a berth on a vessel, everyday sailing put greater distance between him and his former master, making recapture less of a possibility.

With wages better than that which most working men of the time received and generally equal working conditions on board, the degradation of enslavement could be left behind.

Maritime fugitives also entered vessels that historians have described as having “motley crews,” that is, multiracial and multinational, in which maritime skills were valued. 31 And mobility of employment at sea also created possibilities of transforming oneself through migration. Maritime fugitives and other Black seamen were known to choose surnames reflecting the naval ships they served on. In doing so, they asserted their Britishness based upon having served the king.

These men understood that their free status in the British Empire was tenuous and sought to cement it by reminding others of their role in the creation of Britain’s maritime empire.32 Issued only ten days after the Gaspee was burned, news of Chief Justice Lord Mansfield’s decision in Somerset v. Stewart quickly spread among North American enslaved peoples.

By the third week of July, Rhode Island newspapers carried

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 v 19

summaries of the case, and by the end of August, the Newport Mercury noted Mansfield had held “that Mr. Stuart, his master, had no power to compel him on board a ship, or to send [Somerset] back to the plantations.” 33 Despite the accuracy of the Mercury’s summary of the decision, many believed Mansfield had abolished slavery in England. Slave masters in Britain’s American colonies observed that their bondsmen, even those who spoke limited English, would “endeavor to get ... to Britain, where they imagine they will be free.”34 From 1772 to 1775, there was a more than tripling of advertisements for North American maritime fugitives over the prior three years. Several of the advertisements directly indicated runaways sought to reach England.

The persistent presence of the Royal Navy in Narragansett Bay did not offer opportunities for freedom to all enslaved peoples. Maritime flight was deeply gendered and largely only possible for young men such as Briggs. In contrast to the large numbers of enslaved Black men who either worked at sea or in maritime-related trades, women rarely wore sailors’ tarred breeches or handled rope lines. North American slave sale advertisements, which could be quite detailed about the skills of enslaved persons, never referenced a woman as suitable for maritime work. Some enslaved women, such as one known only as Molly, disguised themselves as men, “in order to get on board some vessel.” Another, named Mary, and several other women fled with their husbands dressed “in sailor’s clothes.”

However, the masculine culture on board rarely proved welcoming of women as members of a crew. If women were discovered on board before a vessel left port, they could find themselves treated roughly, as was the unidentified woman who the Castor’s crew ducked from the ship’s yardarm and then “tarred [her] all over.” This may have been an extreme example of men’s hostility to women attempting to work at sea, but women discovered among a crew typically were discharged at the first opportunity to do so after their gender was revealed.

Acceptance of women as seamen typically only occurred after they had disguised themselves as men and had proven their worth.35 During the Revolution, the Royal Navy also assisted flight by enslaved families, women, and children. Both in the Chesapeake and the Lowcountry, naval ships, including the ship Brune, carried family groups. However, this phenomenon was not seen in Rhode Island. In part this was due to the size of naval vessels in Narragansett Bay. Sloops and schooners had

20 v The Bridge

very limited space in their holds, making commanders unwilling to accommodate families of fugitives. And unlike the Brune, smaller vessels such as the Beaver did not move between locales, enabling them to drop large numbers of refugees behind British lines.36 What the Royal Navy’s persistent presence in locales offered enslaved people from 1772 to 1783 can be best understood through a consideration of the lived experiences of individual maritime fugitives. Amos Anderson, Benjamin Freebody, maritime fugitives on the Rose, and enslaved seamen on the merchant vessel Lawrence each had very different experiences, but the totality of their lives at sea provides a comprehensive picture of how and to what degree maritime flight changed the lives of enslaved Rhode Islanders.

Anderson was unusual for many reasons but perhaps most importantly due to how detailed a picture of his life we have.37 In December 1779, Anderson entered the naval sloop Loyalist as an able-bodied seaman. The Rhode Island-born free Black found service in the Royal Navy not to his liking and deserted the following November. Anderson’s time on land proved shortlived; four months later he was impressed back onto the Loyalist. Three months thereafter, the Loyalist was captured by a French frigate. Upon being captured, Anderson found himself sold in Martinique as a “prize good.” This occurred because at this time most European nations presumed captured Black seamen were slaves and therefore property.38 Remarkably, Anderson was able to escape enslavement in the French West Indies and to return to Rhode Island.

From Rhode Island, Anderson sailed to London in December 1783. Once in England, Anderson convinced authorities to arrest and prosecute John Moseley, his former Black shipmate on the Loyalist. It turns out that while Anderson was enslaved in Martinique, Moseley had taken his pay ticket and fraudulently obtained Anderson’s wages.39 What became of Anderson between 1784 and 1793 is not known. In 1793, Anderson reentered Royal Navy service as a forty-three-year-old seaman. Like hundreds of impoverished blacks in London after the Revolution, Anderson struggled to get by; his five-pound reenlistment bounty was a needed lifeline. With no family or kin in England, Anderson relied upon crewmates, such as his white crewmates John Horton and John Raymond, for support. In turn, Anderson made these white sailors his heirs. While serving on the Vengeance in 1793–94, Anderson returned to the island where he had been

enslaved, participating in the British capture of Martinique.

Despite suffering a fractured skull, Anderson remained in the navy through at least May 1800. At the end of his life, Anderson was an in–pensioner at the Royal Hospital Greenwich, receiving protection and care from the British government in recognition of his long naval service.

The lives of Black fugitives who boarded the Rose while it was stationed in Narraganset Bay from 1775 to 1777 were more typical of Rhode Island maritime fugitives. In this two-year period, not less than twenty-four Blacks, characterized as “friend[s] of the government” came aboard the frigate. Most of these men became members of the vessel’s crew, including Alfred Hazard and Peter Robarts, but were made captain’s servants, not seamen. Caezer Tillness and other maritime fugitives on the Rose were recaptured by American forces and returned to their former slave masters. Few of the maritime fugitives on the Rose had extended naval careers.

Tall Wheeler, a thirty-seven-year-old Guinea-born man, was an exception to this. Coming aboard in November 1775, he was made an ordinary the following November. Wheeler eventually was promoted to able-bodied seaman before he died on board in October 1779.40 Notwithstanding their short tenures in the Royal Navy, the cohort on the Rose demonstrated to other Rhode Island Blacks that naval vessels were useful places of refuge for runaways and that naval officers would assist fugitives in obtaining freedom.

In June 1775, as Moses Brown was renewing his efforts to have slave trading banned in Rhode Island, Samuel and Benjamin Freebody reached an agreement whereby Benjamin would be freed. Reflective of the fact that the war with Great Britain and increasing abolitionism in Rhode Island was beginning to undermine slavery and the power of slave owners, Samuel, a Newport distiller, agreed to hire out Benjamin to Captain James Brattle as a means for Benjamin to earn his freedom. Lacking maritime experience, Ben was to be employed as a landsman. Ben understood he would be able to purchase his freedom for two hundred dollars, an amount he could have earned in about three years’ service at sea.

Rather than being treated as a member of Brattle’s crew, Benjamin found himself “most cruelly used” by the ship captain. The unscrupulous Brattle provided Ben some osnaburg cloth and a single dollar to share with Dick, an unidentified but presumably enslaved sailor. Nor did Benjamin receive the ninety pounds that other crewmembers on Brattle’s

ship were awarded as prize monies for the capture of two American vessels. For three years, Brattle forcibly moved Benjamin about the Atlantic, first to Grenada, then to the Gold Coast on several slaving voyages, and on to Pensacola and several West Indies Islands before finally landing in New York. “In a declining State of health” and blind in one eye, the unfortunate Benjamin had to rely upon the charity of a stranger to survive. After the British evacuation in 1783, Ben wrote to his master seeking assistance. Despite Ben’s belief that his service on Brattle’s ship entitled him to wages sufficient to buy his freedom, he was forcibly returned to Rhode Island.41 Benjamin never was able to use the sea to achieve freedom.

Instead, he remained enslaved until at least 1790.42 In 1776, four enslaved sailors on the merchant sloop Lawrence found themselves stranded in the Gulf Stream when the rudder on their vessel broke. The sloop was on its way from St. Thomas to Copenhagen, having engaged in smuggling goods for the American rebels. Discovered by the Royal Navy, the Lawrence was brought into Portsmouth, England. There, John Draper, one of the four enslaved seamen, took the opportunity to escape and communicate with British officials.

Although recaptured, all four Black sailors, with the assistance of officials in Portsmouth and at the direction of Lord George Grenville, the foreign secretary, were released and allowed to remain in England as free men. Grenville’s directive did not directly reference the Somerset decision, but it is apparent from how officials in Portsmouth acted that they believed it required the freeing of the four Black sailors. And Draper acted as if he understood that Mansfield’s decision could, and here it apparently did, provide freedom to enslaved men born in Africa, the West Indies, and North America who landed in England.43 The experiences of these maritime fugitives demonstrate the central tenents of their lives and most Blacks at sea in the Revolutionary era. Most importantly, it was the persistent presence of the Royal Navy in a particular locale that enabled considerable numbers of runaway bondsmen to escape enslavement. Whether it was Lord Howe’s large flotilla in Chesapeake Bay in 1777, the British fleet off the Lowcountry later in the war, or the Rose with its regular movements about Narragansett Bay from 1775 to 1777, these naval vessels drew fugitives like bees to honey. Being welcomed onto Royal Navy vessels opened up possibilities for the naval careers experienced by those such as Anderson and Wheeler, as well as allowing

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 v 21

these men to serve on other vessels, as scores of Blacks, including a South Carolinian named June, did on British privateers operating out of New York.44 Naval service also allowed some, although not very many, maritime fugitives to migrate to England and then take advantage of the Somerset case to claim freedom. It also meant that many maritime fugitives, for the first time in their lives, were being heard and allowed to speak. A naval seaman, Anderson had his concerns about having his pay stolen taken seriously and his testimony given credence, yet Briggs’s testimony in Rhode Island was not.

But maritime life was not an unalloyed positive experience for maritime fugitives. As noted above, women, elderly, children, and most disabled individuals were not able to flee via the sea. Moreover, it was far more likely that those with maritime experience, be they enslaved seaman or workers in one of the maritime trades, could obtain berths than those who were farmhands. Thus, maritime flight in Rhode Island was not only gendered, but also shaped by where one lived.

Residing in the middle of Narragansett Bay resulted in Briggs’s involvement in the Gaspee Affair and made his subsequent flight to the Beaver and eventual freedom possible.

For men who were able to obtain a berth on a Royal Navy vessel, a naval career may have been possible, but as the lives of Anderson and Wheeler demonstrate, upward advancement was limited. Becoming an able-bodied seaman was possible, but Blacks becoming officers was rare. During the eighteenth century, only one, John Perkins, served as a commanding officer. Moreover, through the end of the American Revolution, Blacks also were conspicuously absent among the seamen who received pension benefits.45 Many left behind family and friends only to end up destitute. A considerable portion of the Black poor on the streets of London in the post-American Revolution era were former seamen. Lacking family and personal connections, many of these men struggled to find work.46 Life at sea for Blacks also came with serious risks, far beyond the vagaries that all seamen experienced. Maritime fugitives entered a world in which many whites, despite working beside them, still saw them as lesser. In the first half of the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for sea officers to own and bring enslaved men onto ships, despite Admiralty orders barring the employment of slaves on its vessels. North American colonists hired their slaves onto naval ships. Sea

22 v The Bridge

officers were known to return runaways to their masters, and some sea officers on the North American station had experience putting down slave revolts in the Caribbean.47 Thus, entering a naval ship, as did seeking a berth on any vessel, involved runaways calculating whether they could trust the officers and crew.

The greatest danger to maritime fugitives and Black seamen was that they were subject to being treated as property.

This was not merely that a ship captain, such as Brattle, might abuse a Black. As Anderson’s story makes clear, free Black seamen and maritime fugitives often found themselves enslaved upon being captured by enemy vessels. In the eighteenth century, Great Britain, France, Spain, and the United States at various times, treated captured Black mariners as cargo that could be sold to the highest bidder. As a result, when fugitives obtained a berth, they entered what I have termed the “Anxious Atlantic,” a maritime realm in which their seafaring skills might be prized, but their blackness left them vulnerable, as Anderson was, to being treated as property.48 It was a place in which a lost or a misplaced freedom certificate could be the difference between freedom and enslavement.

Movement in the Atlantic from 1772 to 1783 also was restricted for Blacks from the Americas as European nations attempted to grapple with the tension of having established colonies based on enslaved labor while remaining determined to keep their metropolis societies free of enslavement. In some European nations, licensing regimes were enacted to limit movement of enslaved peoples into the metropolis. These legal measures, commonly referred to as the Free Soil Doctrine, required American colonists to be strategic in how they employed enslaved peoples on their ships.49 Prior to the American Revolution, few Blacks served on ships sailing to Europe from Rhode Island. This appears to have been a strategic choice by Rhode Island slave owners seeking to avoid their enslaved seamen obtaining, as had Draper, freedom in nations that recognized their humanity in ways that legal systems in the Americas did not.50 Yet notwithstanding these difficulties, thousands of enslaved peoples fled via the sea in the eighteenth century.

Hundreds of them went onto Royal Navy ships. For Bristol Rogers, Quashie Ferguson, Pompey Topham, and the other Black maritime fugitives who came aboard the Rose, life at sea was not perfect and surely carried considerable risks. In a world in which slavery was legal in most of the Atlantic basin, North

American maritime fugitives’ choices as to whom they served typically was a strategic choice based on which ship and nation would provide them the best opportunity for permanent freedom. Although many Rhode Island Blacks would, after 1778, choose to enlist in American forces and become free pursuant to the 1778 Slave Enlistment Act, in the years between the Gaspee Affair and the British evacuating Newport near the end of 1779, service on Royal Navy ships was the avenue to freedom that many enslaved peoples chose.51 For Ferguson and dozens of other Rhode Island maritime fugitives, the flames that Briggs saw shooting from the Gaspee in June

1772 represented not a blow against tyranny but rather a light indicating a pathway to freedom. But unlike white Rhode Islanders, these men experienced freedom not in the Ocean State but on the decks of enemy vessels.

Thus, when Rhode Islanders consider the nature of freedom won in the American Revolution, for which the burning of the Gaspee was the first blow for freedom, they need to construct a narrative that acknowledges that some Rhode Islanders, enslaved and indentured Blacks, had to leave the state to obtain their freedom.

Endnotes 1

Christopher L. Pastore, Between Land and Sea: The Atlantic Coast and the Transformation of New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 177; W. R. Leslie, “The Gaspee Affair: A Study of Its Constitutional Significance,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review (1952), 233.

2

Peter C. Messer, “A Most Insulting Violation: The Burning of the HMS Gaspee and the Delaying of the American Revolution,” New England Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2015): 582–622; Steven H. Park, “The Burning of HMS Gaspee and the Limits of Eighteenth-Century British Imperial Power” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2005).

3

“Blacks” refers to persons of African ancestry, including mixed-race people.

“Maritime fugitives” are Black bondsmen who fled via the sea or whose owners believed they had so fled. My Black Mariner Database (“BMD”) contains references to almost 9,000 maritime fugitives from throughout the Atlantic. The BMD undercounts maritime fugitives. For example, runaways for whom records do not indicate they fled via the sea, but headed to ports where maritime flight was possible, are not included.

The BMD contains fifty-one fields of data on each of the more than 43,000 Black mariners and maritime fugitives. It includes references from ship musters, court records, fugitive and slave sale advertisements, newspaper dispatches, merchant records, and governmental records providing “information we need to assess the typicality” of Black life in the Atlantic. Geoffrey Plank, “Sailing with John Woolman: The Millenium and Maritime Trade,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal (“EAS”), 7, no.1 (Spring 2009): 51n15.

4

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 369.

5

John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 71.

6

Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport, Rhode Island in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1985), 82–3.

7

Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 67. After 1772, emancipation in Rhode Island accelerated due to Quaker manumissions, freedom granted slaves who fought for American forces, and, in 1784, the Gradual Abolition Act. Christy Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 62.

8

Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (New York: Verso, 2018).

Similar maritime connections existed among St. Croix enslaved peoples in the nineteenth century. Lomarsh Roopnarine, “Maroon Resistance and Settlement on Danish St. Croix,” Journal of the Third World Studies 27, no. 2 (Fall 2010), 99–102.

9

N. A. T. Hall, “Maritime Maroons: Grand Marronage from the Danish West Indies,” William and Mary Quarterly, 77:4 (Oct. 1985): 481–82; Linda M. Rupert, “Marronage, Manumission and Maritime Trade in the Early Modern Caribbean.”

Slavery and Abolition 30, no. 3 (Sept. 2009), 361–382; Justin Pope, “Dangerous Spirit of Liberty: Slave Rebellion, Conspiracy and the First Great Awakening, 1729–1746,” PhD diss., George Washington University, 2014; Clarence Maxwell, “Enslaved Merchants, Enslaved Merchant-Mariners, and the Bermuda Conspiracy of 1761,” Early American Studies, 7, no. 1 (Spring 2009), 147–151.

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 v 23

10

evin Dawson, “A Sea of Caribbean Islands; Maritime Maroons in the Greater Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 3 K (Aug. 2021): 428–444; Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 173, 240.

11

Crane, Dependent People, 35.

12

Mar. 1766 portage bill for the brig Sally, B. 707 F. 7, Brown Family Business Papers (Nicholas Brown & Co.), John Carter Brown Library; Aaron Lopez Papers, Box 2, Folder 1 and Box 1, Folder 13, Center for Jewish History; 29 May 1747 Bill of Sale, Vol. 11, 98, Rhode Island Historical Society Manuscripts, Mss 9003, RIHS; Charles R. Foy, “Black Hands, White Profits: The Critical Role Black Laborers Played in Rhode Island’s Maritime Economy, 1750–1800,” in Peter Benes, ed., New England at Sea: Maritime Memory and Material Culture, (Deerfield, MA: Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 2019), 129–33.

13

Newport Mercury, May 11, 1772.

14

ichael R. Derderian, “This Licentious Republic: Maritime Skirmishes in Narragansett Bay, 1763–1769,” Journal of the American M Revolution, Oct. 2, 2017; Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William & Mary Quarterly 25, No. 3 (Jul. 1968), 388; Sarah Kinkel, “The King’s Pirates? Naval Enforcement of Imperial Authority, 1740–76,” William & Mary Quarterly 71, no. 1 (Jan. 2014), 3–34.

15

Providence Gazette and Country Journal, June 27, 1772.

16

illiam R. Staples, The Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee (Providence, RI: Knowles, Vose and Anthony, W 1845), 18, 33.

17

Newport Mercury, June 15, 1772.

18

The exact date Briggs entered the Beaver cannot be determined as there is no reference to Briggs in either the Beaver’s log or muster. HMS Beaver, Captain’s Log, 1771–72, TNA ADM 51/3781; HMS Beaver, Muster, 1772, TNA ADM 36/7330. Briggs says it was “some time” after the burning of the Gaspee. Given naval officials forwarded Briggs’s initial statement to Wanton on July 8, it appears Briggs entered the Beaver in early July. Staples, Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee, 17, 34.

19

HMS Stag, Musters, 1758–1759, TNA ADM 36/6755.

20

Staples, Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee, 34. The Beaver’s captain may have been willing to use force to compel Briggs to testify, kept Briggs in irons, and said he was going to “flog him.” But there is no evidence Captain John Linzee threatened to hang Briggs. Staples, Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee, 34, 54. There also can be no doubt that Rhode Island authorities were unwilling to consider that Briggs was telling the truth and instead sought to undermine the credibility of his statements.

21

Rory Raven, Burning the Gaspee: Revolution in Rhode Island (Indianapolis: History Press, 2012), Chap. 6. Unlike for other indentured maritime fugitives, there is no evidence Briggs claimed his indenture had expired. Elena A. Schneider, “A Narrative of Escape: Self Liberation by Sea and the Mental Worlds of the Enslaved,” Slavery & Abolition 42, no. 3 (Aug. 2021), 485.

22

B oston Weekly News-Letter, June 22, 1758. During the Revolution, Esek Hopkins, the commander of the Continental navy, and other Rhode Islanders continued to enrich themselves by the capture and sale of Black sailors. Foy, “Black Hands, White Profits,” 134–135.

23

HMS Captain Musters, 1772–73, TNA ADM 36/7345.

24

HMS Captain Musters, 1772–74, TNA ADM 36/7345–46. Record keeping on the origins of Blacks in eighteenth century England is incomplete. Kathleen Chater’s extensive database of British Blacks has place-of-origin data for only 24 percent of the entries.

Kathleen Chater, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales during the Period of the British Slave Trade, 1660–1807 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2009), 31. Those conducting searches of English records for details of migrating American Black seamen often come up empty. Foy, “ ‘Unkle Somerset’s’ Freedom,” 30–31.

25

he commission investigating the affair believed “illegal threats from Capt. Linzee of hanging” Briggs made his statements T worthless. Staples, Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee, 34, 54.

26

ohn Russell-Bartlett, trans., Records of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, vol. 4, 1707–1740 J (Providence, RI: Knowles, Anthony & Co., 1859), 179–80; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 95; Boston News-Letter, May 24, 1714; New England Weekly Journal, May 3, 1731; New-York Mercury, March 21, 1763; New-York Mercury, Nov. 24, 1764; Providence Gazette & Country Journal, Oct. 27, 1770.

27

W. Jeffrey Bolster, “ ‘To feel like a man’: Black Seamen in the Northern States, 1800–1860,” Journal of American History 76 (1990), 1179.

24 v The Bridge

28

Charles R. Foy, “Using Data to Understand Maritime Flight in the Chesapeake During the American Revolution,” in Debra Reid, ed., Interpreting the Environment at Museums and Historic Sites, (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019): 82–84; Charles R. Foy, “Possibilities & Limits for Freedom: Maritime Fugitives in British North America, ca. 1713–1783,” in Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Power in Maritime America (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport, 2008): 43–54; Charles R. Foy, “Seeking Freedom in the Atlantic World, 1713–1783,” EAS 4:1 (Spring 2006), 46–77; Schneider, “A Narrative of Escape,” 484–501; N. A. T. Hall, “Maritime Maroons: Grand Maroonage from the Danish West Indies,” William & Mary Quarterly 42, no. 4 (Oct. 1985): 476–98.

29

Boston Post-Boy, July 19, 1742; Boston News-Letter, Feb. 10, 1743;

30

Clark-Pujara, Dark Work, 46; Janet McDonald, Feeding Nelson’s Navy: The Story of Food at Sea in the Georgian Era (London: Chatham, 2004), 16–38.

31

eter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the P Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 27–28.

32

Charles R. Foy, “Britain’s Black Tars” in Gretchen Gerzina, ed., Britain’s Black Past (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 80.

33

Providence Gazette, July 25, 1772; Newport Mercury, August 31, 1772.

34

ennsylvania Gazette, April 26, 1775; Newport Mercury, Sept. 28, 1772; Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon), Sept. 30, 1773; P Virginia Gazette (Rind), June 30, 1774.

35

S outh Carolina Gazette, Dec. 31, 1763; Connecticut Courant, July 27, 1784; New-York Post-Boy, July 25 and Aug. 8, 1743; Boston Evening-Post, March 15, 1756. See also Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling, Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1870 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

Rather than attempt to flee via the sea, Black women in the Americas more frequently fled enslavement by peddling at markets.

Shauna J. Sweeney, “Market Marronage: Fugitive Women and the Internal Marketing System in Jamaica, 1781–1834.”

William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 76, no. 2 (April 2019): 197–222.

36

HMS Brune Musters, 1777, TNA ADM 36/7756; Pybus, “Jefferson’s Faulty Math,” 249.

37

A detailed overview of Anderson’s life is set forth in Foy, “Britain’s Black Tars,” 63–64.

38

Charles R. Foy, “Eighteenth Century Prize Negroes: From Britain to America,” Slavery & Abolition 31:3 (Sept. 2010): 379–393.

39

Old Bailey Online, http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17840421-17-defend288&div=t17840421-17#highlight (accessed March 12, 2022).

40

HMS Rose Musters, 1775–1777, TNA ADM 36/7947–50; NDAR 2:23.

41

W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz believed that Benjamin went to Nova Scotia at the end of the American Revolution. W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz, “Atlantic Revolutions: Slavery and Freedom in Newport, Rhode Island and Halifax, Nova Scotia in the Era of the American Revolution,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1999, 1. As his own letter notes, Benjamin refused to go to Nova Scotia feeling he “belonged to” Samuel Freebody, whom he hoped would free him.

42

Benjamin Freebody’s letters and documents from the court proceeding between Samuel Freebody and Captain James Brattle are filed in Mss 9003, Vol. 16, p. 97–103, Rhode Island Historical Society, Newport, Rhode Island (RIHS). Thanks to Philip D. Morgan for providing copies of these records.

43

The case of the Lawrence seamen is discussed in detail in Foy, “ ‘Unkle Somerset’s’ Freedom,” 21–36.

44

Newport Mercury, July 3, 1782.

45

Charles R. Foy, “The Royal Navy’s Employment of Black Mariners and Maritime Workers, 1754–1783,” International Journal of Maritime History, 28, no. 1 (Feb. 2016), 13–17; Douglas Hamilton, “ ‘A most active, enterprising officer’: Captain John Perkins, the Royal Navy and the boundaries of slavery and liberty in the Caribbean,” Slavery & Abolition, 39, no. 1 (2018): 1–21.

46

Foy, “ ‘Unkle Somerset’s’ Freedom,” 30.

47

Chater, Untold Histories, 235; Brown, Tacky’s Revolt, 165.

48

Foy, “Eighteenth Century French Atlantic Black Seamen,” Lumières 35 (Spring 2021), 31–33; Foy, “Britain’s Black Tars” in Gerzina, ed., Britain’s Black Past, 68–71; Foy, “Eighteenth-Century Prize Negroes,” 382-–88.

49

Sue Peabody and Keila Grinberg, “Free Soil: The Generation and Circulation of an Atlantic Legal Principle,” Slavery & Abolition 32, no. 3 (Sept. 2011): 331–339.

50

Foy, “Black Hands, White Profits,” 132.

51

The Slave Enlistment Act clearly altered enslaved peoples’ views as to how to achieve freedom. While in 1777 there were twenty-eight known Rhode Island maritime fugitives, in 1778 there were only two.

The Gaspee Affair and Maritime Fugitives in the Anglo–American Atlantic, 1772–1783 v 25

Fourth of July flag (1826), RIHS COLLECTIONS AN 1826.2.1, RHI X17317.

26 v The Bridge

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay David Stuart David Stuart was Australia’s Ambassador in Vienna from August 2012 until October 2016.

His diplomatic career included postings to the United Nations in New York and in Washington, Jakarta, and Madrid. He was a senior representative in UN, IAEA and other discussions on nuclear disarmament, proliferation threats and nuclear safety and security. Now retired, Stuart is researching Australian colonial history. In 2019, he presented papers on “The First US Pivot to the Pacific: American Maritime Contact with the Australian Colonies, 1788–1818” at the Australian Historical Association Conference and “The American Presence in Hobart Town” at the Hobart Whaling Conference, and has since published on American trade with the colonies in History Compass.

Introduction

q

During the Fourth of July celebrations held in Providence, Rhode Island in 1826, the commemoration of the Gaspee Affair focused on the four surviving “captors.” Their names featured on the Fourth of July banner that depicted the burning of the Gaspee: E. Bowen, T. Smith, J. Mawney, and B. Page.

Ephraim Bowen’s firsthand account recorded that Benjamin Page, who had just turned 19, was in the group that met at the Sabin tavern on the evening of the incident and was one of his “youthful companions” who boarded the Gaspee when it ran aground off Namquid Point.1 It stands to reason that Page was one of the Gaspee raiders. Its instigator, the Providence merchant John Brown, was directly connected to the Page family as Brown’s wife, Sarah, was the sister of Benjamin’s mother. The Whipple and Page families were close, so Benjamin Page would have already known Abraham Whipple when he approached the Gaspee in the early hours of June 10, 1772 and, announcing himself as the “sheriff of Kent County,” demanded that its captain surrender.2 Benjamin and his father can be confidently placed in the ranks of the Rhode Island traders disaffected by the imperial customs regulations and resentful of the heavy-handed methods of Lt. William Dudingston, master of the Gaspee, the British navy’s cutter assigned to enforce the revenue laws in Narragansett Bay.3

The Gaspee Affair can be seen from many dimensions: this article explores how it contributed to the emergence of American maritime commerce as a distinct offshoot of global capitalism by the early nineteenth century. The period between 1760 and 1810 was significant in many respects, notably for the extension of European imperialism into the furthest corners of the globe, including the southern Pacific and Indian Oceans. It also marked a major shift in international trade, whereby Britain’s North American colonies were transformed from an adjunct to the home country’s economy into Britain’s major maritime competitor.4 It is scarcely remarkable to observe that the Gaspee Affair was a step on the path leading to the Revolutionary War. More surprising, however, is how it contributed to Rhode Island’s part in America’s post–colonial emergence as a major maritime trading power. The incident itself, and the way the subsequent Royal Commission of Inquiry was frustrated, reflected and, I contend, reinforced the tight community of merchants and mariners who later became protagonists in America’s postcolonial transformation into a global maritime trading power.

The article argues that the Providence traders and mariners who attacked the Gaspee, in some cases the same individuals but more broadly the economic interests they personified, were to become the “merchant adventurers” who played the leading role in developing a distinct branch of the The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay

v 27

US-China trade using the Eastern Passage to stage through the British penal colony of New South Wales (NSW).

The context for this engagement with Port Jackson in the period before the War of 1812 is the evolution of global capitalism in this period, including as a factor in the colony’s precocious integration into the Pacific economy.5 The article’s explication of Providence’s “Sydney trade,” drawing on both Australian colonial records and the remarkable business and customs archives in the Rhode Island Historical Society and the John Carter Brown Library, adds to our understanding of the cultural and commercial drivers of the Young Republic’s remarkable maritime projection into the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Focusing on the role played by two of the Gaspee raiders, we can better understand the influence of local factors, in particular a business culture built on shared economic and family bonds, and a commercial tradition, notably for John Brown and many other Rhode Island merchants founded in the Atlantic slave trade, which, given the prospect of substantial profit, had engendered a high propensity for risk and trading beyond the boundaries of regulations and jurisdictions.

British Mercantilism, Colonial Trade Interests and the Gaspee Affair: “I know that government and people to be the most piraticall in the King’s dominions” — Earl of Bellemont, Governor of New England, on Rhode Island in 1699 6 The Gaspee Affair features in the history of rising tensions over tax and trade restrictions that fomented the revolutionary struggle. It also was, however, decidedly the result of factors specific to the experience of the colony of Rhode Island. The trigger for the attack on the Gaspee was the direct threat to the colonists’ long-established trade, licit and otherwise, from intensified customs patrols, including cargoes seized and vessels detained, following Dudingston’s arrival in Narragansett Bay in February 1772. More fundamentally, however, the incident was the expression of mounting frustration in the preceding decade at the increasingly aggressive imposition of duties and other constraints on trade that, in the colonists’ view, qualified their rights under Rhode Island’s 1663 Royal Charter to govern their own internal affairs, including commerce. To appreciate the extent to which this was, in essence, a struggle to assert economic interests and understand more fully the business culture that underpinned Providence’s postwar 28 v The Bridge

success in maritime trade, the following reviews the historical background to the Gaspee Affair. John Brown’s resistance to the imperial policies that stood to suppress or curtail the molasses trade is a recurrent theme in this period.

The British authorities had long regarded Rhode Island as a particular problem for smuggling and illicit trade conducted by the colonists. This may have stemmed in part from the colony’s origins and the independent character of the settlers there, who, among the Atlantic littoral colonies, relied most extensively on the ocean for their livelihoods. Certainly, the nature of Narragansett Bay, with numerous inlets, islands, and estuaries and its commercially strategic location, connecting New England to the Eastern Seaboard’s relatively protected sea routes and allowing ready access to the Caribbean, meant that the colony had a strong maritime orientation—and a vocation for smuggling.

British taxes on colonial trade provided inducements and opportunities to deal in contraband and to find profitable ways to trade on the fringe of, if not outside, the law. From the 1733 Molasses Act, which levied a sixpence-per-gallon duty on imported molasses from non-British sources, those in the Caribbean trade found ways of avoiding British imposts, which they regarded as discriminating in favor of plantation owners in the British West Indies. Similarly, the Board of Trade’s ruling that all tobacco grown in the American colonies be sent directly to Britain was widely disregarded by the Rhode Island merchants exporting tobacco grown in Rhode Island or Connecticut.

For much of the eighteenth century, irritation with such taxes and restrictions was contained, in part because enforcement was generally limited and inconsistent but mostly because they did not impede the growth of Rhode Island’s maritime trade. In contrast to much of the colonial economy, the maritime sector, concentrated in the New England seaports and the ports of Philadelphia and New York, was integrated into the vibrant Atlantic economy that developed in the second half of the eighteenth century. Following the Seven Years’ War, the Royal Navy dominated the North Atlantic, which provided protection for enterprising colonials expanding their business range from ports such as Philadelphia, Boston, Salem, and Providence. American merchants carried cargoes for British interests and supplied many of the needs of the British West Indies.7 A feature of this Atlantic integration was that the North American British colonies profited from the slave trade from

West Africa, most notoriously through the “triangle trade.”

After the English Royal African Company’s monopoly ended in 1696, the opportunity to join the “Africa trade” opened to smaller merchants in the colonies. Rum was the key to the Americans’ involvement.8 Guns, gold, and spirits were the commodities on which slave traders depended to fill their vessels with their grim human cargo. By the 1720s, rum had eclipsed brandy as the preferred “tradeable” and became a commodity of exchange in the broader West African economy.9 The Browns were the first Providence merchants to join the triangle trade. In 1736, James Brown sent his sloop Mary, with his brother Obadiah on board to oversee trade, with a cargo of rum, hoping to realize a tenfold return on his outlay. Despite finding “a poor market” for the transported captives in the Caribbean, the Mary returned to Providence with a profitable cargo.10 Over the next thirty years, James Brown’s four sons developed a thriving family business specializing in exporting commodities and some goods, such as spermaceti candles, and importing molasses.11 During the Seven Years’ War, they had profited from trading under “flags of truce” with neutral and enemy ports, such as Monte Christo on northern Hispaniola, often returning with molasses and other contraband cargoes.

This approach came at a risk, with some of their vessels seized by the Royal Navy for engaging in “clandestine and prohibited trade.” The Browns owned or had a major interest in more than 80 vessels actively engaged in trading along the Eastern Seaboard by the mid-1760s, across the Atlantic and in the Caribbean, including with the French West Indies ports, Suriname, and the Dutch entrepot port of Saint Eulalia.12 In the period after 1763, Rhode Island consolidated its leading role among the Atlantic colonies in the slave trade.

Around two-thirds of the human cargo carried by Americans on the Middle Passage sailed from Newport. The city grew wealthy from the resulting stimulus for its maritime business and associated trades and industries.13 Rhode Island’s role was only made possible, however, by its molasses imports from the slave plantations of the West Indies and Suriname. Distilleries proliferated, with twenty-two in the colony by 1772.14 Analyzing slavery’s role in colonial Rhode Island, Christy Clark-Pujara highlights that trade and political power “went hand-in-hand.” Some early governors supported, or were themselves active in, the slave trade. By the 1760s, many leading families such as the Jenckeses, Hopkinses, and

Wantons had invested in slaving ventures or even owned vessels in the trade.15 The Hopkinses had close ties with the Browns through marriage and business.16 In 1763, when John Brown mounted his first Africa venture using the sloop Sally, Joseph Wanton (subsequently Rhode Island governor during the Gaspee Affair) pressed his son’s qualifications as captain. Brown preferred Esek Hopkins, brother of Stephen Hopkins, who had been elected to his third term as governor in 1762. Captain Hopkins was given broad discretion to transact business during the voyage.17 More than half the 196 captive Africans died during the transatlantic crossing, some slaughtered to quell an onboard revolt. Hopkins sold the much-weakened survivors in the Antigua slave market at low prices.18 The experience seemed to discourage the Browns from direct participation in the Africa trade.19 While their subsequent direct involvement in the slave trade was relatively slight, importing sugar and molasses from the West India slave societies and supplying provisions and other goods that supported slavery represented the core of their business in the decades up to the 1790s.20 The slave trade conducted out of colonial Rhode Island had several features that influenced how its maritime trade would develop after the Revolution. One was merchants’ propensity for high-risk ventures that promised high returns; their ruthless human trafficking “needed less time to garner returns than all other forms of possible investment in the eighteenth century.”21 To limit potential losses, many owners used smaller vessels for their African voyages, and, while relying on rum as their trading staple, also loaded tobacco and readily sold provisions such as flour, coffee, rice, and onions to enhance their bartering options. Owners also typically gave their ships’ captains and supercargoes considerable discretion on commercial decisions once in the slave ports.

As these voyages typically were protracted with long delays in transmitting letters back to the American Atlantic coast, merchants usually knew little about the success of their ventures until they reached the Caribbean from Africa. This arm’s-length relationship, at least during the voyages to Africa and on the Middle Passage, demanded commercial patience.

It also afforded owners a certain distance from their captains’ legal transgressions and a convenient ignorance of the brutal treatment intrinsic to the slave trade. Many of the elements of this mode of trade were to be replicated in the pattern of trade through the penal colony in Port Jackson in the 1790s.

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The dynamics of transatlantic relations changed in the 1760s as governments under George Grenville and William Pitt the Elder sought to increase revenue from the colonies.

In 1763, the Royal Navy deployed twenty-seven Men-of-War off the American coast to enforce the Molasses Act. 22 With His Majesty’s vessel Beaver anchoring off Newport Harbor in December 1763 as a visible expression of this more aggressive presence, several concerned Rhode Island merchants, including John and Nicholas Brown, worked through the winter of 1763–64 to produce An Essay on the Trade of the Northern Colonies with the support of the colony’s governor, Stephen Hopkins. This conciliatory appeal to respect the colonists’ legitimate interests in trade became a step toward the more politically charged Remonstrance addressed to the British Lords of Trade in January 1764.

The 1764 Rhode Island Remonstrance insisted that, as British subjects and under the 1663 charter, the colonists in Rhode Island were entitled to the liberties and freedoms enjoyed by the king’s subjects in England, including to consent to taxes imposed on them. It emphasized that the Colony of Rhode Island relied greatly on importing molasses, both for the colonial market and to distill rum for export, including for the slave trade, and acknowledged that more than 80 percent of the molasses was imported from non-British colonies. It challenged London to accept that the interests of colonists and Britain were served by this trade as enforcing the punitive tax on molasses sourced from non-British colonies would undermine Rhode Island’s ability to import British goods.

In short, the 1764 Remonstrance was a considered rejection of a tenet of imperial policy—that Britain would dictate the terms of commerce in, and with, its colonies, and was to be the principal beneficiary of the gains thereof.23 The Rhode Island remonstrations stoked preRevolutionary disaffection, helping “equip an arsenal of ideas with which to justify the stiffest of resistance to the navy.”24 They had little impact in London. The new Sugar Act, passed in April 1764, which targeted imports from non-British colonies for stricter enforcement, soon was followed by the 1765 Stamp Act and the 1767 Townshend Acts, reflecting a continuing disdain for colonial objections to direct revenue duties.25 The British government, concerned that the East India Company’s profitability was in jeopardy as the Dutch and others challenged its dominance of tea imports to Europe, thought to boost the company’s revenue through an effective

30 v The Bridge

monopoly on supplying tea to the North American colonies, which further agitated popular sentiment and alienated the colonial merchants who profited from illicit imports.26 In Rhode Island, the climate of resentment toward imperial policies that marginalized colonists’ economic interests and qualified their civil rights was trending toward hostility by the beginning of 1772. While Rhode Island joined several other colonies in resolving to accept no East Indies tea, for many Narragansett Bay merchants and distillers, the more acute concern was the tougher British approach to enforcing duties on molasses and spirits. This was made manifest in the Gaspee’s arrival in Newport in February 1772 with orders from the British fleet commander in Boston, Admiral James Montagu, “to prevent breaches of the revenue laws and to stop the illicit trade so long and successfully carried out in the colony.”27 Dudingston’s aggressive approach directly confronted local interests. Reinforced by the Beaver, he extended patrols into the northern reaches of Narragansett Bay, into the inlets and estuaries that had long proved a haven for smuggling.

After the sloop Fortune and its cargo of West Indian rum and sugar, owned by the respected Greene family, were seized and its captain, Rufus Greene, manhandled, Dudingston became the target of public outrage. 28 In March, nine Providence merchants, with John Brown clearly the prime motivator, lodged a petition with the colony’s deputy governor complaining about the Gaspee’s operations. Stephen Hopkins, at this stage the colony’s senior judge, drew on Rhode Island’s charter to conclude that the commander of any vessel operating in the colony could not exercise any authority without previous application to the Governor and being formally sworn into office. On this advice, Governor Wanton wrote to Dudingston informing him of the merchants’ complaints of his “having, in a most illegal and unwarrantable manner, interrupted their trade” and asked that Dudingston present his official orders.

While Wanton’s assertion of colonial authority was bluntly rejected by Montagu, his unflinching stance was to provide a skein of legitimacy for those disposed to defy Dudingston.29 John Brown’s role in the Gaspee Affair is best understood against his opposition, over almost a decade, to British duties and restrictions on trade that threatened the Browns’ molasses trade. The common thread to his role in the 1764 resistance and the March 1772 petition was concern for his business interests and his determined defense of a form of government in Rhode Island that allowed him to adjust and expand his

Stephen Hopkins, The Grievances of the American Colonies Candidly Examined

(London, 1766). RIHS COLLECTIONS, RHI X174524.

“Putting an end to the importation of foreign molasses, at the same time puts an end to all the costly distilleries in these colonies, and to the rum trade with the coast of Africa; and throws it into the Hands of the French.”

“There hath been imported into the colony of Rhode Island only, about one million one hundred and fifty thousand gallons, annually [of molasses]; the duty on this quantity is fourteen thousand three hundred and seventy five pounds Sterling, to be paid yearly by this little colony … This money is to be sent away, and never return; yet the payment is to be repeated every year. – Can this profitably be done? Can a new colony, compelled by necessity to purchase all its cloathing, furniture, and utensils from England, to support the expences of its own internal government, obliged by its duty to comply with every call from the crown to raise money on emergencies; … charging foreign molasses with this high duty, will not affect all the colonies equally, nor any other near so much as this of RI, whose trade depended much more on foreign molasses, and on distilleries, than that of any others.”

“By supporting, on one hand, the foreign molasses trade is stopped, and with it the opportunity of the colonies to get money; or, one the other, that this trade is continued, and that the colonies get money by it, but all their money is taken from them by paying their duty; can Britain be a gainer by either? Is it not the chief interest of Britain to dispose of, and be paid for her own manufactures? … Will she find an advantage in disabling the colonies to continue their trade with her? Or can she possibly grow rich by their being made poor?”

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maritime commerce as opportunities emerged. In this, he was a steadfast advocate for self-interest and a representative voice for the community of merchants in Providence that had emerged by 1772.

A striking feature of the Gaspee Affair was that the raid was not the spontaneous action of a rabble, or even a stagemanaged riot of rum-filled seamen egged on by older heads, but a calculated attack in which several respected denizens of Providence and its surrounds played a prominent role.30 The raiders included a broadly representative group of the leading business families and senior mariners of the day: not only John and Joseph Brown but also Abe Whipple and members of the Hopkins, Smith, Jenckes, Olney, Greene, Tillinghast, Allen, Bowen, and Bucklin families. They were mainly, perhaps exclusively, from the seafaring class—traders, mariners, or in vocations depending on the colony’s maritime trade.31 Steven Park has described how the Rhode Island community, with the adroit assistance of officials and magistrates from the governor down, managed the Royal Commission of Inquiry to frustrate its purpose of identifying the perpetrators and bringing the ringleaders to England for prosecution. This only was possible, however, because of the silence observed by all of the raid’s participants after the Gaspee had been destroyed, a discipline that reflected a tight-knit community in which loyalty and shared economic interests were strong enough to rebuff threats and inducements.32

John Brown, Benjamin Page, and the China Trade The underlying factors for the Providence maritime community’s solidarity and cohesion and the relationships forged or strengthened through the Gaspee Affair can be observed during the Revolutionary War and in the challenging years after independence. One element, common to New England ports in this era, was the degree to which intermarriage and family connections consolidated business partnerships.33 Another was the extent to which sons followed their fathers’ profession, including as traders and sea captains.

We can see these ties in the long association of John Brown and his nephew Benjamin Page. Benjamin was born in March 1753 to Ambrose Page and Alice Smith, both from longstanding Rhode Island families established in the maritime trade.34 Ambrose was a sea captain who owned land in North Providence and a member of the Rhode Island Assembly.

32 v The Bridge

He had an interest in seven vessels engaged in the coastal trade, in partnership with other traders including Nicholas Brown and James Lovett (both of whom, like Ambrose, signed the March 1772 Gaspee petition).35 As a Quaker, Ambrose appears not to have been a party to John Brown’s ventures into slaving, and there is no evidence suggesting Benjamin was directly engaged in Brown’s Africa trade.36 Before the Revolutionary War, Benjamin Page appears to have made trading voyages to the British West Indies and Suriname and became co-owner of at least one of his father’s vessels. In October 1774, sources in Amsterdam informed the British government that the Smack, which had left Providence in August under a Captain Benjamin Page without the required British approval, was loading a cargo of 40 small cannons, firearms, and gunpowder. The evidence suggests the captain was Benjamin, son of Ambrose. Despite British measures to interdict transatlantic gunrunning, arms smuggling to Rhode Island and other colonies intensified from this time. While the Smack’s expedition appears to precede the Browns’ involvement in this trade, its backers may well have been Gaspee colleagues.37 Page’s Gaspee associations came to the fore during the Revolutionary War.38 Page, given a commission in Rhode Island’s navy in August 1775, became a lieutenant in the US Navy in October 1776. He served under Commodore Abraham Whipple on several occasions, notably when the Providence broke through the blockade of Narragansett Bay in April 1778 taking official dispatches on the proposed treaty with France to Nantes and in May 1780 when the small Continental Navy fleet was destroyed at Cooper River attempting to relieve Charleston, and on the Warren under another Gaspee raider, Captain John B. Hopkins. Page was a prisoner of war at least twice, after Penobscott and later in South Carolina, but he was released, probably through prisoner exchanges, and returned to the conflict in the western Atlantic. In September 1782, he was given command of a 20-gun sloop, the Regulator.39 John Brown emerged from the war with his standing as a political and business leader in Rhode Island enhanced. He and Nicholas had profited from privateering and supplying cannons from the Hope Furnace to the Rhode Island and Continental Navies. As early as 1783, John Brown engaged Benjamin Page as master of his eighty-ton brig, the Providence. Page was recorded as ship’s master for trading voyages to Jamaica, Martinique, Amsterdam, and Saint Petersburg in the following years.40

Portrait of John Brown (1736-1803), 1794, by Edward Greene Malbone (1777-1807). Watercolor on ivory.

Overall: 3 3/16 x 2 1/2 inches. Purchase, The Louis Durr and Arthur Jones Funds. NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY, 1948.469.

This was the period when Providence emerged as the major center for Rhode Island’s maritime trade, overtaking Newport as the major Narragansett Bay port by 1790. Providence also displaced Newport as the center for distilling rum and other spirits, with seventeen of the state’s twenty-eight distilleries located there by 1798. By 1802, its commercial fleet was the largest in Rhode Island.41 For the Browns, as with many other New England merchants in the postwar years, the economic downturn and dislocation of the “critical period” presented many challenges.

The protracted conflict had damaged much of the colonial maritime sector, disrupting once profitable forms of trade, notably with the British West Indies. This meant finding alternative markets and adapting their commerce away from the previous reliance on goods from their iron foundry and candle production. The margins for domestic sales of rum were squeezed by competition from grain-based spirits from Pennsylvania and elsewhere, exacerbated by the Whiskey Tax introduced by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in 1791.42 John and Nicholas Brown also faced substantial debts as a result of overextending on the credit offered to fund their British imports.

John Brown confronted these difficulties with characteristic enterprise and determination. Of his various initiatives, the most successful was to seize the opportunity for trade with the East Indies following Robert Morris’s 1784 venture with the Empress of China that opened the US-China trade. He was one of the first to recognize that, while the terms of peace in 1783 removed the benefits of trading in the Atlantic under Britain’s auspices, Americans also were no longer bound by restrictions on trade by British subjects, most notably the East India Company’s jealously guarded monopoly on all British trade with China.

Initially, most American merchants faced difficulties in obtaining silver coin, the means of exchange preferred by merchants in Canton. The lack of Chinese demand for almost all commodities that could be carried from American ports meant that many ventures depended on intermediate trade on the voyage to China to acquire coin, convertible bills accepted by the Chinese merchants, or goods that could be sold profitably in Canton, including furs, spices from the East Indies, cotton goods, and, particularly after 1820, opium from India. As sea-otter pelts became harder to acquire from America’s Pacific Northwest, many traders relied on fur

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sealskins from the southern oceans. Robert Hellyer has labeled this search for trade staples as a “silver-substitute century,” a useful framework for understanding the different models of trade that emerged from various American ports after 1790.

Brown organized the first ventures from Rhode Island to China, sending a 340-ton ship, the General Washington, a former privateer, through India to Canton three times between 1787 and 1793, trading mainly for tea.43 The results were

mixed, although the cargo landed in Providence in 1791 — valued at approximately $200,000 ($5.7 million in present value dollars) — would have encouraged Brown to persevere.44 As the table below shows, Page played a prominent part in Brown’s China trade. Page’s Pacific career tells us a good deal about the way Providence merchants managed to establish, at least in the decade after 1792, a lucrative new trade and about the subsequent success of Brown & Ives in the China trade.

Benjamin Page’s Voyages to India and China, 1789–99 Departed/ Arrived Providence 1789 – July 1791

Vessel Name/ Tons Burden Hope 208 tn.

Ship’s Master/ Supercargo Owner(s) B. Page Brown & Francis

Destination/ Other Ports

Sydney Trade/ Recorded Payments (British £)*

India

N/A

Ostend

Return Cargo

Estimated Value Of Return Cargo USD

From Ostend: coal 100,000 lbs. glassware

$35 Duties Assessed (no tariff on coal)

From India: muslin and cotton March 1792 – September 1793

Hope 208 tn.

February 1794 – June 1795

Halcyon 177 tn.

February 1796 – May 1797

July 1798 – June 1799

B. Page Brown & Francis

Canton Port Jackson, December 1792

Zenobia 296 tn.

Ann and Hope 455 tn.

B. Page/ Wm. Megee Clark & Nightingale, Megee, B. Page

Canton

B. Page Clark & Nightingale, J. Munro, B. Page

Canton

B. Page/S. Snow Brown & Ives

Canton

Port Jackson, July 1794

Botany Bay, October 1798

December 1792, Sold 54,000 lbs. salt meat, flour, 7,600 gallons of rum to colony Treasury bills for £2,957/6/6

From Canton: tea, (1,000 chests); brown sugar; silk, 1080 lbs.; nankeens, chinaware, lacquer, gum

$233,000

July 1794, Sold 154,400 lbs. salt meat; 5,000 gallons of rum, sugar, calicoe to colony Treasury bills for £4,391

From Canton: tea; 100,000 lbs. nankeens (1,000 bales); pepper; arrack; silk; lacquer; chinaware; jellies, candy

$96,400

N/A

From Canton: tea, 280,000 lbs.; silk, 50 boxes; nankeens, 250 bales; chinaware

c.$350,000

From Canton: tea, 520,000 lbs.; brown sugar; silk; candy; diverse China goods

$314,917

Stopped to rest and refresh, bartered for pilotage, minor repairs and fresh livestock

Brown & Francis assessed duties of $21,802

Clark and Nightingale assessed duties of $23,275

Total duties, $56,110

Total duties, $83,929; Owners assessed duties of $40,212

Sources: David Collins, Account of the English Colony 1804; Historical Records of Australia, Series 1, Volumes 1–3; Historical Records of New South Wales Vol. 2, 348–49; Pamela Statham, A Colonial Regiment, Appendix A: Paymasters Bill Series 1792–1820, 367–76, Appendix B: Treasury Bills Series, 1791–1810, 377–385; Rhode Island Historical Society US Custom House (Providence RI) Records 1789–1940, MSS28 SG 1 Series 4: Inward foreign manifests, Series 6: Imposts on merchandise imported into the district, Vol. 3. * Between 1792 and 1800, the exchange rate between the pound sterling and the US dollar fluctuated between $4.10 and $4.75 to the pound.

34 v The Bridge

Map from the Oriental Navigator (London: Robert Laurie and James Whittle, 1800). Pictured is the Eastern Passage route along the east coast of Australia/ New Holland. The Oriental Navigator was used by American China traders before Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator (1802). The log of the American ship the Alliance under Captain Thomas Read recorded that it passed Port Jackson only a few weeks before the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788, the earliest instance of an American vessel taking this route to trade in Canton.

COURTESY OF THE MITCHELL LIBRARY, STATE LIBRARY OF NSW.

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John Brown chose Benjamin Page to take charge of his first venture using a new route to Canton pioneered by Robert Morris’s Alliance in 1787.45 Leaving the South Atlantic to cross the Southern Ocean and follow Australia’s eastern coast before sailing into the South China Sea, the Eastern Passage ruled out using Indian ports or Batavia as intermediate ports for the China trade but avoided both the risks of piracy or seizure by European naval ships in the East Indies straits and, between May and October, the typhoon season. Port Jackson, from 1788 the site of a British penal colony, represented a convenient haven on the voyage to Canton, a safe Englishspeaking port for reprovisioning and repairs.

Silver-Substitution and British Bills of Treasury In November 1792, the first “neutral” vessel to trade in Port Jackson, Captain Thomas Patrickson’s Philadelphia, imported a substantial cargo of provisions.46 Only weeks later, a Brown & Francis brig, the Hope, arrived from the Falkland Islands with sealskins destined for Canton. Page declared that he had stopped for wood and water. However, his returns from trade with the colony’s commissary, paid in Treasury bills approved by the lieutenant governor and bills of payment from the “officer-traders” of the NSW Corps, exceeded £3,000 (then around $14,000, see table on page 34 for details).47 If Page was hedging about his intentions, it may have reflected some caution about how his visit, and his cargo, would be received in the British colony.48 Unlike Patrickson’s visit, which had been encouraged by Governor Phillip, there is nothing to suggest any overt invitation to trade.

Nevertheless, the possibility of opportunistic trade in Sydney likely influenced John Brown to use the Eastern Passage.

The Hope’s cargo of salt meat, flour, and what the governor’s secretary, David Collins, described as “7,597 gallons of raw American spirits,” seemed tailored for the colony. The markup (or “advance”) for rum was substantial.49 And Page would have been keen to sell his large cargo of spirits before arriving in Canton because of John Brown’s expectation that the brig’s storage for its return cargo be maximized.

The colony’s new lieutenant governor, Major Grose, was willing to pay handsomely to augment the commissary’s supplies. Grose also allowed the corps officers to buy liquor and tobacco directly from visiting vessels to sell within the colony, which he argued to London would boost the colonial

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economy.50 This accommodating approach opened the way for a mutually convenient commerce, sustained for more than a decade, between Providence traders who could use British Bills of Treasury as a favorable medium of exchange in Canton and the commissary and the NSW Corps, the only colonial entities able to pay in this form.51 On return to Providence in September 1793, the Hope’s cargo was valued at $233,000, one of John Brown’s most profitable China ventures.52 He quickly resolved to send the Hope on another venture through Port Jackson, although with a new master. Benjamin Page combined with the established firm of Clark & Nightingale and William Megee to fund a venture on the Halcyon. Despite leaving Providence well after the Hope, the Halcyon arrived in Sydney in mid-June, weeks ahead of Brown’s brig. David Collins wrote that Page “made his passage from Rhode Island in one hundred and fifteen days, and without touching any port,” suggesting that Page’s motive for such a rapid outward voyage was to beat his uncle to the marketplace.53 Page’s sales of provisions, textiles, and spirits to the Commissary and the NSW Corps in Sydney made a substantial input into returns from the Halcyon’s voyage.54 A further China venture on the Zenobia, under Page’s command and again backed by Clark and Nightingale, returned to Providence in May 1797 with an exceptional China cargo including more than 280,000 pounds of tea.55

Benjamin Page in the Service of Brown & Ives: “a voyage of serious consequences to us” After 1795, John Brown’s role in the China trade diminished, following his son-in-law and partner’s death. A further consideration was that Brown was the first US citizen prosecuted under the 1794 Slave Trade Act, which led to the Hope (a second vessel of this name, not the brig that visited Port Jackson) being confiscated in 1797.56 His nephew Nicholas Jr. was, however, increasingly active. Nicholas Jr. had inherited his father’s maritime business in 1791 when he became a partner in Brown, Benson and Ives, which became Brown & Ives in 1796 when Benson left the firm. By 1800, the firm’s network extended across the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Baltic, generating imports and silver dollars that could be used in their Pacific ventures.

The maiden voyage of the Ann and Hope in 1798 marked a significant change in Brown & Ives’s approach,

Marine painting of the schooner Ann and Hope of Providence, oil on canvas [ca. 1920], by the artist Charles Torrey (1859–1921). RIHS COLLECTIONS 1973.136.1, RHI X173648.

which included using Port Jackson as an intermediate port.

Nicholas Brown and his partners had taken only a modest share in John Brown’s initial ventures to Canton. From 1792, however, they tackled the China trade with greater intent.

Their difficulties trading in India to obtain cargoes for Canton saw them reconsider both their mode of trade and their route to China.57 Their transatlantic trade had put the firm in a position to rely more on specie and credit to trade in Canton.

It also meant that goods from the Baltic ports and Russia, such as bar iron, canvas, and sailcloth, made their way into cargoes landed in Port Jackson, where essential naval stores were in short supply.

The trigger for Brown & Ives’s decision to use the Eastern Passage was the East India Company’s rejection, in February 1798, of its application to load cotton in Bombay to trade in Canton. The growing threat posed by French “raiders” also was a consideration.58 The partners’ change in approach was, however, a more strategic shift toward more direct trade and a greater reliance on carrying large amounts of specie to guarantee a large return cargo.

The Ann and Hope was built to purpose and larger (550 tons burthen) than most Providence vessels previously sent to Canton.59 As it carried more than $80,000 in silver coin, security was paramount; the ship also carried a letter of marque signed by Secretary of State Pickering, a relatively large, well-armed crew, and twelve nine-pound cannons.

Benjamin Page, who by 1798 was one of the most experienced Rhode Island sea captains on the China run, was engaged on generous terms.60 Page stopped in Botany Bay in October 1798 to take on water and step the masts to equip the ship for the lighter winds on the northward run across the equator.61 After five days, the Ann and Hope left the colony and reached Whampoa (Canton’s outport) by December 15.

Within six weeks, Page oversaw loading a considerable cargo of tea, chinaware, nankeens, and silk and arranged to join a convoy protected by three Royal Navy ships to ensure safe passage through the East Indies straits into the Indian Ocean.62 On return to Narragansett Bay in June 1799, the Customs estimate for the return cargo was more than $300,000.63

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay

v 37

The map of Botany Bay from the journal of the Ann and Hope’s 1798 voyage kept by Benjamin Page Jr., the teenage son of Captain Page. Benjamin Jr. may have copied the map from a chart made during James Cook’s visit to Botany Bay in 1770 on the Endeavour that appeared in the 1773 edition of Hawkesworth’s Voyages. The author first came across the map in the State Library of NSW’s microfilm copy of the journal. MAP REPRODUCED COURTESY OF THE JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY.

The Ann and Hope’s short stay in Botany Bay was not as significant commercially as it was for the insights it provides us into the standing and access of the Rhode Island traders through the observations in the journal kept by the ship’s surgeon, Benjamin Bowen Carter, a brother-in-law of Nicholas Brown. His detailed description of the state of the ten-year-old colony, the natural environment, and its indigenous occupants is remarkable for its time.64 Captain Page sent a party of four, comprising Carter, his son, Samuel Snow (the supercargo and consul-designate for Canton), and Thomas Thompson, to call on several officers and colonial officials in Sydney, some ten miles from the ship’s anchorage in Botany Bay. After lunch with the colony’s then-senior military official, Major Joseph Foveaux, who had administered the NSW Corps finances during Page’s previous visits, they had tea with the military quartermaster (Thomas Laycock), met the provost general and other senior officials, and stayed overnight with the colony’s principal surgeon,

38 v The Bridge

William Balmain. On his last night in Botany Bay, Page hosted Laycock and other officials to a shipboard dinner.65 The group also called on Governor Hunter, a veteran of the British blockade of Narragansett Bay during the War of Independence. There is a certain irony in this apparently convivial conversation between an elderly Scottish naval officer, who, as a loyal servant of King George III, played an active role in suppressing Rhode Island trade in the early years of the Revolutionary War, and a youthful group from the new American republic, which included the son of one of the Gaspee raiders.

The Ann and Hope’s initial voyage was an important step for Brown & Ives in establishing a pattern of trade that saw the firm become one of the five leading US-China traders by the middle of the following decade. The partners clearly regarded the venture as a major success; as Ives advised Page, it was “a voyage of serious consequences to us.”66 While the strategy evident in the Ann and Hope’s maiden voyage was

maintained, Brown & Ives decided to trade in Sydney in its subsequent ventures on the John Jay (1800–01) and the Arthur (1802–03).67 In both cases, this made a substantial contribution toward buying large cargoes in Canton.68 The combined value of the return cargoes of Brown & Ives’s three voyages staging through Port Jackson between 1798 and 1802 was in the order of $850,000 (approximately $20 million, in 2020 dollars), among the most profitable, to that point, for the Providence merchants engaged in the China trade.69 By the period 1804–07, Brown & Ives was competing with John Jacob Astor, James and T. H. Perkins of Boston, and the major Philadelphia firms of Stephen Girard and Willing & Francis for total number of China ventures, total tonnage, and specie used for the Canton trade.70 The growth of trade from the United States to China was of historical consequence, both for America’s economic

development in the decades after independence and for the direction of nineteenth century global capitalism.

Within twenty years, the United States became Britain’s main commercial competitor in the Pacific.71 The China trade entailed many risks but was extraordinarily profitable, particularly when combined with the lucrative opportunities for transatlantic commerce exploited by “neutral” traders during French and Napoleonic wars. While this impelled the rapid growth of the United States’ foreign commerce after 1790, its larger significance was through the wealth it generated and hence to the capitalist model that emerged in nineteenth-century America. Earlier work demonstrating the impact on capital formation and the nation’s industrial takeoff has been complemented by recent studies that highlight the overlap between leading maritime trading companies and the first generation of investors in manufacturing, banking, railroads, and land.72

Excerpt from Dr. Benjamin Bowen Carter’s journal for October 22, 1798.

RIHS SHIPS’ LOGS COLLECTION, MSS 828, BOX 1. RHI X17 4527.

“We found the Governor an agreeable man in conversation. The chief part of his life had been spent in the navy. He is well acquainted with the waters of Rhode Island having been stationed there during the American War, and recounts in a humourous [sic] manner the Capture of General Prescot by Col. Barton the particulars of which he well remembered having himself cautioned Prescot against sleeping in the country.”

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay

v 39

Evaluating the Legacy of the Gaspee Affair: “Trade with Revolutionary Roots” In So Great a Proffit, James Fichter writes of “trade with revolutionary roots,” linking the global expansion of American maritime commerce with the dynamics and relationships forged in the revolutionary period.73 The dominant focus of the historiography of the revolutionary period has been on the impact of British policies on colonial militancy in Massachusetts. Acknowledging Rhode Island’s distinctive experience, we not only should situate the Gaspee Affair in the climate of rising tensions in Narragansett Bay but also consider how it influenced the commercial culture that was to propel John Brown, his nephew, and other Providence merchants into extending their trade beyond the Atlantic.

John Brown, in resisting British attempts to restrict the colonists’ molasses trade in the pre-revolutionary period and pioneering Rhode Island’s branch of the China trade, displayed a combination of decisiveness, a propensity for risk-taking and tackling challenges frontally, and the singleminded pursuit of his personal and his family’s business interests. His patriotism came with a strong parochial streak; he acted from self-interest and as the leader of the community of maritime traders in Providence that came to dominate Rhode Island’s international trade by the last decade of the eighteenth century, when its trading fleet exceeded New York’s in tonnage and number of vessels.74 As an entrepreneur, he depended greatly on the expertise that was a feature of this community. The Gaspee raid, and the management of the subsequent inquiry to protect the attack’s leaders, could not have occurred without a strong degree of local solidarity and shared interests. A similar pattern of loyalty combined with professional dedication and competence was evident in the postcolonial growth of Providence’s maritime commerce.

John Brown’s association with Benjamin Page is a case in point. The financial backers of transglobal ventures after 1785 had to put extraordinary confidence in the ships’ masters they chose to take responsibility for these extended expeditions.

As in comparable ports such as Boston or Salem, this trust was reinforced by business and family relationships and intermarriage; in Providence, for John Brown and others, the shared experience of June 1772 created another dimension to a tightly knit community.

40 v The Bridge

We can identify several areas in which the Browns’ ventures and Page’s success as a mariner and trader contributed to American commerce in the Pacific and in turn played a part in the way global capitalism developed in the first decades of American independence. A major reason for the extraordinary growth of American trade in Canton was that, in contrast to the British and Dutch, a high proportion of the American vessels engaged were relatively small craft, in many cases 200 tons or less. Underlying this phenomenon was the Young Republic’s laissez-faire approach, reflecting the popular aversion to large state-backed trading enterprises influenced by colonial experience with the East India Company, which allowed for diverse forms of trade out of America’s major ports. Colonial officials in Port Jackson observed with unqualified admiration the seamanship and “economy” of the American traders.75 Overall, the American model was better organized, leaner, and more adaptable and opportunistic than its competitors; ultimately, this became the form of entrepreneurial capitalism that eclipsed and displaced the state-based trading corporations that had dominated European trade in the Pacific in the eighteenth century.76 John Brown’s 208-ton Hope was closer to the Boston model of a China trader, a relatively small vessel expected to combine a sealskin cargo from the Falklands with speculative trade in Port Jackson to boost the venture’s prospects in Canton. Brown’s hope that Page could sell much if not all of a considerable cargo in the isolated, infant colony reflected not only a willingness to take risks in an untested market but also the extent he relied, as he had done with Esek Hopkins thirty years before on his first Africa venture, on his captain’s judgment and initiative to steer through uncertain waters.

Page’s voyages on the Hope in 1792–93 and the Halcyon in 1794–95 demonstrated that the Eastern Passage was a viable route for smaller traders looking for a fast route to Canton.

Page also was the first to demonstrate that a direct passage was feasible from the American East Coast to Port Jackson, which became increasingly relevant as the security of the East Indies straits became more uncertain.77 Significantly, whereas John Brown sent the Hope back to Sydney through the Falklands, Page already had the confidence to take a full cargo of rum and tradeable provisions to the colony directly to sell before proceeding to Canton.

As Lloyd Churchward’s seminal 1948 article on the Sydney trade in Rhode Island History suggested, Page’s trade in Sydney, especially the handsome advances for spirits, provisions, and naval stores, created a greater sense of opportunity among the Rhode Island merchant community, and more widely among those who could only fund transactions in Canton by relying on intermediate trade or other means of “silver substitution.”78 After 1802, American sealers frequently used their passage around Australian coasts to hunt for sealskins or to buy them from colonial sealers to take to the China market.

Some of these visitors traded with the colony. But the scale of the commerce developed by John Brown and intensified by Brown & Ives’s ship visits was of a different order and much more significant in contributing to the success of their China ventures. An additional incentive for larger trading firms, many of which had an interest in Rhode Island distilleries, was the ability to obtain the necessary certificates demanded by the Customs House to apply offsets (or “drawbacks”) against excises on domestic production of spirits.79 This rum factor applied to almost all the Rhode Island merchants who sent trading ventures through Port Jackson after 1795, including Clark and Nightingale, the Jenckeses, Phillip and Zachariah Allen, John Corlis and William Megee from Providence, and the Vernons from Newport; the other common element is that all of these, other than the Vernons, Corlis, and Megee, had family links to the Gaspee Affair.

Brown and Page established that there was a surprising degree of complementarity between the Rhode Islanders’ trade specialization and the British colony’s needs in a period when the British government’s attention was devoted to the French wars and most British firms were discouraged from trading by the restrictions imposed by the East India Company. As well as supplying much of the demand for rum, the quantities of salted meat imported by American traders in the decade after 1792 were remarkable.80 Even after Rhode Island’s trade with Port Jackson fell away after the 1807 Embargo Act, other American China traders, some with strong Rhode Island links, such as Peter Amidon of Boston and the Champlins of New York, followed a similar approach to trade in Sydney before the War of 1812.81 Page’s success in exchanging his cargo for British Bills of Treasury established a model for trade in Port Jackson in the decade after 1792, one that featured in the Brown & Ives ventures in 1800 and 1802. In its early years, the

remote penal colony produced no obvious goods of value in the Chinese market. Obtaining Treasury bills that, unlike commercial paper, readily were accepted in Canton changed the commercial calculus. To supplement commissary stocks, the early governors authorized these payments out of necessity.82 The prospects of trading profitably in Sydney were increased by the willingness of the “officer traders” who controlled imports from visiting ships to pay generously using bills of payment on London. As a result, most of the sixty or so American vessels that visited Sydney before the War of 1812 were traders or sealers with an interest in speculative trade. British merchants railed against their own government’s mercantilist policies that cut them out of such a lucrative market.83 As a dimension of Hellyer’s “silver substitution” century, the American use of the British colony of NSW for intermediate trade warrants greater attention as an aspect of the China trade and for its impact on the evolution of global capitalism in the early nineteenth century.

Much of the literature on Western capitalism in the Pacific in the nineteenth century emphasizes the significance of Anglo-American mercantile cooperation. Fichter has argued that, even as British officials in London became more concerned about American maritime competition, cooperative arrangements often prevailed, both between British firms and investors who partnered willingly with American traders and in the field.84 It was, however, by no means a matter of course that this would occur in the colony of NSW. Its governors were instructed not to permit any trade that would threaten the East India Company’s trading monopoly in Canton.85 Almost all the naval officers who administered the colony in its first two decades and many of the NSW Corps officers had served in the 1776–1783 war. Yet the warm welcome given to the party from the Ann and Hope seems genuine and without any note of adversarial rancor. The mutual benefits of commerce provide a plausible explanation for this hospitality. Naval officers such as Hunter and Collins surely would have known about the Gaspee Affair. Even so, this does not appear to have qualified their treatment of the visitors—or constrained the trade that developed after Page’s arrival in December 1792.

To understand the Gaspee Affair within the context of the development of global capitalism, one could ask how Rhode Island’s trade would have developed without the June 1772 attack. Indulging in this hypothetical exercise, we can

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay v 41

speculate that if John Brown and his colleagues had not resisted British efforts to suppress the illicit molasses trade and deter imports from non-British sources, the specialization developed in Newport and Providence in the molasses trade, and in distilling rum, may not have continued to flourish.

A substantial part of the Providence’s maritime trade, one that supported associated activities such as shipbuilding, iron foundries, and cordage, might not have prospered to the point that, in the postwar period, it was strong enough to become a significant branch of the US-China trade.

If Montagu and Dudingston had succeeded in stifling Rhode Island’s molasses and rum trade, American trade with the colony after 1792 may never have occurred or at least not

in the way shaped by the Providence traders. In this sense, we can draw a line from Namquid Point to Botany Bay, a line that takes us from the teenage Benjamin Page at the oars making for the British cutter stranded on a sandbank in the gathering June night in 1772 to Page’s arrival in Port Jackson, twenty years later on a blazing December morning, as John Brown’s captain on the Hope, as well as a connection between John Brown’s dogged resistance to the imperial assertion of British mercantile interests and the unlikely twist in the USChina trade that saw the Browns and others from the Gaspee generation profiting from replenishing the penal colony’s supplies in a period of imperial neglect and selling “raw New England rum” to British veterans of the Revolutionary War.

Endnotes 1

phraim Bowen’s account is in William R. Staples, The Documentary History of the Destruction of the Gaspee E (Providence, RI: Knowles, Vose, and Anthony, 1845), republished by the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS) in 1990, 14. the events of June 9 and 10, 1772, I have relied mainly on the accounts in Steven Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule before the American Revolution (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2016); Charles Rappleye, Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade and the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), and the contemporary documents from Staples, Documentary History, and J. R. Bartlett (ed.) Rhode Island Colonial Records (RICR) (Providence, RI: 1865).

2 For

3 All

conversions between Pounds Sterling and US dollars and into approximate current US dollars (2020) in this article use the Purchasing Power Calculator for price indexation (CPI/RPI) in https://www.MeasuringWorth.com.

4 The

following is informed by a wide range of writing about the changes in trade patterns and routes in the period from 1770 until the 1820s, spanning global history studies including Robert Hellyer, “The West, the East and the insular middle: trading systems, demand, and labour in the integration of the Pacific, 1750–1875” Journal of Global History 8(3) (2013), 391–413; to work on the decline of the East India Company [James Fichter, So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)]; economic and historical works on the Pacific [David Matsuda, Pacific Worlds: a History of Seas, Peoples and Cultures (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and David Igler, “Exploring the Concept of Empire in Pacific History: Individuals, Nations and Ocean Space Prior to 1850,” History Compass 12(11) (2014), 879–887]; and recent publications on the U.S.-China trade including J. R. Haddad; America’s First Adventure in China: Trade, Treaties, Opium, and Salvation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2013) and Eric Jay Dolin, When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2012).

D. R. Hainsworth, The Sydney Traders: Simeon Lord and His Contemporaries 1788–1821 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1981); D. Stuart, “American trade with the British colony of New South Wales, 1792 to 1816—A reappraisal” History Compass, Vol. 18 (12) December 2020, DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12641.

5 See

in Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 30. The imperial view of Rhode Island seemed to remain consistent through much of the eighteenth century. For example, comments on the “piratical proceedings of the people of Providence” made by Admiral Montagu in his letter to Governor Wanton of June 11, 1772, in Staples, Documentary History, Section 21, “A Proclamation.”

6 Quoted

42 v The Bridge

7 On

the degree of integration of the American colonies into British Atlantic trade, see Edwin J. Perkins, The Economy of Colonial America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988) and Jeremy Atack and Peter Passell, A New Economic View of American History (New York: North and Co., 1994). One of the few significant manufactured exports from the colonies was shipbuilding, which became competitive with the major shipbuilding nations across the Atlantic. Almost half the seagoing vessels built in colonial America were sold to foreigners, with Britain being the leading market, see Perkins, 84.

8 “Rum

completely overshadowed every other item on the cargo manifests of Rhode Island slavers,” typically accounting for 85–90 percent of the cargo by value, Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 86–87, quote from 86.

Clark-Pujara, Dark Work: The Business of Slavery in Rhode Island (New York: N ew York University Press, 2018), 19; Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 12.

9 Christy

Sons of Providence, 11–17; Gertrude Selwyn Kimball, Providence in Colonial Times (New York: De Capo, 1972), reprint of Houghton and Mifflin original publication of 1912, 245–248; the estimated value of the Mary’s return cargo landed in Providence was £2,601, G. Kimball, 248.

10 Rappleye,

11 Obadiah

Brown established the manufacture of spermaceti candles in the early 1850s as a trading commodity, in Obadiah Brown (1712–62) Papers, RIHS MSS 315, Historical comments. details of the Browns’ trade with neutral and enemy ports, see James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: Colonial Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 22–70. Trade under “flags of truce” was conducted by applying to transport French prisoners of war to French ports for exchange with British prisoners. Given such permission, colonial traders could profit by exchanging goods needed in the French ports for commodities such as molasses and sugar. Even though their brig Prudent Hannah was seized by the British navy off Virginia in 1758 and two of their vessels were later condemned in the Bahamas, the Browns were able to sustain this trade for the duration of the war, Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 31–33.

12 For

13 Christy

Clark-Pujara calculates that between 1751 and 1775, 383 of the 515 American vessels in the slave trade were from Rhode Island and that they carried more than 40,000 of the almost 60,000 slaves carried by these vessels, Clark-Pujara, Dark Work, 17; see also Eric Kimball, “ ‘What have we to do with slavery?’ New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies” in Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development, Eds. Sven Beckett and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 181–194. Rhode Island was the largest supplier of candles to West Indian sugar plantations, where they were used so mills could operate around the clock during the harvest season, Kimball, 186.

14 Only

Massachusetts made more rum; in per capita terms, Rhode Island was the largest producer, see Kimball, “What have we to do with slavery?” 185; by 1769, 13 distilleries in Newport produced rum, Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle, 81.

15 Clark-Pujara,

Dark Work, cited from 13, 13–16 on colonial governors’ involvement in slave trading.

16 Stephen

Hopkins was a co-owner of the Browns’ iron foundry at Scituate, where his eldest son, Rufus, was manager for almost 40 years, Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 95. John Brown’s brother Nicholas and Stephen Hopkins were cousins through marriage. The Browns’ and Hopkinses’ “social and business connections were close and constant. Their business interests were in many respects identical, and their political views were ever sympathetic.” Kimball, Providence in Colonial Times, 283.

Browns’ instructions of September 10, 1763, to Esek Hopkins are described in Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 59–60; Obadiah Brown also attempted to send a vessel to Africa in 1759, the schooner Wheel of Fortune, but this was seized by French privateers after reaching the African coast, Hedges, The Colonial Years, p.72; Clark-Pujara, Dark Work, 23.

17 The

of the 196 captives died, Clark-Pujara, Dark Work, 23. Esek Hopkins’s problems began from the Sally’s arrival near Bissau (the modern capital of Guinea-Bissau), losing crew to disease during the ten months spent trying to obtain a complete cargo, Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 61–72; “What is absent from all the Brown brothers’ correspondence relating to the Sally, and from any of the letters and journals written by Esek Hopkins, is any reference to the plight and ghastly demise of the captive Africans,” 75.

18 108

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay

v 43

the impact of the Sally’s 1763 voyage on the Browns’ participation in the slave trade, see Kimball, Providence in Colonial Times, 275-276. John Brown pursued a second slaving venture with the Sultan in 1769 but thereafter concentrated on other branches of his growing maritime trade until sending the Hope to West Africa under the Newport slaving captain Peleg Wood in 1795; he invested in slavery ventures and was a leading advocate for the slave trade until his death in 1803, Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 226–231, 323–324, 303–305; on the Sultan, see Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 77–78, and Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle, 73, 88, 98.

19 On

20 Kimball,

“What have we to do with slavery?” 185–189; Clark-Pujara, Dark Work, 22–24, 74.

Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade: New Approaches to the Americas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010) 100, cited in Clark-Pujara, Dark Work, 20.

21 Herbert

22 Colonial

administration cost the British Crown far more than revenue raised in the colonies; struggling to manage the burden of funding wars on its colonial frontiers, including against First Nation Americans and other European powers, British governments saw taxing colonial trade and consumption of imported goods as preferable to new taxes in Britain. In 1763, with fewer demands on the Royal Navy when conflict with France and Spain ended, a fleet was deployed directed by the Board of Trade to enforce the “suppression of the clandestine trade with foreign nations and the improvement of the revenue,” Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 42–43.

23 Rhode

Island was the only colony to make a formal statement before the renewal of the Molasses Act. The Remonstrance was endorsed by the Rhode Island General Assembly on January 27, 1764, its passage expedited

by John Brown, see RICR, Vol. 6, 378–383. Its authors appear to have been Governor Hopkins and a committee that included John and Nicholas Brown, see Frederick B. Wiener, “The Rhode Island Merchants and the Sugar Act,” New England Quarterly, Vol. 3 (3) July 1930, 464–500. While overstated in some respects, such as exaggerating the proportion of Rhode Island rum that was exported to Africa, it was significant as an argument that Britain and its colony had a shared interest in supporting Rhode Island’s molasses trade, expressly including the slave trade, Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle, 13–14.

24 Nick

Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), 62.

25 Although

the 1764 Sugar Act, which replaced the 1733 Molasses Act, maintained discriminatory duties on sugar and molasses from non-British sources, the Grenville government later reduced the rate. This only partly mollified colonial merchants including the Browns as other provocative provisions were maintained, notably the provisions that gave jurisdiction on seizures of cargoes by imperial customs officials to the Vice-Admiralty Court in Nova Scotia. The 1768 Vice Admiralty Court Act further extended the Crown’s authority by creating three new ViceAdmiralty Courts, in Boston, New York, and Charleston, in which Crown-appointed judges had jurisdiction on all matters on customs violations and smuggling. For the Rhode Island merchants, this challenged their conviction that such commercial matters should be decided within their colony’s jurisdiction.

26 Tea

imported from China into Britain and other company markets constituted 90 percent of the company’s profits by 1770, Dolin, When America First Met China, 68. However, despite London’s efforts, most American tea drinkers obtained their tea from other sources; Table 1.1. “Legal Tea Imported into the Colonies 1770–72” in Fichter, So Great a Proffit, 8, shows that Boston was the only major port to accept tea imported by the East India Company.

Arthur Schlesinger wrote that by 1771 more than 90 percent of imported tea was smuggled from the continent, mainly the Netherlands, Arthur Meier Schlesinger, The Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1959), reprint of 1917 original, 107.

27 RICR,

Vol. 7, 59–60; on Montagu’s orders to Dudingston, see Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 10.

28 This

was the subject of editorials and reports in the colonial press railing against the activities of the “piratical schooner” and Dudingston’s decision, contrary to the law governing determinations of disputed cargoes, to send the Fortune to Boston, Newport Mercury, February 20, 1772, and Providence Gazette, February 22, March 21 and 28, 1772. Nathanael Greene, later second-in-command under Washington during the Revolutionary War, successfully sued Dudingston for damages, Gerald M. Carbone, Nathanael Greene: A Biography of the American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 3–5.

44 v The Bridge

comments and Wanton’s letter to Dudingston of March 22, 1772, are in Staples, Documentary History (1990 edition), 4–5. The merchants’ petition is described in Deputy Governor Darius Sessions’s Deposition to the Gaspee Commission, which lists the signatories as John Brown, Nathan Angell, Joseph Nightingale, Job Smith, Thomas Greene, Ambrose Page, Darius Sessions, James Lovett, and Nicholas Brown, RICR, Vol. 7, 174–175.

Many of these had close business links to John Brown. Sessions had sailed for the Browns on West Indies voyages, see Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 11.

29 Hopkins’s

30 Steven

Park describes the raid as “somewhat surgical” or even “restrained,” although also speculating that the schooner’s destruction was not preplanned, Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 101; Park argues that the attack should be placed in the context of “a known formula, a script or agenda of increasing resistance when ordinary channels of redress failed,” Park, 48–50. For another view that the raid was a community action notable for the limited use of violence and the targeted nature of the attack, see P. Messer, “A Most Insulting Violation The Burning of the HMS Gaspee and the Delaying of the American Revolution,” New England Quarterly 88 (4) December 2015, 582–622, at 585–586 and Note 9. total number who participated in the raid on the Gaspee has not been reliably established. Although Dudingston later claimed that the cutter was attacked by 17 longboats with some 200 men, less self-interested contemporary accounts indicate a lower number, possibly around 60–70, for example, the Customs Collector in Providence, William Checkley, in a letter written on June 11, 1772, to the Customs collector for the Port of Rhode Island; Park says that eight longboats, with space for ten oarsmen and a sea captain at the tiller, departed from Fenner’s Wharf in Providence, possibly supplemented by a longboat from Bristol—of this group, a smaller number, perhaps around 40, boarded the vessel, see Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 16–18, and 124, Note 21, and Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 108–109. The identity of some of those who participated in the raid can be drawn from various sources, including reports in Rhode Island American, July 4, 1826, and Newport Mercury, July 8, 1826, as well as Staples, Documentary History (1990 edition).

31 The

Park, The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee, 21–27 and chapter four, “Star Chamber”; also Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 115–125. The inducements included a reward of £500 for information on any of the raid’s participants and an additional bounty of £500 for capture of the leaders, issued by Royal Proclamation on August 26, 1772, Rappleye, 115.

32 See

33 Many

examples of the network of social and marriage interrelationships between the different Gaspee participants and through their respective professions and business can be found in Kimball, Providence in Colonial Times, chapters “The Shipping Trade” and “The Colonial Town”; to list only some instances: James Brown’s marriage to Hope Power, daughter of Mercy Tillinghast, 230; his business partnership with Jabez Bowen, 243; the Browns’ links through marriage with the Jenckes (272) and Clark families, 262–263, (John Innes Clark of the firm Clark and Nightingale also was Ephraim Bowen’s brother-in-law); and the Browns’ long-standing business association with Joseph and William Wanton, 273 (see also Note 15 on the Hopkins–Brown family links).

34 Key

events for the Page family were recorded in the inside cover of Ambrose’s copy of the sixth edition of Robert Barclay’s An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, Being an Explanation and Vindication of the Principles and Doctrine of the People Called Quakers, printed for James Franklin, Newport, RI, in 1729 and now held by the RIHS. Benjamin was the grandson of Mary Soule, descendent of the Pilgrim Father George Soule, see Martin Lawrence, “Sea Trade brings a ’Soule’ to Australia,” September 8, 2020 accessed on November 7, 2021, at https://www. mayflowersociety.org.au/post/sea-trade-brings-a-george-soule-descendent-to-australia.

W. Kenny, “The Maiden Voyage of Ann and Hope of Providence to Botany Bay and Canton, 1798–99,” American Neptune, 1958 Vol. 18 (2) pp.105–136, at 129.

35 Robert

36 Based

on the author’s review of shipping and customs records of Benjamin Page’s maritime career and the RIHS’s Papers of the American Slave Trade Part 2: Selected Collections, Ed. J. Coughtry (Bethesda, MD: University Publications of America 2001), Editorial Note v, ix. The Pages did trade with the West Indies slave societies, so in that respect, they participated in the broader slave-based Atlantic economy.

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay

v 45

An Empire on the Edge, 326–328, concluded that the Smack was commanded by Benjamin Page of Providence and that, while the evidence is limited, the voyage probably was backed by a group determined to arm a Colonial Navy. From mid-1775, after Lexington, when obtaining supplies became a pressing priority for the fledgling Continental Army, John and Nicholas Brown were involved in importing gunpowder from Europe and the West Indies, see Hedges, The Colonial Years, 215–223. I have seen no evidence that they had any role in the Smack’s gunrunning. Given British suspicions about his role in the Gaspee attack, it would have been highly risky for John Brown to have done so.

37 Bunker,

38 Much

of what we know of Page’s military career comes from the surviving record of his 1818 application for a veteran’s pension, Page’s file, S.3629, Revolutionary War Records, U.S. National Archives. See Thomas E. Woodrup, Captain Benjamin Page. A Forgotten Rhode Island Hero of the American Revolution Rediscovered in Sycamore, Illinois (United States Copyright Office, 1998), Registration Number TX 4–777–730, Second Edition 2001.

39 Page

also may have participated in the Battle of Rhode Island on Aquidneck Island in August 1778. His war record included serving as lieutenant under Captains John Manley, John Olney, Hoystead Hacker, and Samuel Nicholson and as first lieutenant on the frigate Hague (Captain Hanley) in the final year of the war. the registration of the Providence, owned by John Brown, master, Benjamin Page, in November 1783, see RIHS Ships Register and Enrollments of Providence RI 1773–1939 Vol. 2, 874, Entry 2788; on subsequent trading voyages, see Kenny “Maiden Voyage of Ann and Hope,” 130 and Woodrup, Special Contribution to the Gaspee Virtual Archive, accessed on November 7, 2021, at https://www.Gaspee.org/PageBio.

40 On

41 A

review of the Customs House records of cargoes imported into Providence in the 1790s reveals the pattern of external trade developed in the late eighteenth century, RIHS US Custom House (Providence, Rhode Island) Records 1789–1940, MSS 28 SG 1 Series 4, Inward Foreign Manifests; Providence’s fleet reached 120 vessels, with a total tonnage of 13,000 in 1802, see Peter J. Coleman, “The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Rhode Island History,” The Business History Review, Vol. 37 (4) Winter 1963, 319–344, at 328; see also Robert G. Albion, William A. Baker, and Benjamin Woods Labaree, New England and the Sea (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport, 1994), 48–49 which describes Providence’s emergence as Rhode Island’s leading commercial port. On the number and location of Rhode Island distilleries, see Henry R. Chace, Owners and Occupants of the Lots, Houses and Shops in the Town of Providence, Rhode Island in 1798 (Providence: Livermore & Knight, 1914).

42 The

1791 Excise Whiskey Tax Act, the first excise levied in the United States on domestically produced goods, was signed into law by President George Washington on March 3, 1791. Rhode Island merchants had successfully lobbied Congress on the legislation to include an offset on this levy for every gallon of spirits exported. For rum exports, this was increased by three cents per gallon because of the duty on imported molasses, see James B. Hedges, The Browns of Providence Plantations: Volume 2, the Nineteenth Century (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1968), 8–10.

Hedges, Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century, 17–24; Hedges drew heavily on the earlier work of William B. Weeden, “Early Oriental Commerce in Providence,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 1907–08, Third Series, VI; the Browns’ subsequent ventures pioneering trade through Port Jackson in the 1790s were recognized in early studies including Foster Rhea Dulles, The Old China Trade (Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 29–30, and K. S. Latourette, The History of Early Relations between the United States and China, 1784–1844 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1917), 45, but often are overlooked in more recent work, e.g.

Dolin, When America First Met China, 123–124.

43 See

44 Brown

declared a narrow loss on the first venture, although he appears to have inflated his costs; Hedges calculated that the voyage returned a profit of around $20,000, Hedges, Vol. 2 The Nineteenth Century, 24.

Customs duties assessed for the second voyage, which returned to Providence in June 1791, were much higher at $51,790, indicating a considerably more valuable cargo, RIHS Customs House Providence — Entry of Merchandise, MSS 28 Series 4, Inward Cargo Manifests, 1790–May 1804, Box 1, Folder 14.

Alliance, a 900-ton frigate, was one of the five vessels in the squadron that fought under John Paul Jones at the Battle of Flamborough Head off the English coast in September 1779. For details of its 1787–88 voyage, see Colin Jack-Hinton, “The Voyage of Alliance: American Contribution to the Rediscovery and Exploration of the Solomon Islands,” American Neptune, Vol. 25 (4) October 1965, 248–261.

45 The

46 v The Bridge

the Philadelphia’s visit, see J. Wade, “Young America and Young Australia: 200 Years of Trade,” Australiana Vol. 14, No. 4, November 1992, 89–96.

46 On

Hope’s Sydney visit and Page’s transactions with the Commissary are recorded in David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, from its settlement in January 1788, to August 1801. (London: A. Strahan for T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1804), 193; records of Commissary purchases from Page are in “John Palmer’s accounts 1791–97,” Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP) Public Record Office Series 3570 (PRO3570), Exchequer and Audit Department.

47 The

48 Using

a foreign port to rest and refresh was standard practice, but even at the time, Page’s declared intentions were taken with a grain of salt: “An American ship has put in here to wood and water and is bound to China, which I do not believe; she has vast quantities of Spirits on board as well as provisions which Lt Governor has purchased for the use of the Colony.” Richard Atkins, entry for December 28, 1792, Journal of a Voyage to South America and Botany Bay, 1791–1810, State Library of NSW MLMSS737.

49 Rum

loaded in Providence at three shillings and sixpence (3/6) per gallon, was purchased by the colony’s commissary for 4/6 per gallon; for loaded prices, see Manifest of Cargo on Board the Ship Hope, March 12, 1792, at RIHS microfilm record of Providence Customs House Inward and Outward Entries Volume, Outward Manifests, 1790–94; Collins, Account of the English Colony (1804), 193 describes the amount of salt meat, flour, and spirits purchased, giving prices.

50 Grose,

who had been sent to the colony as commander of the military contingent (the NSW Corps), served as lieutenant governor from Governor Phillip’s departure in December 1792 until leaving the colony at the end of 1794.

He advised London that he had been obliged to purchase spirits as Page would not otherwise trade his provisions but also argued it was opportune to purchase the spirits as he believed that encouraging trade in liquor and tobacco between the orps officers and visiting ships would boost the colonial economy, Grose to Home Secretary, Henry Dundas, January 9, 1793, Historical Records of Australia (HRA) 1.1. 413–414.

51 On

the way that bills of payment were used by the military and how they gave the NSW Corps “officer-traders” an effective monopoly on buying from American (and other) vessels, see Hainsworth, The Sydney Traders (1981), 15–17 and 25–27, and Statham (Ed.), A Colonial Regiment: New Sources relating to the NSW Corps, 1789–1810, (Canberra: ANUTech, 1992). $6.3 million in present value dollars. The Hope cleared Port Jackson in January 1793 and traded in Canton for brown sugar, tea, nankeens, 100 pounds of silk, silk shoes, umbrellas, sweetmeats, gum, chinaware, and one keg of “dragon’s blood,” a dark red resin used as a varnish, dye, incense, or medicine. Nankeen was a buff-colored cotton fabric generally used for inexpensive clothing; nankeens were trousers made from this. The Hope’s Canton cargo is listed in the RIHS, Providence Customs House Records, Inward Foreign Manifests, MSS 28, Series 4, Box 4, Folder 62, f.56.

52 About

from Collins, Account of the English Colony (1804), 265, Collins’s speculation about Page’s motives for his rapid passage is in Collins and Brian H. Fletcher (ed.), An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, with Remarks on the Dispositions, Customs, Manners, etc., of the Native Inhabitants of that Country Volume 1, A. H. and A. W. Reed in association with the Royal Australian Historical Society, 1975, 316.

53 Quoted

Halcyon left Port Jackson on July 8 and reached China in September 1794. Details of its return cargo, and the Customs estimate of total value, are in RIHS, MSS 28, Series 4, Inward Foreign Manifests, Box 5, Folder 32.

54 The

duties assessed on the Zenobia’s cargo were $56,110, MSS 28, Series 4, Inward Foreign Manifests, Box 8, Folder 143, “Entry of Merchandise imported by Clark and Nightingale on the Zenobia, Captain Benjamin Page master, from Canton,” Providence May 15, 1797, shows that more than 80 percent of duties were for the large cargo of teas, much of which was held in bond. The total estimated value of the cargo was approximately $350,000.

55 Total

Brown’s prosecution, see Rappleye, Sons of Providence, 310, 318–321; Clark-Pujara, Dark Work, 84; and RIHS Papers of the American Slave Trade Part 2 Selected Collections (Ed.), J. Coughtry, Editorial Note v, ix.

A further reason for Brown’s declining role as a merchant was his election to the US Congress in 1799.

56 On

firm’s setbacks with Indian trade included its 1792–93 venture with the Rising Sun when Captain Rogers felt obliged to sell most of his cargo in Bombay under cost to obtain cotton to sell in Canton and the unprofitable voyage of the Hamilton in 1795, when its captain also was obliged to sell much of his cargo in India at a loss, Hedges Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century, 32–33 and 61–64, quote from 33.

57 The

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay

v 47

58 Thomas

Dickason, the firm’s London representative, wrote to Ives on February 23, 1798, to advise that his representations to the East India Company on Brown & Ives’s behalf for permission to load cotton in Bombay to trade in Canton had been rejected; referring to the threat of hostile French raiders in the Andaman Sea and around the Malacca and Sunda Straits, letter from Dickason to Ives, February 23, 1798, in the Brown Family Business Records (BFBR), Series II CCP64 correspondence with Dickason and Company, London 1790–1800, Box 57.

These records are held in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Providence, RI. Brown’s George Washington (624 tn.) and President Washington (950 tn.) were the two larger ships sent from Providence to this point, Hedges, Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century, 72. Records of the Ann and Hope’s voyage, including on building and equipping the ship, are in BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann and Hope, Box 475; at a cost of approximately $45,000, it was built by Colonel Benjamin Tallman and was registered on July 17, 1798, ten days after it began its maiden voyage, Kenny, Maiden Voyage of Ann and Hope, 105.

59 John

60 Page’s

conditions included eight tons of privilege, an additional ten tons of goods on consignment, and payment of $8,000 and an additional $2,000 ninety days after the ship’s safe return, Brown & Ives letter to Page, April 2, 1798, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann and Hope, Box 475, Folder 2. Kenny, Maiden Voyage of Ann and Hope, 105, confirms these payments were much higher than was normal for a ship’s master engaged in Providence in that period because of the venture’s importance and reflecting Page’s standing as an experienced China trader.

61 Mindful

of the owners’ instructions that their insurance required no trading before Canton, Page bartered canvas, timber, and provisions to cover pilotage fees, minor repairs, some livestock, and vegetables; his account for reimbursement of costs at Botany Bay, dated October 21, 1798, recorded expenditure of $341 paid through the sale of raven’s duck (canvas), plankboard wood, 46 barrels of beans, corn, and five barrels of salt pork, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann and Hope, Box 475, Folder 4.

62 Of

the cargo’s total cost of $121,014, tea was $95,389, invoice of merchandise shipped from Whampoa, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann and Hope, Box 475, Folder 5. Page diligently reported the process of loading to the owners’ requirements as well as arrangements for securing the return voyage, see letters from Page to Brown & Ives of January 18 and 29, 1799, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann and Hope, Box 475. cargo’s total value was estimated on arrival in Providence at $314,917, Hedges, Vol .2, The Nineteenth Century, 70, Note 159. The estimate of duties for the Ann and Hope’s cargo made on June 17, 1799, fills more than four pages of the detailed pro forma used by Customs House officials, exceptionally long for the time; total duties assessed were $83,929 of which Brown & Ives’s assessed duties alone constituted $40,212, Estimate of Duties, June 17, 1799; “Impost of Merchandise Imported into Providence,” June 7, 1799, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann and Hope, Box 475, Folder 5.

63 The

64 See

Brett Goodin, “200-year-old Journals by American Sailors Shed Light on Kidnapped Aboriginal Bennelong,” Newsweek, February 22, 2019. Carter’s “Journal of a Voyage to Canton in the ship Ann and Hope,” and the journal kept by Benjamin Page Jr. are in the RIHS, Ships’ Logs Collection, MSS 828, Ann and Hope, Box 1. Copies are in the Australian National University Pacific Manuscripts Bureau’s collection; see ANU PMB MSS 769 (Carter) and MSS 540 (B. Page Jr.).

65 These

were among the most significant figures in the colony’s trade in the “Rum Corps” period. Foveaux, a leading figure in the NSW Corps through the 1790s who later became the colony’s lieutenant governor, was the colony’s senior military officer in the absence of Lt. Col. Paterson between August 1796 and November 1799. He had a farm between Botany Bay and Farm Cove, in the modern suburb of Surry Hills, and later became the colony’s largest landholder, Henry Pike (ed.) Australian Dictionary of Biography 1788–1850, National Centre of Biography ANU 1987, Vol. 1, 407–09; Laycock was both quartermaster and deputy commissary, see Pike (ed.) ADB, Vol. 2, 97; Balmain, who was recorded as “Bellamin” in Carter’s journal, is better known as the first settler and farmer in what is now the suburb of Balmain, Pike (ed.) ADB, Vol. 1, 51–52. to Benjamin Page, July 7, 1795, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann and Hope, Box 475, Folder 2.

66 Ives

48 v The Bridge

Hedges, Vol. 2 The Nineteenth Century, 92–93, Weeden “Early Oriental Commerce,” 241–242, 248–253; and Stuart, “American Trade with…NSW” Table 1, “Selected American Cargoes 1792–1800,” Table 2, “Payments to American Traders, 1792–1802,” and Table 3, “Selected American Cargoes, Port Jackson 1802–11,” for details of these voyages. Like the Ann and Hope, the John Jay carried a large amount of specie, but, unlike Page, Captain Benjamin Dexter was encouraged to trade in Sydney and “procure…Bills on Canton or on London, as you may be able,” owners’ letter to Dexter to deliver to Samuel Snow, May 10, 1800, and “Instructions for the Commander of the Private Armed Ship John Jay bound on a Voyage to Canton and back,” May 15, 1800, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries Z, John Jay, Box 582, Folder 1.

67 See

the John Jay, total payments from trade in Port Jackson converted to more than $15,700 for trading in Canton, a considerable boost to the voyage’s success considering the total cost of the loaded cargo ($6,319), see “1800 Account of Sails (sic) at Port Jackson of Part of the Goods shipped by Messrs. Brown & Ives, John Innes Clark Esq. Munro, Snow & Munro Merchants Providence, made by Captain Dexter at Canton 25 January 1801,” BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries Z, John Jay, Box 582,Folder 7. For the Arthur, payments from Sydney of £6,589/11, which exceeded all previous American visits to the colony, converted to $22,274, which was one-third of the funds used (supplemented by credit) on purchasing goods in Canton; the other elements of the $66,000 were $42,057 in specie and $3,383 from goods sold in Canton, “The Owners of the Ship Arthur in Account Current with Scott Jenckes at Canton,” signed by Scott Jenckes on board the Arthur, December 1802, BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries F, Arthur, 1802–later, Box 494, Folder 1.

68 For

69 The

estimated value for each of the three returning cargoes can be found in BFBR, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries B, Ann & Hope, Box 475 Folder 5, “Estimate of Duties, 17 June 1799” and “Impost of Merchandise Imported into Providence,” June 7, 1799, RIHS MSS 28 SG1 56 V3, 64 for the Ann and Hope; in RIHS MSS 28 US Customs House (Providence, RI) Series 4: Foreign Manifests 1790–1896, Sub–Series A: Inward Foreign Manifests, Box 13, Folders 245 and 246 for the John Jay; and “Impost on Merchandise Imported from Canton,” April 1, 1803, RIHS MSS 28 SG1 S6 V3, 116 and RIHS MSS 28, Box 16, Folder 19, 1 and 2 for the Arthur.

70 Hedges

measured Brown & Ives’s China trade against these four major trading houses and concluded that the Providence firm carried the largest amount of specie and was second in total tonnage and number of ventures, Hedges, Vol. 2 The Nineteenth Century, 103–104.

“Table of American Trade with China, 1784–1844” in Dulles, The Old China Trade, 210, listed the number of American ships that traded annually in Canton through this period, peaking for a single trading season in 1805–06 with 42 recorded. As an exceptionally thorough empirical analysis demonstrating the nature and extent of the growth of the US-China trade, including by size of vessel and goods traded, see R. Richards, “United States Trade with China, 1784–1814” The American Neptune, Special Supplement to Volume 54, 1994, 9–66.

71 The

the impact of growth in maritime trade on capital formation and industrial investment, see Stuart Bruchey, The Roots of American Growth 1607–1861: An Essay in Social Causation (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965); on the consequences for industrial investment through textile factories in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Daniel Walker Howe, What God Hath Wrought, the Transformation of America, 1815–48 (Oxford University Press, 2007), 132–135; Fichter, So Great a Proffit, 132–148, 279–280 described the “creation of the affluent investor” through the China and East Indies trade. The transformation of the Brown family business from maritime trade to industrial investment is the theme of Hedges, Vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century.

72 On

73 Fichter,

So Great a Proffit, 17.

74 At

the time when John Brown first fixed on Port Jackson as a place to trade, Providence could claim a larger fleet than New York, in total tonnage of shipping (which reached 12,000 tons in 1792) and number of vessels (110 in March 1790), Coleman, The Entrepreneurial Spirit in Rhode Island History, 328, Note 9. example, Collins’s remarks on the 129-ton Susan, under Capt. Nathaniel Pearce, trading in Port Jackson in April 1796, Collins, in Fletcher (ed.) Account of the English Colony (1975), Vol. 1, 393.

75 For

76 Igler,

“Exploring the Concept of Empire in Pacific History”; Fichter, So Great a Proffit, 26–29, 278–279.

early American vessels to stop in Port Jackson, including the trader Philadelphia (1792) and the Boston sealer Fairy (1793), made at least one stop en route. Page’s direct passage later was emulated by other Rhode Island mariners including Nathaniel Pearce and William Trotter on the Susan in 1796 and Jacob Smith in 1798, from Newport, on the Semiramis, Collins in Fletcher (ed.), Account of the English Colony, Vol. 1, 393 and Vol. 2, 93–94.

77 Other

The Gaspee Affair: From Namquid Point to Botany Bay

v 49

78 The

extent and trajectory of Providence trade in Port Jackson were described in Lloyd G. Churchward, “Rhode Island and the Australian Trade 1792–1812’ in Rhode Island History, Vol. 7 (4) October 1948, 97–104, including the Appendix, “Rhode Island ships visiting NSW, 1792–1812,” at 104. Page’s success was not the only encouragement to New England merchants considering trade in Port Jackson; the visits of the Fairy (1793) and the Otter (1796) sponsored by Boston sealer Ebenezer Dorr encouraged others to see Sydney as an intermediate port, and the 1794 Jay Treaty, which took effect in 1796 provided more assurance that American traders would be welcome in a British port.

79 Several

papers in the RIHS archives and the John Carter Brown Library’s BFBR (maritime records) show how much ship owners and other partners valued the ability to use the drawbacks for exported spirits to reduce taxes imposed on domestic production of such items. These tax concessions help to explain the extraordinary cargoes of spirits landed by American vessels in Port Jackson after 1792. Examples from the BFBR archive include: pre-prepared forms for the Certificate of Landing for imports of goods entitled to the US Customs bounty provided to Brown & Ives’s ships masters intending to trade in Sydney, Brown & Ives, Series XV (Maritime Records), Subseries Z, John Jay, Box 582, Folder 1; certification of trade in Port Jackson dated October 4, 1800, signed by NSW Corps quartermaster Thomas Laycock and merchant Robert Campbell, RIHS, US Customs House (Providence RI) Series 4: Foreign Manifests 1790–1896, Sub–Series A: Inward Manifests MSS 28, Box 13, Folder 246. example, the 154,400 pounds of salt meat imported by the Halcyon in 1794 was almost twice the total amount of salt beef and pork brought by the First Fleet (300 tierces) when the colony was established, which was intended to provide at least two years’ worth of supplies, https://firstfleetfellowship.org.au/library/first–fleetlist–livestock– provisions–plants–seeds/; for a more comprehensive account of such imports in this period, see Stuart, “American Trade with...NSW” Table 1, “Selected American Cargoes 1792–1800.”

80 For

81

See Stuart, “American Trade with...NSW” Table 3, “Select American Cargoes, 1802–11.”

82

“ … the fortuitous arrival of American ships has frequently saved this colony from great want.” Governor King to Lord Hobart, October 30, 1802, Historical Records of New South Wales, Vol. 4, 870–871; Hunter was strongly criticized in London for the amounts he authorized between 1796 and mid–1800 to pay for imported goods, a large part of which went to American traders. His successor, Philip Gidley King, instructed to curtail such transactions, authorized even larger transactions after his arrival in September 1800.

83 “The

Americans, hearing that New South Wales is considered within the chartered seas of the East India Company, and that no British merchant can send goods to that colony without risqué (sic) of seizure, have at times sent small vessels there with investments of goods on their way to India or the Northwest Coast of America, and have benefitted themselves much thereby...” Letter from C. and S. Enderby and A. and B. Champion to the Earl of Liverpool, August 1, 1800, President of the Board of Trade, AJCP, Papers of Charles Jenkinson, First Earl of Liverpool, 1785–1826, M1399–1400, ff. 124–125.

84 As

an example of the inconsistency between the formal British position and business practice, Fichter highlights the relationship of Alexander Baring, from one of London’s most powerful merchant families and a member of the East India Company board, with some leading Philadelphia merchants including Girard and Bingham; Baring was even a financial backer for some of the China ventures of Francis and Willing. Fichter, So Great a Proffit, 141–145.

85 Intent

on preserving its monopoly over tea imports from China, the East India Company conditioned its agreement to establishing the penal colony in Botany Bay on ensuring that any trade out of the new colony that might compete with its interests would be prevented. This constraint, maintained with little amendment before 1813, expressly required the colony’s governors to prohibit trade between the colony and the company’s settlements in India and the Chinese coast either by British subjects or visiting “neutral” vessels, see Instructions to Governor Phillip, April 25, 1787 (Colonial Office 201/1), HRA 1.1., 15–16. Nevertheless, pragmatic management of the colony’s lack of basic supplies led all governors in the first two decades to interpret their instructions flexibly (see Note 80).

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