Authors: Bernard Cornwell
“And all the king’s men watched them, and saw they were not harmed by the fiery furnace,” Wadsworth said, remembering the sermon he had heard in Boston’s Christ Church the day before the fleet sailed. “The scripture tells us the fire had no power over those men.” He paused, watching the frigate burn. “No power,” he said again and he thought of his dear wife and of the child waiting to be born, then smiled at James. “Now come,” he said, “you and I have work to do.”
The remaining powder in the
Warren
’s magazine exploded. The foremast flew upwards, spewing smoke and sparks and fire, the hull burst apart along its flame-bright seams, the sudden light seared the shivering river red and the frigate disappeared. It was over.
From an Order in Council, Boston, dated September 6th, 1779:
Therefore Ordered that Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere be and he hereby is directed Immediately to Resign the Command of Castle Island and the other Fortresses in the Harbor of Boston to Captain Perez Cushing, and remove himself from the Castle and Fortresses aforesaid and repair to his dwelling house in Boston and there continue untill the matter complained of can be duly inquired into. . . .
From a Petition of Richard Sykes to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, September 28th, 1779:
Your Petitioner was . . . a Sergeant of Marines on board the Ship General Putnam when an attack was made on one of the Redoubts . . . your Petitioner was made a Prisoner and was carried from Penobscot to New York in the Reasonable Man of War was stript of almost all his Clothing . . . Your Petitioner prays your Honors would allow him Pay for the cloathing he lost . . . viz 2 Linnen Shirts 3 Pair Stockings 1 pair Buck Skin Breeches 1 pair Cloth Breeches 1 Hat I Knapsack 1 Handkerchief 1 pair Shoes.
The Penobscot Expedition of July and August 1779 is an actual event and I have tried, within the constraints of fiction, to describe what happened. The occupation of Majabigwaduce was intended to establish a British province that would be called New Ireland and would serve as a naval base and as a shelter for loyalists fleeing rebel persecution. The government of Massachusetts decided to “captivate, kill, or destroy” the invaders and so launched the expedition which is often described as the worst naval disaster in United States history before Pearl Harbor. The fleet which sailed to the Penobscot River was the largest assembled by the rebels during the War of Independence. The lists of ships in the various sources differ in detail, and I assume that two or three transport ships must have left before Sir George Collier’s arrival, but the bulk of the fleet was present, which made it a terrible disaster both for the Continental Navy and for Massachusetts. The fourteen-gun brig
Pallas
had been sent to patrol beyond the mouth of the Penobscot River and so was absent when Sir George Collier’s relief ships arrived, and she alone survived the debacle. Two American ships, the
Hunter
and the
Hampden
, were captured (some sources add the schooner
Nancy
and nine other transports), and the remaining ships were burned. Doctor John Calef, in his official position as the Clerk of the Penobscot Council (appointed by the British), listed thirty-seven rebel ships as taken or burned, and that seems broadly correct.
The blame for the disaster has been almost universally placed on the shoulders of Commodore Dudley Saltonstall. Saltonstall was no hero at Penobscot, and he appears to have been an awkward, unsociable man, but he certainly does not bear the full responsibility for the expedition’s failure. Saltonstall was court-martialed (though no record of the trial exists, so it might never have convened) and dismissed from the Continental Navy. The only other man to be court-martialed for his conduct at Majabigwaduce was Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Revere.
It is an extraordinary coincidence that two men present at Majabigwaduce in the summer of 1779 were to be the subjects of famous poems. Paul Revere was celebrated by Henry Longfellow, and it is Revere’s presence at Majabigwaduce that gives the expedition much of its interest. Few men are so honored as a hero of the American Revolution. There is a handsome equestrian statue to Revere in Boston and, in New England at least, he is regarded as the region’s paramount patriot and revolutionary hero, yet he does not owe his extraordinary fame to his actions at Majabigwaduce, nor even to his midnight ride, but to Henry Longfellow’s poem, which was published in
The Atlantic Monthly
magazine in 1861.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
And Americans have been hearing of the midnight ride ever since, mostly oblivious that the poem plays merry-hell with the true facts and ascribes to Revere the heroics of other men. This was deliberate; Longfellow, writing at the outbreak of the American Civil War, was striving to create a patriotic legend, not tell an accurate history. Revere did indeed ride to warn Concord and Lexington that the British regulars were marching from Boston, but he did not complete the mission. Many other men rode that night and have been forgotten while Paul Revere, solely thanks to Henry Longfellow, gallops into posterity as the undying patriot and rebel. Before the poem was published Revere was remembered as a regional folk-hero, one among many who had been active in the patriot cause, but in 1861 he entered legend. He was indeed a passionate patriot, and he was vigorous in his opposition to the British long before the outbreak of the revolution, but the
only
time Revere ever fought the British was at Majabigwaduce, and there, in General Artemas Ward’s words, he showed “unsoldierlike behaviour tending to cowardice.” The general was quoting Marine Captain Thomas Carnes, who closely observed Revere during the expedition, and Carnes, like most others in the expedition, believed Revere’s behavior there was disgraceful. Revere’s present reputation would have puzzled and, in many cases, disgusted his contemporaries.
A second man at Majabigwaduce was to have a famous poem written about him. This man died at Corunna in Spain and the Irish poet Charles Wolfe began his tribute thus:
Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O’er the grave where our hero was buried.
We buried him darkly at the dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning . . .
The poem, of course, is
The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna
. Lieutenant John Moore went on to revolutionize the British Army and is the man who forged the famed Light Division, a weapon that Wellington used to such devastating effect against the French in the Napoleonic Wars. Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore died in 1809 defeating Marshal Soult at Corunna, but Lieutenant John Moore’s first action was fought on the fogbound coast of Massachusetts. Moore did leave a brief account of his service at Majabigwaduce, but I invented much for him. His extraordinary ability to load and fire a musket five times a minute is recorded, and he was in command of the picquet closest to Dyce’s Head on the morning of the successful American assault. Lieutenant Moore, alone among the picquets’ officers, attempted to stem the attack and lost a quarter of his men. I doubt that Moore did kill Captain Welch (though Moore was carrying a musket and must have been very close to Welch when the marine captain died), but it is certain that it was Moore’s bad luck to be faced by the American marines who were, by far, the most effective troops on the rebel side. Those first marines did wear green coats and it is tempting, though unproven, to think that those uniforms influenced the adoption of green jackets for the 60th and 95th Rifles, regiments that Moore nurtured and which served Britain so famously in the long wars against France. Welch’s death on the heights was one of the strokes of ill-fortune that beset the expedition. John Welch was an extraordinary man who had escaped from imprisonment in England and had made his way back across the Atlantic to rejoin the rebellion.
Peleg Wadsworth, in his long statement to the official Court of Inquiry, offered three reasons for the disaster: “the Lateness of our Arival before the Enemy, the Smallness of our Land Forces, and the uniform Backwardness of the Commander of the Fleet.” History has settled on the third reason and Commodore Dudley Saltonstall has been made to carry the whole blame. He was dismissed from the Continental Navy and it has even been suggested, without a shred of supporting evidence, that he was a traitor in British pay. He was no traitor, and it seems egregious to single out his performance as the primary reason for the expedition’s failure. In 2002 the Naval Institute Press (Annapolis, Maryland) published George E. Buker’s fine book
The Penobscot Expedition
. George Buker served as a naval officer and his book is a spirited defense of a fellow naval officer. The main accusation against the commodore was that he refused to take his ships into Majabigwaduce Harbor and so eliminate Captain Mowat’s three sloops, and Saltonstall’s description of the harbor, “that damned hole,” is often quoted as the reason for his refusal. George Buker goes to great lengths to show the difficulties Saltonstall faced. The British naval force might have been puny compared to the rebels’ naval strength, but they held a remarkably strong position, and any attack past Dyce’s Head would have taken the American ships into a cauldron of cannon-fire from which it would have been almost impossible to escape without the unlikely help of an easterly wind (which, of course, would have prevented them from entering). George Buker is persuasive, except that Nelson faced a roughly similar situation at Aboukir Bay (and against an enemy stronger than himself) and he sailed into the bay and won, and John Paul Jones (who had served under Saltonstall and had no respect for the man) would certainly have sailed into the harbor to sink Mowat’s sloops. It is grossly unfair to condemn a man for not being a Nelson or a John Paul Jones, yet despite George Buker’s arguments it is still hard to believe that any naval commander, given the vast preponderance of his fleet over the enemy, declined to engage that enemy. The thirty-two naval officers who signed the round-robin urging Saltonstall to attack certainly did not believe that the circumstances were so dire that no attack was feasible. Saltonstall’s ships would have suffered, but they would have won. The three British sloops would have been captured or sunk, and then what?
That question has never been answered, and it was not in the interest of Massachusetts to answer it. George Buker’s book is subtitled
Commodore Saltonstall and the Massachusetts Conspiracy of 1779,
and its main argument is that the government of Massachusetts conspired to place all the blame on Saltonstall, and in that ambition they were brilliantly successful. The expedition was a Massachusetts initiative, undertaken without consultation with the Continental Congress, and almost wholly funded by the state. Massachusetts insured all the private ships; paid the crews; supplied the militia; provided weapons, ammunition, and stores; and lost every penny. British money was still in use in Massachusetts in 1779 and the official inquiry was told that the loss amounted to £1,588,668 (and ten pence!) and the real figure was probably much closer to two million pounds. Discovering the equivalency of historic monetary sums to present values is a difficult and uncertain task, but at a most conservative estimate that loss, in 2010 U.S. dollars, amounts to around $300 million. This enormous sum effectively bankrupted the state. However, Massachusetts was lucky. The
Warren
had been in Boston Harbor when the news of the British incursion arrived, and it had made sense to use that powerful warship, and the two other Continental Navy vessels at Boston, and so permission to deploy them had been sought and received from the Continental Navy Board. This meant that a small portion of the defeated forces had been federal and if the blame could be placed on that federal component then the other states might be made to recompense Massachusetts for the loss. That required, in turn, for Saltonstall to be depicted as the villain of the piece. Massachusetts argued that it had been Saltonstall’s behavior which had betrayed the whole expedition and, supported by mendacious evidence (especially from Solomon Lovell), that argument prevailed. It took many years, but in 1793 the federal government of the United States of America largely reimbursed Massachusetts for the financial loss. So placing the entire blame on Saltonstall was politically motivated and very successful as the American taxpayer ended up paying for the mistakes of Massachusetts.
So why did Saltonstall not attack? He left no account, and if his court-martial ever took place then the records have been lost and so we do not possess his testimony. It was certainly not cowardice that stayed his hand because he proved his courage elsewhere in the war, and the suggestion that he was in British pay is unsupportable. My own belief is that Saltonstall was unwilling to sacrifice his men and, quite possibly, one of the few frigates left to the Continental Navy in an operation which, though successful, would not have advanced the aim of the expedition. Yes, he could have taken the three sloops, but would Lovell have matched his achievement on land? I suspect Saltonstall believed that the Massachusetts Militia was inadequate, for which belief he had much evidence, and that destroying the sloops was irrelevant to the expedition’s purpose, which was the capture of Fort George. If the sloops were taken or sunk, the fort would have survived, albeit in a less advantageous situation, whereas the capture of the fort irrevocably doomed the sloops. Saltonstall understood that. This is not to exonerate the commodore. He was a difficult, prickly man and he was obdurate in his relations with Lovell, and he failed miserably to stop or even attempt to slow the British pursuit during the retreat upriver, but he was not the man who ruined the expedition. Lovell was.
Solomon Lovell has been forgiven for the expedition’s failure, yet it was Lovell who did not press the attacks on Fort George which, on the day his troops landed, was scarcely defensible. It does seem true that McLean was fully prepared to surrender rather than provoke a ghastly hand-to-hand fight over his inadequate ramparts (at that moment McLean still believed, probably based on the number of rebel transport ships, that he was outnumbered by at least four to one). But Lovell held back. And went on holding back. He refused Peleg Wadsworth’s eminently sensible suggestion that the rebels should prepare a fortification upriver to which they could withdraw if the British should send reinforcements. He made no attempt, ever, to storm the fort, but instead called endless councils of war (which made decisions by votes) and insisted, in increasingly petulant tones, that Saltonstall attack the sloops before the militia moved against the fort. It is evident that the Massachusetts Militia were poor soldiers, yet that too was Lovell’s responsibility. They needed discipline, encouragement, and leadership. They received none of those things and so they camped forlornly on the heights until the order came to retreat. It is true that once Fort George’s walls were raised sufficiently high Lovell’s chances of capturing the work were almost nonexistent because he did not have enough men and his artillery had failed to blast a way through the ramparts, but certainly he had every hope of a successful storm in the first week of the siege. My belief is that Dudley Saltonstall understood perfectly well that his destruction of the sloops would not lead to the fort’s capture, and that therefore any attack on the British ships would simply result in unneccessary naval casualties. He was finally persuaded to enter the harbor on Friday, August 13th, but abandoned that attack because of the arrival of Sir George Collier’s relief fleet. The aborted land-sea attack might well have eliminated Mowat’s sloops, but Lovell’s forces would surely have been decimated by the fort’s defenders. It was all too little too late, a fiasco caused by atrocious leadership and lack of decision.