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On a warm Saturday afternoon in May 1775, a drummer boy, 50 men, and a small group of commanders came to a field in Fairhaven. They assembled to practice the movements and mindset of war when, suddenly from the east, war found them.
A rider on horseback galloped at full speed into the field of militiamen and leapt from his panting horse. With the sun lowering over the remote harbor of Bedford Village, the rider announced that a “ship of the enemy” was terrorizing Buzzard’s Bay, stealing livestock, and commandeering American ships.
All 50 men lined up, and commanders ordered that 25 of them step forward at the beat of the drum to volunteer themselves to chase down the most powerful navy in the world.
Whether it was the snarled look in those commanders’ eyes or the clarion call of their voices, captains Nathaniel Pope and Daniel Egery wielded sufficient magnetism and daring that when they asked who would take two steps forward into the face of death, all 50 marched. No sooner than the drummer boy’s drum sounded, every single man on that Fairhaven field stepped forward to either save their neighbors or die.
The Battle off Fairhaven, which would become known as the first naval battle of the American Revolution, occurred on the 13th and 14th of May, 1775, in the choppy, swirling seas between what’s now New Bedford, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands.
Patriots would recapture two merchant ships and imprison roughly 15 British sailors and marines — the first naval prisoners that colonists would take in the eight-year war. Itching for a fight since the eruption of violence at Lexington and Concord — less than three weeks prior — these volunteers charged into the deep to protect their neighbors and friends against the 14 well-trained cannons and more than 100 men aboard the HMS Falcon, a ship hungrily looting supplies and livestock to feed gathering imperial forces in Boston.
At this point, the Americans had already suffered blows from the British navy. The HMS Falcon itself was involved in the Battle of Lexington and Concord, accepting prisoners from the ranks of mutinous patriots into her berth that night, April 19.
And the Americans had used boats, too, like when Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys stormed into Fort Ticonderoga alongside Benedict Arnold, their canoes responsible for the stealth approach, on May 10.
Fairhaven’s was the first battle after Lexington and Concord where both sides fought from the decks of ships. But unlike traditional naval battles of the era, few cannon shots (if any) were fired. This battle took place in the form of cunning deception and surprise boardings. That was the only hope for guerrilla farmers and fishermen to cast off the British yoke.
But did these men know they were fighting in the American Revolution? They answered to no formal command. The Continental Army was yet unformed. Patriots were still “rebels” on both sides of the Atlantic. The conflagration at Lexington and Concord was still being called a “civil war” in the Massachusetts press. And on May 13 — the same day this battle commenced — Britain’s Vice Admiral of the Blue, Samuel Graves, sniffed at the “seditious and disaffected” colonials in a letter.
The men who embarked from Fairhaven and Bedford Village into history belonged to no navy, sailed for no country, and were not privateers — for there was no profit to win. Whether revolutionaries or rebels, usurpers or traitors, the truth is that such names could only be affixed by history — and depended on the outcome of a war not yet won.
If by any name their actions smell as sweet, then consider what these flagless sailors, moved by nothing more than the bonds of loyalty into gun-toting, high-seas justice really were.
They were pirates.
↑ The 1845 painting “View of New Bedford From the Fort Near Fairhaven,” depicts the exact spot where patriots launched the Battle off Fairhaven. The city in the background (and steamboats in the harbor) did not yet exist in 1775. Credit: Courtesy of the New Bedford Free Public Library
The Battle off Fairhaven begins
The sun had set when, at 9 p.m., names had been drawn and the 25 chosen men were at the waterfront.
Earlier, it had been “immediately resolved” that the stage for this unfolding drama would be “the old sloop, ‘Success.’” The workhorse whaling vessel had space enough for these men to hide beneath her deck. But more than any strategic advantage, the Success was simply available.
In the battle’s primary documentation — Captain Nathaniel Pope’s account, written down by his son, Joshua — the Success received scant description except that it was “then lying in the wharf.” That was enough.
A wind from the bay brought fog into the harbor, and its direction prevented the ship from sailing out. But so hungry were these men for action that they took up oars, hauling this borrowed ship through inky darkness, thirsting for a foe better armed and trained.
The antagonist that so stirred these men was Commander John Linzee, who was steering the 95-foot-long HMS Falcon through its mission under the direction of Admiral Graves. His orders were to plunder the Massachusetts coastline, and Linzee stole thousands of sheep from the islands. In one report, Linzee confiscated an entire flock of sheep from a man on Martha’s Vineyard, leaving the shepherd with just one cow to feed his family.
On May 11, Linzee commandeered two ships in Buzzard’s Bay. The first was the transport Champion, which likely was stocked with supplies destined for the rebel army at Marblehead. The second was an unnamed sloop from Nantucket, which Linzee seized under the claim that it lacked the proper clearance.
Onto these captured prize ships, Linzee “ordered a skeleton crew of British sailors and Royal marines,” according to Pope’s account. An estimate of the crew aboard one of the ships was “eight seamen, three marines, a gunner, and a surgeon’s mate,” all of whom reported to one captain, a midshipman elevated to the post, according to Derek Beck, an author writing in the Journal of the American Revolution.
As the growing collection of captured ships idled on the Bay, Linzee’s next effort sent one of the seized vessels into Dartmouth — which, at the time, still included the villages that became present-day New Bedford and Fairhaven. The cargo Linzee was after (smuggled goods, purportedly) had already been unloaded, but his men took the emptied ship as another prize. This raid within the harbor caught the attention of the colonists and snapped their newly formed militia into action.
But the colonists, desperate as they were for retribution, would not find any that first evening. The next morning, May 14, they awoke “just as the grey dawn pierced the fog” to find themselves within shooting distance of the British. Less than a rope-length away and drifting nearer out of the fog, Captain Pope saw one of the captured ships emerge.
“Ship, ahoy,” came a call from the captured ship. “Sheer off. You’ll be into us!”
Pope responded with a calm, “Aye, aye,” but did not change course. Instead, he rapped his foot upon the deck — the first signal to Captain Egery and the men below. Upon his second rap, the drummer boy would play his tune and all 25 men would explode into action.
A second call came. “Sheer off, you’ll be into us!”
“Aye, aye,” was again Pope’s response. His foot rapped a second time.
In the next moments, the sound of the drum sprang what the Success held in store: “Grappling the two vessels together, the patriots leaped aboard, [and] surprised the party below with this unceremonious morning call.” The British marine, who had called out the friendly warnings just moments earlier, saw that he was outnumbered and dropped his gun. He picked up an axe to cut loose the anchor and escape, but it was too late. The patriots were aboard.
From this first ship, the patriots took 13 British prisoners and confiscated their supplies. Prisoners were lashed together and secured by the weight of the anchor as the colonists towed them and the stolen ship back to port.
Pope wrote in his account that “the prize with the prisoners was at anchor off Fairhaven.” But then the colonists turned out to sea again, not yet finished with their hunt.
They came upon another captured ship in a nearby cove. When the patriots drew near, the ship hoisted sail and darted off. “The contest began,” Pope wrote.
Patriots attempted one cannon shot from a recently acquired swivel gun that, having lost part of its mount, was hastily tied down to a timberhead. “But proving yet loyal to the king, [the cannon] kicked out of the traces and went overboard at first fire.”
The British did not have cannons on their stolen ship either, so Patriot sharpshooters attempted to pick off the British captain with musket fire. Pope describes the captain in the crosshairs like a frightened hen ducking for cover: “Being dressed in the livery of the king and evidently deeming discretion the better part of valor, [the ship’s captain] sought to screen his plumage from the Yankee sharp shooters by standing within the gangway, giving his commands from that quarter, seldom exposing his person.”
But the sharpshooters found their target, and the captain’s extraordinary hardheadedness was recounted like a pirate’s myth: “He received a buckshot directly in front, on the retreating line of his forehead, which, piercing to the bone, slid on its surface, cutting the scalp in its course, and was found flat, within the scalp on the back of his head.”
The officer lived. His skull bested the bullet — flattening it, apparently — until the doctor on shore retrieved it from the back of his head, as flatly astonished as the lead ball in his hand.
With their second prize recovered and tales for a lifetime in tow, the men from Fairhaven returned to shore.
Remembering the Battle off Fairhaven
Some historians have chosen to remember the Battle off Fairhaven for the alacrity and easy triumph of the seaworthy New Englanders. Edward E. Hale, who was quoted in Leonard Ellis’ History of New Bedford, wrote:
“So soon as the outbreak of hostilities began to disturb the natural course of their commerce, the seamen of the New England coast took up the business of cruising against their enemies, as if it were quite normal and some thing to which they had been born and trained …. A people thus bred to the sea and able to assert themselves upon it in no time lost.”
Others have chosen not to remember the Battle off Fairhaven at all. Most histories of the Revolution acknowledge the Battle of Machias as the rightful “first naval battle of the revolution,” though it occurred a month later, on June 10.
“Historians will quibble about what these words mean,” said Jonathan Lane, coordinator of Revolution 250, the organization behind many historical reenactments and remembrances in Massachusetts. “I don’t stand in anyone’s way when claiming a superlative. Everybody wants to be the first, and that’s American.”
Whether the Battle off Fairhaven should wrest the title of “first” away from proud Mainers — or even Rhode Islanders — Lane said the South Coast’s tale is worth remembering.
“The real amazing part of this story,” Lane said, is the “group of average, everyday people — farmers, fishermen, whalers, furniture makers — who took up arms against a tyrannous government. They had no idea how it was going to play out. All they know is they are being treated unfairly.”
“These were men who lived a very dangerous life,” Lane continued. “They understood the risk of being out upon the water. They definitely understood the risk of going out against the might of the British empire — and the navy is the prime symbol of that.”
Commemoration
The Fairhaven Village Militia will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the first naval battle of the American Revolution, fought just offshore in 1775. This pivotal moment in history saw local patriots defending their waters against the British, marking the beginning of America’s fight for independence at sea.
When: 6-7 p.m. Wednesday, May 7
Where: Fort Phoenix, Fairhaven
“They were answering to something higher,” Lane said. And when the call came, “Their answer was, ‘There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to help a friend or neighbor.’”
The extraordinary courage of the men aboard the Success — and all 50 who stepped forward to volunteer for her mission — might be best understood in relation to their contemporaries who remained ashore.
For when the men and their prisoners returned from battle, the leading citizens in Bedford Village and Fairhaven overwhelmingly sought to apologize. A meeting on the following Monday morning aimed to “formulate an apologetic return to Captain Lenzee [sic] of his officers and men in company of the captured property,” according to Pope’s account.
After all, the wealth of the towns was “afloat in the port,” and there was no defense from British retribution — in truth, the attacked and imprisoned soldiers were supposedly the defenders.
Captains Pope and Egery, having lost none of their daring, wouldn’t see such an apology come to pass. They marched the prisoners off to Taunton forthwith.
Pope and Egery and all their men count among the first movers in an uprising that historian Gordon Wood called, “as radical and social as any revolution in history.”
“We Americans like to think of our revolution as not being radical,” Wood wrote. In the typical remembrance, Wood said, “American revolutionaries seem to belong in drawing rooms or legislative halls, not in cellars or in the streets.” The common telling of history, according to Wood, has preferred the founders to make “speeches, not bombs.”
But the Battle off Fairhaven, if it is to be remembered at all, is a reminder of the common cause, the uncommon courage, and the bonds of loyalty that bound neighbors together in a Revolution that would forever change the world.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
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Thanks for this vivid account of the Battle of Fairhaven and the colorful local individuals that made it happen.
The similarities between today and 250 years ago are remarkable. Instead of sheep and crops, the wannabe King in Washington is looting the populace of their livelyhoods, their dignity, their 401Ks, and their jobs, all with the help of the most “prominent” citizens and politicians.
Great story. Hollywood should take notice!
Wow! What a story! I’m so proud to be from that area.
I was a teenage British reenactor in 1975 and participated in the Battle of Fairhaven reenactment. It was a wonderful and immensely enjoyable recreational activity made even more enjoyable as it was held during the 200th anniversary of the USA. We began the reenactment in a boat rowed ashore at Ft. Phoenix where we recreated a battle to capture Ft. Phoenix from the Colonial reenactors. After taking Ft. Phoenix, we marched throughout the Fairhaven area in formation and engaged the Colonial reenactors in battles throughout the day. I would love to see this reenactment performed again during America’s 250 year anniversary. In 1976, our group of British reenactors based in Fairhaven was selected to serve as Queen Elizabeth’s Honor Guard when she visited Boston in 1976 to celebrate America’s 200th Anniversary. It was a very proud moment for my mother to say the least.