The good pirates of the South Coast

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

In late July 1776, the Argo, a stout, 170-ton British mercantile ship heavy with West Indies cargo, pushed northward through Atlantic waters toward Newfoundland. Deep in its hold rested 40,000 gallons of molasses and 300,000 pounds of sugar, a sweet fortune at the time. In command was Capt. William Cochrane, responsible for delivering the ship, crew, and precious goods safely to port.

We cannot know what crossed Cochrane’s mind when he first spotted the vessel on the horizon. We know only what he might have seen through his spyglass.

A smaller ship, the Warren, less than half the size of the Argo, was moving toward them. Fast. 

Six gun ports were open along its side. About 50 men stood on deck, ready to open fire. At the top of the mast, a red-and-white striped flag whipped in the wind, a snake stretched across it and words Cochrane may never have seen before:

DON’T TREAD ON ME.

To the men aboard the Warren, the flag represented who they were: Americans. Citizens of a few-weeks-old country.

To Captain Cochrane, it meant only one thing.

Pirates.

The men aboard the Warren were privateers from the South Coast. They were merchants, shipbuilders and sailors, granted special licenses authorizing them to attack British shipping during wartime. Privateering transformed local maritime workers into one of America’s most powerful weapons at sea during the Revolution.

And few places mattered more to that effort than Massachusetts’ South Coast.

Once British forces occupied Boston and Newport early in the war, “there were no good harbors anywhere between Canada and New Jersey where Continental Navy or American ships could anchor in,” said Robert Barboza, a local historian, author and expert on South Coast American Revolution history.

Great Britain entered the war with the world’s most powerful navy, a superpower the newly independent states could not match. By authorizing privateering licenses, the states gained a share of the cargo seized by local residents while helping keep coastal economies alive.

“The British thought they were coming to fight a bunch of colonists with no army,” said Barboza.

But places like Massachusetts had over 100,000 semi-trained militia, and many had experience fighting alongside the British in the French and Indian War two decades earlier.

“So these experienced soldiers from that war were now your militia captains, your militia majors, your ship’s captains,” said Barboza. “They weren’t a bunch of country bumpkins fighting the British. They were the experienced mariners of a rebellious colony.”

The first privateers

Within months of the Revolution’s first shot in April 1775, privateers set sail. 

“The New Englanders are fitting out privateers,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to a friend in July 1775, “with which they expect to be able to scour the seas and bays of every thing below ships of war; and may probably go to the European coasts, to distress the British trade there. The enterprising genius and intrepidity of these people are amazing.”

In November 1775, Massachusetts became the first colony to formally legalize privateering. The Massachusetts legislature (meeting in Watertown because the British army had occupied Boston) passed a resolution that authorized the colonial government to issue letters of marque and reprisal, which allowed private citizens to arm vessels at their own expense and seize enemy ships. Anyone seeking a commission had to post a bond and provide guarantors, a safeguard against illegal captures. 

The first Massachusetts privateer bond was signed a month later for the Boston Revenge.

In March 1776, the Continental Congress formally legalized the practice for all 13 colonies.

The economy

The Argo, outgunned, never stood a chance. But the capture raised some diplomatic issues.

Captain Cochrane surrendered to Capt. John Phillips of the Warren, which had been fitted out by Dartmouth and Bedford Village shipbuilders Leonard Jarvis and Patrick Maxfield. After its capture, the Argo was brought into Dartmouth harbor and stripped of its sweet cargo.

A few weeks later, in August, Edward Pope, a judge of the Bristol County Court of Common Pleas, wrote to Nathan Cushing, judge of the Plymouth Court of Admiralty, on behalf of Sir Thomas Burges of Dartmouth. The letter asked the court to review the capture of the Argo because “the said Ship at the time of her capture aforesaid, was the property of the enemies of the United Colonies, and was employed by said enemies in transporting the cargo…, all which is against the said Resolves of Congress and Laws of this Colony,” reads the letter.

In essence, Pope was challenging the legality of the capture and the sale of the Argo’s cargo, arguing that the ship and its goods belonged to British owners and that Phillips had no legal right to seize them.

What Pope may not have known was that Warren had already been operating under a privateering commission for nearly a month. The Massachusetts government issued the license on July 5, 1776, one day after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.

Less than a month after the Argo’s capture, the Warren was already chasing an even bigger prize. The crew captured the 400-ton Isaac, sailing from Jamaica to Liverpool with a valuable cargo of cotton, sugar and molasses, according to Robert Barboza’s book “Patriots of Old Dartmouth.”

The capture did not go smoothly this time. A British warship had spotted the Warren.

On the morning of Aug. 24, 1776, as the Warren’s crew sailed the Isaac toward Cape Ann, the HMS Milford, a 24-gun frigate, started chasing them and fired its bow chasers 20 times.

The Isaac’s prize crew reached Marblehead under full sail with surprisingly little damage. With the Milford still in pursuit, the crew slipped into the harbor as colonial forts guarding the entrance opened fire on the British warship and drove it away.

The Isaac was put up for sale the following month. Like the Argo before it, the prize was brought into port and its cargo auctioned through an Admiralty Court and then divided: one-third to the state, one-third to the ship owner and captain, and the remainder to the crew.

In the case of the Isaac prize, after the various fees and shares were deducted, the owners, captain and crew of the Warren split about 300 English pounds among themselves, which would be approximately $66,000 today. For many sailors, it was more money than they could expect to earn in years at sea.

However, obtaining a privateering license was not cheap, and it was rarely a one-man operation. Most privateers were small partnerships of three or four people: a ship owner or a wealthy merchant willing to invest cash, an adventurous captain willing to take the risks, and another partner with the experience to outfit a vessel and hire a crew.

“The three of them would split the profits and they’d also split the risks,” said Barboza.

To obtain a privateering license, applicants had to petition the state council, post bonds worth the equivalent of $4,000 to $10,000 today, and agree to the rules: they could attack only British merchant vessels or Royal Navy warships, and one-third of any captured prize went to the state.

“The state loved to issue them because they were making revenue either from selling or the bonds,” said Barboza. If privateers were caught breaking the rules, the state would keep the bond. “And it was a considerable amount of money for a government that had no money.”

The American colonies issued nearly 1,700 privateering commissions during the war. Privateers captured 2,283 British ships and seized hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cargo, including cannon, gunpowder and other military supplies desperately needed by the colonies to fight the war, Barboza said.

“What the British army needed, the American army needed too, but they had no money to buy it.”

Privateering became the workaround.

The risks and the chance of a lifetime

The war had hit the South Coast economy hard.

About 70% of the local economy depended on maritime industries: fishing, whaling and trade. But once British forces occupied Boston and Newport and blockaded Dartmouth, ships sat idle.

For locals on the South Coast at the start of the Revolution, the choice came down to two options. With merchant ships blocked by the British, South Coast captains could build gun ports into their vessels, load cannons and try to fight the world’s most powerful navy. Or they could get a privateering license, speed out to sea past the bigger, slower British ships, and make more money while helping their state. 

“You had a thousand sailors out of work, couldn’t feed their families, couldn’t pay their rent, couldn’t buy food,” said Barboza. A sailor in those days might make $10 or $20 a year, working year round. A good privateer capture could get a sailor anywhere from $50 to $500.

The answer was obvious. “You risk your life, but it’s a chance of a lifetime,” said Barboza.

For Bedford Village, the stars aligned. Both privateers and navy ships would come looking for experienced crewmen. “Everything you needed to outfit a ship, whether it was an emergency ship, a whale ship, or a warship was here,” said Barboza. “You had sailmakers, you had carpenters, you had rope makers — you had everything you needed if you had to get your ship fixed, outfitted, and crewed.” 

The economy came back to life.

Privateers’ interests were after cargo, not people. Holding enemy prisoners required resources the colonies did not have. So in many cases, privateers left enemy crews aboard and stripped vessels of valuable goods.

The British did not extend the same treatment.

“During the eight years of the war, more than 1,300 privateers were captured by the Royal Navy or British privateers,” said Barboza. Some went to prison, some were exchanged for British prisoners, and “others took the ugly option of joining the Royal Navy, escaping prison.”

The British considered privateers as pirates who were not protected by the rules of war since they did not recognize the American Continental Congress or the Massachusetts government, Barboza explained.

“More American seamen died in British prisons than died in combat against the British navy,” he said.

But those who evaded capture often became enormously wealthy by the end of the war, enough to easily enter aristocratic circles, Barboza said. “It was like hitting the lottery.”

The end of an era

During the War of 1812, fought in part over British interference with American shipping and maritime rights, privateers became even more of a crucial weapon.

Writing to newspaper editor William Duane in the opening weeks of the war, former President Jefferson believed privateers could succeed:

“Their fleet will annihilate our public force on the water, but our privateers will eat out the vitals of their commerce.”

And he was right. At the time the United States counted only 16 warships. The Royal Navy had more than 500 in active service.

According to the U.S. Naval Institute, while the U.S. Navy captured about 250 British vessels during the three years of the war, American privateers captured somewhere between 1,200 and 2,000 merchant vessels worth millions of dollars of cargo.

A month before the end of the war, Jefferson wrote to James Monroe, at the time Secretary of State and Secretary of War.

“Privateers will find their own men & money. let nothing be spared to encourage them. They are the dagger which strikes at the heart of the enemy, their commerce,” he wrote. The warships rendered great service, he added, but did not have significant physical impact on the British. Our privateers “are bearding and blockading the enemy in their own seaports. encourage them to burn all their prizes, & let the public pay for them. they will cheat us enormously. no matter; they will make their merchants feel, and squeal, & cry out for peace.”

When the war ended, the nation’s priorities shifted from winning independence to building a country and joining the international community.

And privateering had become increasingly controversial. Critics ranged from government leaders to ordinary citizens. Some saw it as legalized piracy that preyed on innocent merchants. Others argued that free trade should be protected and that private property at sea deserved the same immunity from seizure as private property on land.

The practice survived for more than a century after the Revolution, when the United States formally renounced privateering with the Hague Peace Conference of 1907.

By then, the states had long stopped issuing privateering licenses. The term privateers gradually went from titles to footnotes in government documents and correspondence, replaced by the accomplishments of the U.S. Navy.

George Coggeshall, a former privateer captain and author whose writings were later criticized by Theodore Roosevelt for romanticizing privateering, believed privateers never received the recognition they deserved.

“Can any man of common sense, imagine that these worthy men would risk their lives and reputation, for a mere mercenary hire, without an ardent love of their country, and a desire to revenge themselves upon the tyrants of the seas, who had insulted and abused the most of them for many years?” wrote Coggeshall. “On the contrary, they were, with hardly an exception, a dashing, brave set of disinterested men, and an honor to their country.” 

Email Eleonora Bianchi at ebianchi@newbedfordlight.org.

---

More by Eleonora Bianchi

---

---

---