He then discovered that all his powder had been shot away excepting one last charge. Instead of calling it a drawn battle, he rammed home this last shot in the locker, and ran down to windward of the packet, so close that he could shout across to the other quarter-deck: "I will give you five minutes to haul down your colors. If they are not down at the end of that time, I will fire into you and sink you, so help me God."
It was the bluff magnificent—courage cold-blooded and calculating. The adversary was still unbeaten. Haraden stood with watch in hand and sonorously counted off the minutes. It was the stronger will and not the heavier metal that won the day. To be shattered by fresh broadsides at pistol-range was too much for the nerves of the gallant English skipper whose decks were already like a slaughterhouse. One by one, Haraden shouted the minutes and his gunners blew their matches. At "four" the red ensign came fluttering down and the mail packet was a prize of war.
Another merchant seaman of this muster-roll of patriots was Silas Talbot, who took to salt water as a cabin boy at the age of twelve and was a prosperous shipmaster at twenty-one with savings invested in a house of his own in Providence. Enlisting under Washington, he was made a captain of infantry and was soon promoted, but he was restless ashore and glad to obtain an odd assignment. As Colonel Talbot he selected sixty infantry volunteers, most of them seamen by trade, and led them aboard the small sloop Argo in May, 1779, to punish the New York Tories who were equipping privateers against their own countrymen and working great mischief in Long Island Sound. So serious was the situation that General Gates found it almost impossible to obtain food supplies for the northern department of the Continental army.
Silas Talbot and his nautical infantrymen promptly fell in with the New York privateer Lively, a fair match for him, and as promptly sent her into port. He then ran offshore and picked up and carried into Boston two English privateers headed for New York with large cargoes of merchandise from the West Indies. But he was particularly anxious to square accounts with a renegade Captain Hazard who made Newport his base and had captured many American vessels with the stout brig King George, using her for "the base purpose of plundering his old neighbors and friends."
On his second cruise in the Argo, young Silas Talbot encountered the perfidious King George to the southward of Long Island and riddled her with one broadside after another, first hailing Captain Hazard by name and cursing him in double-shotted phrases for the traitorous swab that he was. Then the seagoing infantry scrambled over the bulwarks and tumbled the Tories down their own hatches without losing a man. A prize crew with the humiliated King George made for New London, where there was much cheering in the port, and "even the women, both young and old, expressed the greatest joy."
With no very heavy fighting, Talbot had captured five vessels and was keen to show what his crew could do against mettlesome foemen. He found them at last well out to sea in a large ship which seemed eager to engage him. Only a few hundred feet apart through a long afternoon, they briskly and cheerily belabored each other with grape and solid shot. Talbot's speaking-trumpet was shot out of his hand, the tails of his coat were shorn off, and all the officers and men stationed with him on the quarter-deck were killed or wounded.
His crew reported that the Argo was in a sinking condition, with the water flooding the gun-deck, but he told them to lower a man or two in the bight of a line and they pluckily plugged the holes from overside. There was a lusty huzza when the Englishman's mainmast crashed to the deck and this finished the affair. Silas Talbot found that he had trounced the privateer Dragon, of twice his own tonnage and with the advantage in both guns and men.
While his crew was patching the Argo and pumping the water from her hold, the lookout yelled that another sail was making for them. Without hesitation Talbot somehow got this absurdly impudent one-masted craft of his under way and told those of his sixty men who survived to prepare for a second tussle. Fortunately another Yankee privateer joined the chase and together they subdued the armed brig Hannah. When the Argo safely convoyed the two prizes into New Bedford, "all who beheld her were astonished that a vessel of her diminutive size could suffer so much and yet get safely to port."
Men fought and slew each other in those rude and distant days with a certain courtesy, with a fine, punctilious regard for the etiquette of the bloody game. There was the Scotch skipper of the Betsy, a privateer, whom Silas Talbot hailed as follows, before they opened fire:
"You must now haul down those British colors, my friend."
"Notwithstanding I find you an enemy, as I suspected," was the dignified reply, "yet, sir, I shall let them hang a little bit longer,—with your permission,—so fire away, Flanagan."
During another of her cruises the Argo pursued an artfully disguised ship of the line which could have blown her to kingdom come with a broadside of thirty guns. The little Argo was actually becalmed within short range, but her company got out the sweeps and rowed her some distance before darkness and a favoring slant of wind carried them clear. In the summer of 1780, Captain Silas Talbot, again a mariner by title, was given the private cruiser General Washington with one hundred and twenty men, but he was less fortunate with her than when afloat in the tiny Argo with his sixty Continentals. Off Sandy Hook he ran into the British fleet under Admiral Arbuthnot and, being outsailed in a gale of wind, he was forced to lower his flag to the great seventy-four Culloden. After a year in English prisons he was released and made his way home, serving no more in the war but having the honor to command the immortal frigate Constitution in 1799 as a captain in the American Navy.
In several notable instances the privateersmen tried conclusions with ships that flew the royal ensign, and got the better of them. The hero of an uncommonly brilliant action of this sort was Captain George Geddes of Philadelphia, who was entrusted with the Congress, a noble privateer of twenty-four guns and two hundred men. Several of the smaller British cruisers had been sending parties ashore to plunder estates along the southern shores, and one of them, the sloop of war Savage, had even raided Washington's home at Mount Vernon. Later she shifted to the coast of Georgia in quest of loot and was unlucky enough to fall athwart Captain Geddes in the Congress.
The privateer was the more formidable ship and faster on the wind, forcing Captain Sterling of the Savage to accept the challenge. Disabled aloft very early in the fight, Captain Geddes was unable to choose his position, for which reason they literally battled hand-to-hand, hulls grinding against each other, the gunners scorched by the flashes of the cannon in the ports of the opposing ship, with scarcely room to ply the rammers, and the sailors throwing missiles from the decks, hand grenades, cold shot, scraps of iron, belaying-pins.
As the vessels lay interlocked, the Savage was partly dismasted and Captain Geddes, leaping upon the forecastle head, told the boarders to follow him. Before they could swing their cutlases and dash over the hammock-nettings, the British boatswain waved his cap and yelled that the Savage had surrendered. Captain Sterling was dead, eight others were killed, and twenty-four wounded. The American loss was about the same. Captain Geddes, however, was unable to save his prize because a British frigate swooped down and took them both into Charleston.
When peace came in 1783, it was independence dearly bought by land and sea, and no small part of the price was the loss of a thousand merchant ships which would see their home ports no more. Other misfortunes added to the toll of destruction. The great fishing fleets which had been the chief occupation of coastwise New England were almost obliterated and their crews were scattered. Many of the men had changed their allegiance and were sailing out of Halifax, and others were impressed into British men-of-war or returned broken in health from long confinement in British prisons. The ocean was empty of the stanch schooners which had raced home with lee rails awash to cheer waiting wives and sweethearts.
The fate of Nantucket and its whalers