A Privateer Whaleboat Raid on a New Jersey Night
On the night of June 11, 1777, Atlantic Ocean waves racing in from the southern end of New York Bay slapped the sides of the two whaleboats creeping along the shore and attempted to climb aboard like raiding pirates. The privateers manning the whaleboats followed the waves out into the Bay on a similar raiding mission to Long Island. They intended to raid the homes of several prominent Tories or Loyalists pirate-style, capture them, and exchange them for captured Patriots.
Whaleboat privateer Captain William Marriner didn’t recite privateering success statistics as he and his whaleboat crew crept along the coast of New Jersey during the night of June 11, 1777, because reliable statistics wouldn’t be compiled until after the war ended in 1783. Even if Captain Marriner had known the statistics, he probably wouldn’t have cared. The adrenalin of outwitting the better armed British, and the probability of good profits for his trouble compelled him to undertake this dangerous mission. Adrenalin and patriotism enabled him to capture British soldiers and Tories and fade back into the New Jersey shoreline with his men and ships.
Captain Marriner and his whaleboat privateers were part of the sea war against the British Navy, at the time the most powerful navy on earth. The Patriot privateers and their rag tag maritime army inflicted tremendous losses on the British during the Revolutionary War and were instrumental in tipping the balance in favor of the Patriots.
After the Battle of Fort Washington on November 16, 1776, the Continentals or the Patriots evacuated Long Island and for the rest of the Revolutionary War the British controlled most of what is now Greater New York. Lord Richard Howe and his brother Sir William Howe shaped New York City which then comprised only the southern tip of Manhattan Island, into the center of the British political and military operations in North America.
New York harbor bustled with British activity. Hundreds of British sloops, schooners, tenders, and supply barges dotted New York harbor like white seagulls riding blue waves. British war ships protected merchant ships that supplied the British Army isolated in New York. Over 150 sloops and schooners carried farm products from Tory farms in New Jersey, Staten Island, and Long Island to Manhattan which was the main source of British supply. Sails of hundreds of vessels unfurled a continuous white canopy over the blue waters of New York Bay.
British ships of war escorted merchant ship convoys from New York across the Atlantic Ocean to England. Three decker ships of the line with tiers of heavy cannon, swiftly sailing gun heavy frigates, and smaller sloops of war ringed the British war ships. An armada of British and Tory privateers hovered to protect and defend British shipping and prey on Patriot shipping.
New York Bay and the Atlantic Ocean waters surrounding it also teemed with Patriot activity where an armada of Patriot privateers lurked to prey on British shipping and protect Patriot shipping. Captain William Marriner challenged the occupying British in New York and New Jersey, as part of the Colonial privateer army that successfully fought and often won battles with the most powerful Navy in the world. His whaleboat and others like it were part of an armada of privately owned and operated sloops, schooners, and whaleboats that avidly hunted British ships, captured goods, supplies, and British soldiers, and significantly helped supply the Colonial Army.
Patriots Were Privateers and Entrepreneurs
On March 23, 1776, the Continental Congress passed an act establishing uniform rules of conduct for Letters or Marque which commissioned ships as privateers. Owners of ships acting as privateers had to post bonds to ensure they followed regulations. Some scholars of the American Revolutionary War estimate that about 1,700 Letters of Marque were issued on a per voyage basis during the Revolution to nearly 800 vessels. These privateers were credited with capturing or destroying approximately 600 British ships. The privateers captured enemy ships and took them back to port. In port they sold the cargo and often the ship as well and split the profits between the backers of the privateer, the crew, and the government.
In his book Patriot Pirates The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution, Robert Patton reported that Lloyd’s of London recorded 3,087 British merchants ships captured, with 879 of those recaptured on the spot or ransomed. About 2,208 ships were destroyed or sold with their cargoes as prizes in American ports. Privateering was a business combining patriotism with profits. The lowest members in the crewman hierarchy could make a fortune if their ship successfully captured prizes.
The ships used for privateering were as varied as the privateers themselves. Privateers used ships from the scale of the 600 ton, 26 gun ship Caesar from Boston to the smallest whaleboat. Privateering crews varied from a small whaleboat crew of three men to more than 200 men aboard a large, well equipped privateer like the Defense of Falmouth, Massachusetts. Two masted schooners and brigantines were most often used in privateering.
The New Jersey privateers mostly pitted whaleboats against the ship of war might of the British Navy. As described by Fred J. Cook in What Manner of Men: Forgotten Heroes of the American Revolution, whaleboats measured from 26 to 30 feet long, were broad beamed, had a shallow draft and featured “sharply double ends.” Whaleboats carried crews of 14-24 men, usually local residents who knew the coastline and inlets as intimately as they did their whaleboats. The whaleboat men armed themselves with boarding pikes, and muskets or duck guns, but the weapons they relied on most were pistols, cutlasses, and surprise attacks.
The largest whaleboats carried only one piece of artillery, a small swivel gun mounted on the bow or the stern of the largest boats. The widely known secret about the identity of the swivel gun was that it was a large musket fixed on a swivel mounting so that it could be fire a quarter of a pound ball at all ranges and in all direction. It was a glorified small arm, not a canon.
Whaleboat privateers had to rely on swift, surprise attacks for successful raids. They had to swarm like angry bees over the decks of their astonished enemies, capture the prize, and quickly escape. To escape to safety, whaleboat privateers navigated across treacherous shoals and up winding channels where the heavier armed, deeper drafted war ships, couldn’t follow them.
Captain William Marriner
Many of the Patriot Privateers earned local, regional, and even national fame. Captain Adam Hyler and Captain William Marriner, two privateers from New Brunswick, New Jersey, became renowned for their whaleboat operations against the British.
General George Washington knew Captain William Marriner as a tavern keeper and a jovial, relaxed man with a good sense of humor. Tall with a large body and possessing great physical strength, William Marriner early in the Revolutionary War served as a private in the New Jersey regiment of Lord Stirling - William Alexander Stirling- but eventually he left and established a tavern on the banks of the Raritan River outside of New Brunswick. Patriot spies, informers, and whaleboat men used Captain Marriner’s tavern as an informal information clearing house and he conducted raids across New York Bay with the whaleboat men who were his tavern customers.
The British commanders in New York had instituted a policy of rounding up prominent patriots in New Jersey. Tories knew the identity of the Patriot leaders and they were familiar with the roads and the countryside. The British engineered repeated raids, snatching Patriots from their homes and confining them in the dank, disease ridden holds of British prison ships anchored in Wallabout Bay in Brooklyn and other locations. For their part, the Americans didn’t have any influential prisoners to use as pawns in exchanges, so they decided to acquire some.
John Schenck, a local militia captain, and Captain William Marriner organized a whaleboat raiding expedition bound for the Long Island shore where many prominent Tories had established their country homes. Captain Schenck had many friends and relatives in Flatbush that he had visited since childhood, so he knew the area well.
Captain William Marriner’s First Whaleboat Raid
On the night of June 11, 1777, Atlantic Ocean waves racing in from the southern end of New York Bay slapped the sides of the two whaleboats creeping along the shore and attempted to climb aboard like raiding pirates. The privateers manning the whaleboats followed the waves out into the Bay on a similar raiding mission to Long Island. They intended to raid the homes of several prominent Tories or Loyalists pirate-style, capture them, and exchange them for captured Patriots.
Captain William Marriner conducted his first and one of his most daring and successful whaleboat raids on June 11, 1777
Darkness settled over the land and sea like a black velvet blanket and Captain Schenck, Captain Marriner, and 26 hand-picked men in two whaleboats set out on Matawan Creek on the southwestern shore of Raritan Bay. They hugged the shoreline so that their boats could slip in and out of the shadows to avoid the British patrols that monitored the Bay.
The sky was overcast and a sword edged east wind swept in from the open Atlantic Ocean creating waves that romped across the open water meadows of Lower New York Bay and battered the sides of the whaleboats. North of the mouth of the Raritan River, the whaleboats veered over to the Staten Island shore reaching the coast just north of Princess Bay and creeping along the Bay close to land. The rough waters roiled the stomach of one of Captain Schenck’s militiamen and he became noisily seasick. Captain Marriner growled an order to the whaleboat men, telling them to throw the man overboard if he made another sound. The miserable man somehow controlled his seasick noises.
The whaleboats slanted across the Narrows, the channel that separates Staten Island on the west from Long Island on the east, and connects upper and lower New York Harbor. Grounding their boats on the shore of Long Island the whaleboatmen hurried to accomplish their mission. They hid their boats in the bushes, left a man to guard them, and stationed three pickets on the road to the beach so the British couldn’t turn the tables and surprise them. Then they moved inland on the next phase of their raid.
Captain Marriner and Captain Schenck had compiled a list of Tories that they had in mind for capture. David Matthews, the Tory Mayor New York topped the list. After him came Miles Sherbrook a wealthy Tory merchant and an enemy of Captain Marriner, wealthy Jacob Suydam, Colonel William Axtell, a member of the Governor’s Council and a wealthy Tory, and Theophylact Bache, president of the New York Chamber of Commerce. His brother Richard had married Sarah, a daughter of Patriot Benjamin Franklin.
Captain Marriner and Captain Schenck marched their men into the protective shadow of a neighborhood church, divided their men into four squads, and gave each squad a heavy plank to use as battering ram to carry out their mission. If the mission worked as clockwork as planned, each squad would raid a selected home at the same time, seize their prisoners quickly, return to the church, reunite, and make their way back to their boats in a group.
The raiders faded into the night to fulfill their respective missions. The fact that the British enjoyed an active and party filled night life in Long Island worked in favor of the whaleboat raiders. Captain Marriner’s men soon discovered that Mayor Matthews and Colonel Axtell were attending an all night party in New York City and they wouldn’t be home until before dawn. The privateer raiders didn’t have time to welcome home the British partiers, so they moved on to more promising prospects.
At the Suydam house they encountered Captain Alexander Gradon, an American officer who had been taken prisoner in the capture of Fort Washington in November, 1776. He had been billeted at the Suydam house waiting for a prisoner exchange and Captain Marriner’s men promptly liberated him. At the next house they found Theophylact Bache sleeping in his bed and they captured him and dragged him away.
In the nearby home of George Martense, Captain Marriner ferreted out Miles Sherbrook hiding in a garret behind a Dutch chimney. Captain Marriner’s men had entered the house so quickly that Miles Sherbrook hadn’t had time to put on his breeches, so they dangled from his hand as he stood staring at Captain Marriner in disbelief. Instead of giving Miles Sherbrook time to pull on his breeches, Captain Marriner prodded his prisoner to the gathering at the church. While they waited for the other raiding parties to return, Miles Sherbrook managed to pull on his breeches before Captain Marriner led him and Theophylact Bache to the whaleboats.
The Patriots Sail Home with their Tory Prisoners
The whaleboat privateers had raided the British and the Loyalist homes so swiftly and skillfully that they didn’t have a chance to sound an alarm or fight the Patriot privateers. The privateers quickly launched their boats and headed straight across New York Bay for home. On the return voyage the wind and the waves were at their back and the tide surged with them. The little whaleboats skimmed across the wide expanse of Lower New York Bay and it took the privateers only an hour and a quarter to reach Keyport, New York. By 6 a.m. they were docking at Matawan.
The whaleboat raiders hadn’t captured all of the Tories on their list, but they had at least two to exchange for patriot leaders and Continental Army officers and they had returned safely without fighting or losing a man. As he tied his whaleboat to the dock, Captain Marriner was already planning his next raid.
References
Cook, Fred J. What Manner of Men: Forgotten Heroes of the American Revolution, William Morrow, 1959
Cook, Fred J. Privateers of ’76, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1976
Donnelly, Mark P and Diehl, Daniel. Pirates of New Jersey: Plunder and High Adventure on the Garden State Coastline, Stackpole Books, 2010
Kemp, Franklin. A Nest of Rebel Pirates. Batsto Citizens Committee, 1966.
Patton, Robert. Patriot Pirates: The Privateer War for Freedom and Fortune in the American Revolution. Pantheon, 2008.
Donald Barr Chidsey, The American Privateers. New York, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1962.
Edgar Stanton Maclay, A History of American Privateers. Freeport, New York, 1970.
C. Keith Wilbur. Picture book of the Revolution's Privateers. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Stackpole Books, 1973.