The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution
has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of
America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly
revealed the new nation's character--above all, its ambition and
entrepreneurial ethos.
In Rebels at Sea, best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin corrects that
significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called,
were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately
owned vessels, mostly refitted merchant ships, that were granted
permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of
war. As Dolin stirringly demonstrates, at a time when the young
Continental Navy numbered no more than about sixty vessels all told,
privateers rushed to fill the gaps. Nearly 2,000 set sail over the
course of the war, with tens of thousands of Americans serving on them
and capturing some 1,800 British ships. Privateers came in all shapes
and sizes, from twenty-five foot long whaleboats to full-rigged ships
more than 100 feet long. Bristling with cannons, swivel guns, muskets,
and pikes, they tormented their foes on the broad Atlantic and in bays
and harbors on both sides of the ocean.
The men who owned the ships, as well as their captains and crew, would
divide the profits of a successful cruise--and suffer all the more if
their ship was captured or sunk, with privateersmen facing hellish
conditions on British prison hulks, where they were treated not as enemy
combatants but as pirates. Some Americans viewed them similarly, as
cynical opportunists whose only aim was loot. Yet Dolin shows that
privateersmen were as patriotic as their fellow Americans, and moreover
that they greatly contributed to the war's success: diverting critical
British resources to protecting their shipping, playing a key role in
bringing France into the war on the side of the United States, providing
much-needed supplies at home, and bolstering the new nation's confidence
that it might actually defeat the most powerful military force in the
world.
Creating an entirely new pantheon of Revolutionary heroes, Dolin
reclaims such forgotten privateersmen as Captain Jonathan Haraden and
Offin Boardman, putting their exploits, and sacrifices, at the very
center of the conflict. Abounding in tales of daring maneuvers and
deadly encounters, Rebels at Sea presents this nation's first war as
we have rarely seen it before.
