By Edward O’Mahony
On April 18, 1775, the American War of Independence broke out with fighting at Concord and Lexington in Massachusetts. The British government, headed by Lord Frederick North, reacted by immediately sending military reinforcements to crush the rebels. The responsibility for keeping the soldiers supplied, as well as preventing arms shipments from getting through to George Washington and his army, fell on the Royal Navy. In October 1775, a squadron of British naval vessels bombarded the town of Portland, Maine, a major center of arms smuggling at the time, and left it in flames. A few months later, the town of Norfolk, Virginia, was similarly destroyed. The attacks outraged American opinion, and the Continental Congress, a representative body of all 13 states then in rebellion, decided to establish its own navy.
In October, Congress purchased two naval vessels, and this was followed by an order for two more ships in November. By the end of 1775, regulations for the navy had been devised, a Marine Corps had been established, and orders had been placed for another 13 frigates. One of the first seamen to join the Continental navy was John Barry, a native of Wexford, who is generally regarded as the father of the U.S. Navy. Barry was given command of the first ship bought by Congress, the “Lexington,” and over the next few years he enjoyed remarkable success in fighting the British.
For centuries, the policy of attacking an enemy’s trade had been an accepted form of maritime warfare. For the colonists in America, with no great navy of their own, such an approach was inevitable. Years of experience in smuggling, as well as an extensive coastline that defied a total blockade, produced natural raiders. From 1775 onwards, the capture of British merchantmen became the primary mission of official American naval forces and privateers alike. Privateers were ships crewed, armed, and paid for by merchants who hoped to make a fortune from captured enemy vessels, and both individual states and the Continental Congress granted licenses for this purpose. Ships engaged in ordinary cargo-carrying voyages were also issued with “Letters of Marque,” which allowed them to seize enemy vessels if the opportunity arose.
The number of licenses issued annually grew from 34 in 1776 to 550 in 1781, and altogether, the Continental Congress is known to have issued almost 1,700 privateering commissions over the course of the war. Not all licenses, of course, were actually put to use. Nevertheless, by 1778 over 100 American privateers were carrying out attacks against British merchant vessels, and this number had risen to almost 450 by 1781, when the war came to an end.
Initially, American raiders carried out operations near to home, but they soon decided to carry the fight to their enemy’s doorstep. In early 1777, an American captain named Lambert Wickes led a group of three vessels into the Irish Sea, where he proceeded to capture numerous vessels sailing between Great Britain and Ireland. Wickes was soon followed by Gustavus Conyngham, a merchant stranded in France by the outbreak of hostilities, who managed to obtain a commission and fit out two vessels with which to go raiding. Conyngham rapidly became a bogey figure for the English, particularly after his much-publicised capture of a mail packet. Soon dozens of other American privateers were plying the waters around Britain and Ireland. In June 1777, eleven British ships were captured in just one five-day period, and altogether it has been estimated that 2,200 British merchant vessels were captured by American privateers during the course of the war. Many of these privateers found shelter in French ports between cruises, where they could both sell the captured vessels and resupply themselves.
The appearance of numerous American privateers in British waters eventually led to the introduction of convoys for all British merchant vessels at the end of 1777. Most of the best British naval vessels were stationed off the American coast during this period, so local defence was generally left to former merchantmen that had been specifically adapted for the purpose. Even though they were old and slow, these guardships represented a significant threat to American privateers. On September 19, 1777, the Continental Navy vessel “Lexington” became the first overseas loss when she was captured by British naval forces.
For captured American sailors, the prospects were not good. If captured on an armed vessel, they were regarded as rebels and charged with treason or piracy. Many were imprisoned on the notorious prison hulks, retired warships that had been converted into floating prisons. Others were sent to prisons in Plymouth, Portsmouth, or Kinsale, depending on where they had been captured. Altogether there were about 3,000 American prisoners incarcerated in British prisons at any one time, and the conditions in which they lived were horrific. Naturally, many of these prisoners tried to escape, but the odds were very much against them. At Mill Prison in Plymouth, fewer than 10 percent of the prisoners were able to make a successful escape, and it can be assumed that the situation was the same at all the other British prisons. The remaining prisoners had to sit out the war and hope they would be exchanged for British prisoners in American jails.
In late 1777, an American envoy named John Thornton visited England with the assistance of David Hartley, a member of the British parliament and an opponent of the North government. Thornton was instructed to visit the prisons, compile an accurate list of the number of Americans held in confinement, report on the conditions he found, and distribute relief to the prisoners. Thornton does not appear to have visited Kinsale, but he did visit Forton prison at Portsmouth, one of the two main prisons for American captives. There he found the guards to be corrupt and sadistic. Thornton discovered that the guards often served the prisoners beef spoiled by maggots, watered the beer, and short-weighted the rations.
These stories and others led to an outcry in Great Britain, and a committee was set up to provide relief for the captured Americans. In just two weeks, 3,700 pounds were raised for distribution to the prisoners, and this subscription became one of the primary sources of assistance for them. Thornton made arrangements for the American captives to receive more food, and he entrusted the particulars to the Presbyterian minister Thomas Wren, a member of the British relief committee. No efforts appear to have been made, however, to ameliorate the conditions of the prisoners in Kinsale.
In 1780, another Presbyterian clergyman, the Reverend William Hazlitt * moved from England to the town of Bandon. He soon became aware of the conditions in which American prisoners were being held in the French Prison in Kinsale, and he began a newspaper campaign to help them. Hazlitt revealed that of 260 American prisoners in Kinsale, sixty had died within the previous six months, and of the remainder he wrote: “They have been closely confined there…Many of them are almost naked. Many of them, are sickly and dying. All of them are in the greatest distress, and without any other beds than the hard boards.” Among the barbaric practices Hazlitt brought to light was the tendency of British officers to run their swords into the hammocks of sick prisoners for enjoyment. The churchman also took up the case of a ship’s captain from Boston who was well known for providing assistance to English sailors captured by the Americans. This man was subsequently captured while captaining a privateer and was imprisoned in Kinsale. The man attempted to escape but was caught soon afterwards, and as punishment he was placed in a small dungeon and given half-rations for 52 days.
Hazlitt’s exposure of the prisoners’ conditions led to an immediate improvement in their lot. Charitable and sympathetic people rallied to the prisoners’ aid, and food and clothing became far more abundant. Hazlitt and some of his friends also made frequent trips to Kinsale to see and assist the prisoners. Some months after Hazlitt began his campaign to help the prisoners, three of the captives managed to escape. Local sympathizers sheltered the escapees, and the men remained in hiding for a long time afterwards until they could be smuggled back to America. At one point, one of the prisoners fell seriously ill, and it was generally expected that he would die. This caused considerable alarm, since the prisoner would not only have to be buried in secret, but the discovery of the body could lead to all involved being charged with murder. Luckily, one of the people hiding the escaped prisoners was a doctor, and the man was nursed back to health. According to Hazlitt, he and his friends saved the lives of between 200 and 300 Americans.
Hazlitt’s activities were not always popular with his fellow-townsmen, however. When walking through the streets of Bandon, he was often met with cries of “..beware of the black rebel.” Many of his parishioners were also not happy about his views. On one Sunday, when Hazlitt was more vociferous than usual in advocating American independence, one of his parishioners stood up, shouted: “I didn’t come here to listen to treason!” and walked out of the church. Nevertheless, the clergyman’s biggest problems tended to be with British soldiers, who took every opportunity they could to insult and harass him.
In America, the war was going badly for the British during this period. On October 19, 1781, the last major battle of the war, at Yorktown in Virginia, ended with a British defeat. In March 1782, the government of Lord North fell and was replaced by that of the Marquess of Rockingham. Rockingham had always been sympathetic to the prisoners, and his government now also began moves to reach a negotiated settlement with the Americans. The new government introduced legislation that would change the status of the American captives from that of rebels to prisoners of war. Not only would this mean that the prisoners would finally receive full rations, but it was also an implicit recognition of the independence of the United States. The Irish statesman Edmund Burke also introduced a bill to parliament that called for an exchange of all prisoners-of-war, and this was rapidly passed. In early April, 70 prisoners were transferred from Kinsale to Mill Prison in anticipation of the exchange, and one of the men who had been imprisoned in Kinsale, William Stetson of Boston, actually met his brother-in-law when he arrived at Mill. This was quite a common experience, because about 60 percent of all prisoners came from Massachusetts.
On May 9, the British government instructed the Royal Navy to assemble all prisoners at Forton and Mill, and to send a number of troop transport ships to Portsmouth and Plymouth in order to carry the captives back home to America. The remaining prisoners in Kinsale were transferred shortly afterwards to the two English prisons, but freedom was not quite yet at hand. Contrary winds delayed the arrival of the troop transports, and with almost 700 prisoners crammed into Mill, a flu brought by the men transferred from Kinsale spread rapidly among the captives. Large numbers of the men became ill, and several are known to have died. Nevertheless, on June 23, the first transport vessel finally left Plymouth with 215 prisoners on board, and over the next few weeks, all of the remaining captives were sent home.
In Ireland, William Hazlitt’s activities were not confined to just helping the American prisoners. On Good Friday in 1783, Hazlitt was walking through Bandon when he saw some British officers assault a number of local Catholics. The soldiers held the point of their swords at the mens’ throats and forced them to eat pork. They then forced the men to walk on their knees over the rough paved streets and perform “an act they abhorred.” One man died as a result of this treatment, and Hazlitt subsequently forced the authorities to bring the officers to trial. The soldiers apparently bribed or intimidated the witnesses, because the case was later dropped. After this incident, Hazlitt was regularly harassed by the military and threatened with assassination. The situation became so bad that the clergyman was finally forced to emigrate to America with his family. While he never received official recognition from the American government for what he had done on behalf of the American prisoners in Kinsale, Hazlitt did have the pleasure of meeting two former prisoners in Massachusetts who thanked him profusely for his assistance.
The American War of Independence began 227 years ago this month.
*The Reverend William Hazlitt was the father of the famous essayist and critic William Hazlitt.
For further reading: A good general guide to events in the American War of Independence is John R. Alden’s “A History of the American Revolution.” A detailed survey of the naval war can be found in Robert Gardiner (ed.), “Navies and the American Revolution 1775-1783.” In addition, Francis D. Cogliano discusses the capture and imprisonment of American sailors in his book “American Maritime Prisoners in the Revolutionary War.” For events in Kinsale, the best sources are George Bennett’s “A History of Bandon,” and an article by Ernest J. Moyne, entitled “The Reverend William Hazlitt: A Friend of Liberty in Ireland during the American Revolution” in the William and Mary Quarterly (April, 1964), pp. 288-297.