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James Covey, African Sailor, Helps the Amistad Captives to Freedom

In 1839, a young black sailor named James Covey held the key to freedom for 53 Africans who appeared in a Spanish ship off Long Island.

They couldn’t speak English. They spoke in a strange language no one understood, at least in Connecticut. And there, in a New Haven jail, they awaited a trial to determine whether they were free or slaves.

Amistad

The U.S. Revenue Service had seized them and their schooner, the Amistad, in August 1839. Two Spanish plantation owners aboard the vessel, Jose Ruiz and Pedro Montez, claimed they owned the Africans and wanted them back. The Amistad had carried them from Havana to the Spaniards’ plantations when the Africans mutinied, killed the captain and three crew. They had only spared the Spaniards’ lives because they could navigate the Amistad to Africa.

The trial that followed hinged on one question: Were the Africans Spanish citizens, in which case they were legally the property of Ruiz and Montez? Or had they been kidnapped in Africa, taken illegally to Cuba and sold there as slaves? In that case they should regain their freedom.

Because James Covey spoke their language, he could answer that question.

James Covey

James Covey was a long way from home in the fall of 1839. Born as Kaweli in what is now Sierra Leone, he had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. His kidnappers took him to the notorious Lomboko slave factory on the coast. Then, shackled on a slave ship, he headed for Cuba and a lifetime of servitude.

James Covey

Though slavery was legal in North America, importing kidnapped Africans was not. The British West Africa Squadron patrolled the sea in search of illegal slavers. Fortunately for James Covey, a British warship hunted down his slave ship, Sgundo Secorro, and freed him.

He returned to Sierra Leone and learned English in a missionary school, where people called him Covie. Then he enlisted in the British Royal Navy as James Benjamin Covey. Perhaps the “Benjamin” came from the “B” branded into his flesh. He served aboard HMS Buzzard, which hunted down and captured slavers.

In the fall of 1839, the Buzzard was moored on Staten Island. Covey, working on the dock, suddenly heard someone babbling loudly on the wharf. Then he recognized the words — “Eta,” “fele,” “sauwa.” Someone, a white American, was counting to 10, over and over, in the Mendi language – his language.

He approached the man, Josiah Gibbs.

Abolitionists

Josiah Gibbs, a minister, taught sacred literature at Yale College. He had a passion for languages, and knew Greek, Hebrew, Arabic and several American Indian tongues.

Gibbs also hated slavery. He knew about the prisoners in New Haven jail. Everyone knew about them. They had been marched up the street from Long Wharf to the jail as people lined the streets watching. The jailer charged a shilling to get in and view the captives.

Josiah Gibbs belonged to a network of wealthy, well-connected abolitionists who mobilized behind the captives of the Amistad. Lewis Tappan, a wealthy New Yorker, headed the committee to defend them. Tappan hired good lawyers (including John Quincy Adams), raised money and promoted the cause of the Amistad captives.

Lewis Tappan

Amistad Captives

There were 53 of them, including three girls. They had been tricked by the two Spaniards, who sailed the Amistad east by day, but then switched course at night and headed northwest.

The captives had figured out what happened by the time they reached Long Island. The Spaniards feared they’d be killed, but then the Revenue Service arrived and rescued them.

News accounts described the participants in the drama: “Jose Rues [Ruiz], is very gentlemanly and intelligent young man, and speaks English fluently. He was the owner of most of the slaves and cargo, which he was conveying to his estate on the Island of Cuba.

Pedro Montes, 50, owned three slaves. Formerly a shipmaster, he navigated the vessel since the Africans mutinied.

An 1840 engraving depicting the Amistad revolt

Some of the Africans had decked themselves “in the most fantastic manner in the silks and finery pilfered from the cargo.” Others, in a state of nudity, lay on the decks, emaciated to mere skeletons. Cinque, their leader, 25 or 26, seemed “unusually intelligent, evincing uncommon decision and coolness.” Strong and well-built, he would command $1,500 at auction in New Orleans, the newspaper reported.

The three little girls, aged eight to 13, the newspaper described as “the very images of health and gladness.”

Courtroom Drama

Ruiz and Montez filed a claim in court, demanding the return of their property– the ship and its human cargo. The Spanish government weighed in as well, asking the United States government to return their property.

The abolitionists disputed the Spaniards’ claims, saying the captives had clearly been kidnapped in Africa and illegally taken to Cuba. Therefore they were free.

The U.S. Attorney for Connecticut asked the judge to determine if the Africans came from Africa or Cuba. If Africa, he asked the court to return them to Africa.

But how could the Africans prove they came from Africa, since no one in Connecticut could understand them?

Mendi

Gibbs had gone to the jail with a handful of pennies. He counted them out, one to ten, in front of the captives. Nearly all the captives spoke Mendi, and they taught him to count to 10 in that language.

After he found James Covey, the captain of the Buzzard gave Gibbs permission to take him to New Haven. Covey brought excitement and confusion to the captives when he walked into the jail speaking their language. He spent the next weeks and months with them, taking down their stories and helping Yale students teach them English. From his own experience, he knew without question they came from Africa.

Singweh, for example, said he’d been taken to Lomboko, as had James Covey. A vessel with two masts had taken him to Cuba, he said.

Cinque told him four Africans had kidnapped him while he worked on a road near his wife and three children.

Cinque

The captives knew of the same rivers in Africa James Covey knew. And they gave them a reason for their mutiny aboard the Amistad: The cook had told them the white men would kill them and eat them when they reached land.

Trial

The trial date was set for Nov. 19, 1839 before U.S. District Judge Andrew Judson. He had prosecuted Prudence Crandall six years earlier for the crime of opening a school for black girls in Canterbury, Conn.

The abolitionists bought James Covey a new suit for his courtroom appearance. During the trial, Covey gave a deposition:

I have conversed with these Africans separately in the presence of Dr. Gibbs, and they are consistent in their history of the place from which they sailed in Africa, and of their voyage to Havana, the events which happened there, and their voyage to the United States.

Based on the captives’ “language and manner and appearance, I am sure they are native Africans,” he said.

Covey then accompanied Cinque to the stand during the highlight of the trial. Cinque, wrapped in a blanket, told of his kidnapping in Africa, his voyage to Cuba and his capture on Long Island. At one point he sat on the floor to demonstrate how his captors had manacled him during his voyage on the slave ship Tecora.

Amistad replica

Outcome

The judge ruled in favor of the Amistad captives, but the Spaniards appealed the case. It went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where John Quincy Adams argued on the captives’ behalf.

In the end, the court ruled in favor of the Africans. Free to go, most of them boarded a ship, Gentleman, and sailed back to Sierra Leone. James Covey went with them.

Today, you can see a replica of the Amistad at Mystic Seaport Museum. Or you can watch the film of the same name by Steven Spielberg.

Amistad replica By Rhvanwinkle, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36402773. With thanks to Steve Thornton and his Shoeleather History Project for bringing our attention to this story. This story last updated in 2022.

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Stephen Higginson Tells Fish Stories To Parliament In 1771 and Gets Arrested For It

In 1771, the British government desperately needed to know how American colonists felt about fishing policies. Stephen Higginson filled them in, and almost got jailed as a traitor because of it.

Stephen Higginson served in many capacities during the American Revolution and the formative years of the country – military leader, representative to Congress and political intriguer.

Higginson was born in Salem, Mass., in 1743 into a family of politicians and clergymen. Well-connected, his single act of rebellion against his place in society seems to be his decision to marry Susannah Cleveland, his second cousin from Connecticut. As their families opposed the marriage (probably because of their youth), the couple ran away to New Hampshire to marry in 1764.

After returning to Salem, Higginson took up his position as a merchant trader, same as his father. He set up a home near East India Square in Salem across from the Lafayette Coffee House. Armed with introductions from his well-connected father, he sailed to England in 1771.

Stephen Higginson in London

Stephen Higginson

In England, Higginson had his first critical brush with politics. Higginson, on his travels in England to introduce himself to his trading partners, found himself summoned before Parliament to answer to an investigation about New England’s fisheries.

Higginson’s testimony gave a picture of how large and vital cod fishing was to the New England economy.

Seven hundred fishing vessels, most between 40 and 70 tons, worked the waters off New England fishing for cod. It took more than 4,000 people to man those vessels, Higginson estimated. Another 2,000 worked on shore, curing and preparing the catch for sale. And another 350 vessels, employing another 3,000 people, transported the fish to market.

Between 1768 and 1772, fish accounted for 35 percent of all New England exports by value. But the interests of the English and their American colonies often diverged when it came to codfish.

Fishing schooners

American fish fed slaves in the West Indies and Catholics in Europe. This resulted in New England fishermen trading with the French, importing French sugar, rum and molasses, as well as trading directly with the French in Newfoundland. Britain implemented a series of tariffs to limit New England fishermen’s ability to trade with the French, preferring to keep such trade for Englishmen.

By 1771, the arguing over the New England fishery had gone on for 40 years, and Britain’s Navy actively seized American fishing vessels caught trading with the French. Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament who sympathized with the colonists and their position, summoned Higginson to testify.

Stephen Higginson Testifies

The British, as usual, were concerned that New England was trading too much with Spain and France, rather than England.

Higginson explained that Britain remained New England’s primary trading partner. He suggested that restricting New England trade would result in the region being unable to pay its debts to English companies.

In particular, the Parliament questioned what New England fishermen would do if the government closed the fishery entirely.

A partial transcript of his testimony:

Under Questioning

Q. What would these people do if the Fishery was stopped?

A. I can’t readily resolve that question. I suppose they would remain where they are as long as they could subsist in hopes of being engaged in their old employment.

Q. But when that hope failed and they could no longer subsist?

A. Then they will probably go elsewhere?

Q. Whether they would settle at Halifax?

A. In general I think not … the Fishermen in Salem and other Towns are a very quiet and steady set of men They esteem the people of Halifax to be dissolute and of a quite contrary turn. I think therefore they would not sit down among a people so different in their manners. Another reason is that they think the Government of Halifax is arbitrary and have a terrible notion of it. Another, those who have been there have disliked the country very much as being inhospitable.

Q. Would they go to Miguelon and St Pierre and fish for France?

A. Don t think they would generally. From Marblehead some perhaps would.

Q. Why would they from thence?

A. Because the people there are of various nations Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch, but the others are born in the towns where they live, have tenements and freeholds there and would not leave their place of abode, I conceive.

Return of the Traitor

News of Higginson’s appearance before Parliament spread, and upon his return to Marblehead, the colonial authorities arrested him on suspicion of traitorous conduct. Higginson had walked a fine line in Parliament, both continuing to state the American case for greater freedom in operating the fishery while defending the loyalty of the colonists.

Fortunately for his sake, Higginson had brought a detailed account of his testimony home with him. When he presented what he had said, the colonial authorities reversed themselves and praised him for his poise and presentation.

Into the History Books

During the American Revolution, Higginson ran his ships as privateers, and in 1783 Massachusetts elected him to the Continental Congress. Following the war, he participated in the military force that put down Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 and 1787.

Higginson’s most well-known legacy involves his opposition to John Hancock, during Hancock’s term as governor of Massachusetts. Higginson was a firm Federalist, along with John Adams and many others. The Federalists wanted a strong central government, and they were opposed by the Anti-Federalists who wanted the states to retain more power in the new country that they were forming.

John Hancock, meanwhile, had become something of a political chameleon. He managed to win support from enough Federalists and Anti-Federalists to serve as governor.

Stephen Higginson led probably the harshest attack on Hancock, though there were many. He published the “Laco Papers” in a newspaper, castigating Hancock for a weak military record during the Revolution. He called into question Hancock’s fitness to serve, as well as the alliances he had struck with his opponents, including Samuel Adams. In addition to printing the letters in a newspaper, under the pseudonym Laco, he also had them bound and distributed.

The Laco Papers had a remarkable effect, though not the one Higginson intended. Historians agree that the publication most likely generated sympathy for Hancock and helped extend his political reign.

Thanks to: Life and Times of Stephen Higginson, Member of the Continental Congress (1783)

Images: Stephen Higginson, Delegate to Continental Congress, New York Public Library, Max Rosenthal(Etcher)

Postcard of fishing vessels at the Portland Dock, Maine, c. 1908.

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The Greely Expedition Plants the Flag ‘Farthest North’

Buddy Levy relates an inspiring and harrowing tale in Labyrinth of Ice, his account of the Greely Expedition of 1881-1884.

The expedition was a maritime venture carried out by a ground force, the U.S. Army. In the brief Arctic summer of 1881 a multinational company of soldiers commanded by Lt. Adolphus Greely, a native of Newburyport, Mass., steamed northward from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Lady Franklin Bay, an inlet along the east coast of Ellesmere Island. Ellesmere lies west of northern Greenland across a narrow sea.

Adolphus Greely

There the adventurers constructed Ft. Conger, the northernmost encampment in the world at the time. Their chief goal was scientific research. Commander Greely’s ulterior goal, or personal “grail,” was to plant the U.S. flag “Farthest North,” breaking a centuries-old British record. If possible he wanted to reach the North Pole.

The Greely Expedition

The explorers indeed eclipsed the British record by a few miles. They mapped much of the region for the first time and conducted painstaking scientific observations. They also endured sunless winters lasting over 130 days, fraught with almost unimaginable cold and hardship. During November 1881, for example—before the worst of the long night set in—temperatures averaged -24⁰ F.

The Greely Expedition’s accomplishments and derring-do at Ft. Conger constitute the inspiring part of the story. The back half of the book relates the harrowing part. The summer of 1881 was mild by Arctic standards, permitting the expedition to reach Lady Franklin Bay with little trouble.

But the summers of 1882 and 1883 were unusually severe. Ice kept resupply ships planned for each summer from getting through. In 1882 the lead vessel, Proteus, found itself icebound and crushed—compelling its crew to undertake a hazardous getaway to the south.

Greely opted to evacuate Ft. Conger in 1883 rather than try to wait out another long night. His orders directed him to retreat south that summer, while stores were starting to run low. The party managed to reach a designated rendezvous point at Cape Sabine, far to the south, yet was forced to improvise shelter to await a third relief expedition that might never come.

Salvation

Salvation did come in 1884—for some of Greely’s party. By then 18 soldiers had succumbed to starvation or the elements. Seven survived, including Greely himself. Barely: physicians on scene testified that the rest would have perished within a day or two had ships not anchored off Cape Sabine when they did.

Si survivors of the Greely expedition with their rescuers

Such a nick-of-time rescue would never pass muster in Hollywood.

The survivors received a hero’s welcome in Portsmouth, N.H., where the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic squadron and flagship gathered to greet them. Afterward Greely and fellow survivors heatedly denied speculation that members of the party had cannibalized fallen comrades. While press sensationalism tarnished the expedition’s reputation to a degree, Congress eventually awarded Greely a seldom-seen peacetime Medal of Honor—the U.S. armed forces’ supreme decoration for valor.

Lessons Learned

Levy leaves the lessons from the Greely Expedition mostly implicit, but they stand out for all that. First and foremost, to describe the far north as forbidding operating grounds constitutes an epic understatement. Natural barriers obstruct human movement on a colossal scale. For instance, Greely’s band encountered one ice floe 15 miles long. It took nine hours to pass while drifting southward.

The ill-fated Proteus

The icy north’s fickle dynamism is likewise striking. Ice floes were perpetually in motion. Seafarers watched for “leads,” or narrow sea lanes, to open as bergs jostled against one another. Sometimes a lane would open, then—as with the luckless Proteus—close around a ship like a vise. On one occasion the soldiers confronted a seemingly impassable iceberg, only to discover a fortuitous narrow cleft through the berg and make their getaway. Another Hollywood moment.

Second, Levy’s account arouses historical vertigo. For instance, the late 19th century was not that long ago, yet cartographers speculated that an “open polar sea” lay beyond a rim of ice. The top of the world was a tropical paradise! The Greely Expedition helped dispel such fancies. The book shows that the past is a foreign country, in earth science as in so many disciplines.

Third, logistics, bureaucracy and politics were pivotal and intermingled. The expedition was an army affair, but Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln saw Arctic exploration as a waste. Lincoln dithered constantly, delaying the 1882 and 1883 relief missions while encumbering their prospects for success.

Henrietta Greely

Levy casts Henrietta Greely, Adolphus’ well-connected San Diego wife, as a hero of the story. Working through press and government contacts, Mrs. Greely shamed the U.S. government into mounting a third relief effort—an effort orchestrated by the U.S. Navy when many thought hope for rescuing Greely and his men was forlorn.

Henrietta Greely

Professional mariners took great trouble to outfit ships capable of withstanding pressure from ice floes. And they got moving. The navy flotilla set out in time to reach Cape Sabine early in the summer of 1884, helped by Queen Victoria’s loan of a suitable Royal Navy ship. No more dawdling.

Warming Seas

And lastly, some years ago the U.S. Navy’s chief oceanographer forecast that warming temperatures will cause the polar icepack to advance and recede with the seasons. (For more on Arctic strategy click here.) Warming will open Arctic sea routes to shipping on a more regular basis, but it could accent the geophysical dynamism Buddy Levy documents so vividly, making navigation even more perilous.

Labyrinth of Ice, then, furnishes a historical baseline for seafarers—and New Englanders with a nautical bent—to think about northern operations in the coming years and decades.

Adolphus Greely, safe at home with his family.

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and the author, coauthor, or coeditor of ten books and hundreds of shorter works. An archive of his works can be found at https://navaldiplomat.com/.

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The Massachusetts Camouflage School that Taught How To Razzle-Dazzle

In 1917, the U.S. government set up a camouflage school for women artists in Marshfield Hills, Mass. About five dozen women artists came to the month-long training camp to learn how to camouflage cars, locomotives and battleships. Their work would help save lives on the European front and in the shipping lanes of the Atlantic during World War I.

Painting of the Mauretania in razzle-dazzle

Camouflage was a very big deal during that war, though deception had been part of armed conflict since the Trojan Horse. But not until World War I did camouflage become an official branch of warfare. Architects, artists, cabinetmakers, stage designers, carpenters, ironworkers, chemists – and women artists — brought camouflage to a new level.

The so-called camoufleurs designed uniforms that disguised soldiers as rocks, as sky, as ice. They painted designs on guns and covered them with camouflaged nets to hide them from aerial surveillance. And they tried to make artillery emplacements invisible to the enemy.

Camouflage perhaps reached its apogee with razzle-dazzle battleships, a technique the women were to learn at the Marshfield camouflage school. They painted bold geometric designs onto 1,250 US. battleships, no two alike, to confuse the German U-boats about where to aim torpedoes.

RMS Mauretania painted in dazzle. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The fantastic razzle-dazzle designs inspired none other than Picasso to claim the Cubist school of art invented the technique. Artists from the camouflage school left their mark on New England in ways that can still be seen.

Roots of the Camouflage School

A Dublin, N.H., painter better known for his angels made key advances in the science of camouflage. Abbott Handerson Thayer, an ardent outdoorsman, studied animals’ protective coloring. He and his son Gerald in 1909 wrote and illustrated an influential book called Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. The book discussed disruptive patterning (they called it ‘razzle-dazzle’), which breaks up an animal’s outlines. The Thayers also wrote about masquerade, as when a creature mimics something in its environment. And they described countershading, such as the white undersides of animals that make them seem less round and less solid.

Illustration from the Thayers’ book, showing a concealed ruffed grouse.

Abbott Thayer and his friend, fellow Dublin artist George de Forest Brush, proposed camouflaging ships during the Spanish-American War. They failed to interest the military. Theodore Roosevelt later mocked Thayer’s theories about camouflage, calling him ‘a poor lunatic goose.’

But Thayer’s ideas about camouflage reached across the Atlantic. For a time, it seemed, every country adapted his ideas about the strange art of Yankee origin — except for the United States.

Norman Wilkinson, a British artist who served in the Royal Navy Reserves, read the Thayers’ book. During World War I, he served on submarine patrol. When German U-boats began sinking British ships with abandon, Wilkinson suggested using razzle-dazzle camouflage to confuse the Germans.

Template for a razzle-dazzle design on a warship. Courtesy National Archives.

In the summer of 1917, Wilkinson took charge of a special Dazzle Section for the Royal Academy of Art. In a year or so, the Dazzle Section painted about 2,300 battleships in bright abstract patterns. (To see templates for the designs, click here. They’re fascinating.)

Norman Wilkinson painting of a battleship painted in a dazzle design, 1918.

The French had also formed a special camouflage unit in 1915, and called its artists camoufleurs. They, too, painted thousands of battleships in dazzle patterns. And in In Australia and New Zealand, women made camouflage nets to disguise guns from the enemy’s aerial photographers.

Back in the USA

Before the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, a younger generation of U.S. artists began to promote the art of camouflage. They formed the New York Camouflage Society, a group that included Gerald Thayer, Thayer’s cousin Barry Faulkner, Brush’s son Gerome and Homer Saint-Gaudens, son of the Cornish, N.H., sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

They offered their services to the War Department. As usual, the War Department didn’t have much interest. But by the end of July, a military mission sent to Europe recommended the Army Corps of Engineers create a 260-man “camouflage park.” In September, the first recruits reported to camp in Washington, D.C. By December, the camoufleurs had their own section, Company A of the 40th Engineers.

Camouflaging artillery in World War I.

They shipped off to France on January 4, 1918. Barry Faulkner spent the rest of the war in France, camouflaging artillery and machine gun positions.

Upon his return to the States, Faulkner painted murals, most notably the ‘Faulkner Murals,’ which adorn the rotunda of the National Archives. He also painted murals in the Senate Chamber in the New Hampshire Statehouse, Hartford’s Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, and the old John Hancock building in Boston.

Dazzled by the Faulkner Murals at the National Archives.

Camouflage School

When the male camoufleurs went off to war, the ladies took over at home.

On Dec. 3, 1917, newspapers picked up a wire service report that reported about the camouflage school.

“An appeal has been issued to women artists urging them to enroll in a camp for the training of women camouflage workers,” it said. Seventy-five women had already joined and as many as four a day were signing up. Camouflage school would last as long as six months. Before they arrived, the women were urged to practice at home by painting sailcloth with house paint.

As the men before them did, some of the women migrated south to New York City from New England. In 1918, the Army formed the American Women’s Reserve Camouflage Corps.

The women worked on camouflage uniforms, trying them out in Van Cortlandt Park and Kykuit, a Rockefeller estate, just north of New York City. Disguised as rocks and trees, they often fooled visitors. One police officer told a journalist in 1918, he knew they were there, “but ye can’t see thim till they move.”

Now you see her…

Now you don’t.

The military soon learned of the public attraction for razzle-dazzle camouflage. Women went to work painting crazy patterns on tanks, ambulance and trucks for parades and other wartime events.

One of those women, Edith Barry, grew up in a wealthy New Jersey family but summered in Kennebunkport. Before the war, she studied painting and sculpture at the Art Students League in New York and abroad, in Paris, Rome, Austria and Spain.

Edith Barry, self-portrait.

Razzle-Dazzle

Barry painted portraits and landscapes, at least until 1918 when she started painting razzle-dazzle camouflage onto military vehicles in New York City. She belonged to a group of camoufleurs who painted bold abstract patterns onto a replica battleship in Union Square.

Women artists painting a replica warship in Union Square. Photo courtesy National Archives.

The ship attracted a great deal of public attention. That, after all, was the point of the exercise as the razzle-dazzle ship served as a recruiting station.

The razzle-dazzle battleships also enjoyed popularity among critics, who compared them with crazy quilts at a county fair, a Russian toy shop gone mad and a flock of sea-going Easter eggs. Those critics failed to understand the purpose of the razzle-dazzle: to deceive the eyes about the speed and direction of the ship.

Since then, scientists have tried to ascertain whether the razzle-dazzle camouflage really protected battleships.

The Brick Store Museum..

At war’s end, Edith Barry resumed her art and her world travels. She painted a mural in the Kennebunk post office in 1939 as part of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. Also during the Great Depression she inherited a historic brick building in Kennebunk. She turned it into the Brick Store Museum in 1936. Dedicated to the history of the Kennebunks, it was one of the few museums founded during the Depression.

With thanks to the Camoupedia blog and Camoupedia, by Roy Behrens.

Images: Edith Barry portrait: By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54578744; Brick Store Museum, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18018629. This story was updated in 2022.

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David Dunbar Tries to Steal Maine from Massachusetts in 1729

David Dunbar had an uncanny ability to agitate people. Though born in Ireland to a family of little means, in 1708 he married Mary Murough, niece of an Irish lord who served in Parliament. Through these connections he received an appointment to be surveyor of the king’s lands and lieutenant governor of New Hampshire in 1727.

Historians have little positive to say about Dunbar. In his History of New Hampshire Edwin Sanborn notes: “David Dunbar (was) an Irishmen by birth and a bankrupt colonel of the British Army. He was needy, greedy and arrogant. He possessed no qualifications that fitted him for his new position.”

Upon his arrival in New Hampshire, Dunbar immediately joined the faction pushing to expand New Hampshire’s land holdings. He did it in direct opposition to Massachusetts’ political leaders Jonathan Belcher and William Dummer. Belcher would eventually serve simultaneously as governor of both New Hampshire and Massachusetts. He hoped to unite the colonies.

New Hampshire vs. Massachusetts

Twilight in the Wilderness, Frederic Edwin Church (Cleveland Museum of Art)

There were as many as six conflicting land grants that established wildly different boundaries for Massachusetts and New Hampshire. To the extent that he favored either side, Belcher sided with Massachusetts, where most of his business interests lay.

The competing sides took their case to England and all agreed that the king should make the final decision. King George II then surprised almost everyone by siding with New Hampshire. The king also gave the state much more property than expected. He based his decision on his reading of the original grants and their intention. He may also have believed New Hampshire was more loyal to the Crown.

King George II

Dunbar and his friends had won. He was a thorn in Belcher’s side in other ways, as well. Dunbar agitated local forest holders by aggressively enforcing laws against cutting timber that could be used as masts for ships of the British Royal Navy.

He was so despised that he was attacked in Exeter, N.H. by enraged residents who disguised themselves as Indians, beat up a surveying party, sank their boat and chased them into the woods, where they hid all night. Dunbar, in letters to England, would fume that Belcher and his government forces allowed the attackers to escape unmolested. It was probably not true, though Belcher had no affection for Dunbar.

New Hampshire’s Sancho Panza

In his letters, Belcher mocked David Dunbar. He referred to him as St. Patrick, because of his Irish roots. And he took great pleasure in deflating the rumor that Dunbar’s wife would receive an inheritance of 2,500 pounds per year. The sum, he assured his friends, amounted to 200 pounds.

Belcher often referred to Dunbar in his letters as “Sancho,” or “Sancho Panza” – a reference to the fool in the Don Quixote stories. And indeed Dunbar’s pursuits did have a quixotic quality. Another nickname Belcher had for Dunbar was “His Pemaqui-ship,” a reference to their biggest dispute.

Gov. Jonathan Belcher

In all the land grabbing that went on around 1730, Dunbar, who had a military colleague serving on Britain’s Board of Trade, managed to obtain permission to settle a colony in what is now Maine’s Pemaquid Region. In trying to curry favor with the king, he naturally proposed calling this new colony Georgia. And he would be its governor.

David Dunbar – Governor?

Dunbar wasted no time in setting up his new colony. He constructed Fort Frederick, on the foundations of old Fort William Henry at Pemaquid. Dunbar lured several hundred settlers to Pemaquid, drawing on Irish immigrants and New Englanders from elsewhere who were unsatisfied with the government. He offered land grants more generous than those available from other colonies.

He even temporarily received the blessings of the Penobscot people, who welcomed him as a friend. They soon rescinded their friendship. Meanwhile, the settlers built new homes and the seeds of a new trading post with the Indians began to take root. Dunbar quickly established six additional towns in the area as well.

Dummer and Belcher were furious, as were the leaders of New Brunswick. All parties – Massachusetts, New Brunswick and the Penobscots and other Indians in the area – believed Dunbar was trespassing on their land.

The agents for Massachusetts raised the matter in England. The King’s Privy Council reviewed the Board of Trade’s decision. The Council and the king decided the board and Dunbar had overstepped their authority. The new colony of Georgia was officially terminated.

In the aftermath, Dunbar was eventually brought back to England, where he served time in prison for unpaid debts. The fort he constructed at Pemaquid, meanwhile, would survive until 1775 when colonists destroyed it so it could not be seized and used by the British in the American Revolution.

Thanks to: Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690–1763, Jeffers Lennox.

If you enjoyed this article, you might like: New Hampshire’s Pine Tree Riot of 1772. This story was updated in 2021.

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The Battle of Margaretta, When Pitchforks Beat the British Navy

The Battle of Margaretta, by today’s standards, was really more of a skirmish: a sailing vessel with four guns attacked by woodsmen with farm implements.

But it was the first naval battle of the American Revolution, and James Fenimore Cooper called it “the Lexington of the Seas.”

The victors in the battle would protect Maine’s eastern coast during the Revolution and raid British ships.

And the Battle of Margaretta would have dire consequences for a town 200 miles to the south.

A British Royal Navy sloop-of-war, c. 1831, in the West Indies

The Battle of Margaretta

During the Siege of Boston, bottled-up British troops quickly ran out of wood. They tore up churches and fences for firewood, but they needed lumber to build barracks for their crowded soldiers.

A Loyalist entrepreneur, Ichabod Jones, lived in the lumbering village of Machias in Downeast Maine. He worked out a deal to send firewood and lumber to Boston in exchange for flour, pork and other much-needed provisions in Machias.

But Machias proved a poor choice as a trading partner for the British. Some of the town’s most prominent citizens sided with the patriot cause. They included militia colonel Benjamin Foster and Jeremiah O’Brien.

In the summer of 1775, two sloops carrying provisions sailed into Machias Bay, escorted by an armed British cutter with four guns, the Margaretta. The Margaretta’s captain, midshipman James Moore, circulated a document that he wanted the villagers to sign. The document said they would agree to protect the three vessels in exchange for the provisions they so desperately needed.

Many of the villagers agreed, but Benjamin Foster did not. He gathered militia from neighboring villages. The rebels then secretly plotted to capture the British officers while they attended church services on Sunday, June 11.

Machias in 1777, much as it would have looked in 1775.

Farce, Then Tragedy

There really wasn’t much to the Battle of Margaretta. It might have even seemed comical had it not ended in the deaths of seven combatants.

The Battle of Margaretta amounted to some three dozen woodsmen in a merchant vessel ramming a small, lightly armed cutter that sailed too clumsily to escape. The woodsmen overtook the British with pitchforks, axes and hunting rifles, using melted-down spoons as ammunition.

Hannah Watts Weston by an unknown artist. Courtesy the Farnsworth Museum.

So on June 11, the British officers noticed the Machias rebels coming after them in church. They escaped to their little ship Margaretta amidst a bit of shooting. Midshipman Moore threatened to bomb the town.

The two sides prepared for battle the next day. Two young women, Hannah and Rebecca Weston, traveled 16 miles from Jonesboro with bags of pewter plates, spoons and mugs for ammunition. Hannah, 17 and pregnant with her first child, lived to 97; the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution adopted her as their patron saint.

The Burnham Tavern.

On Monday, June 12, the rebels commandeered two sloops and chased the Margaretta, but the one captained by Benjamin Foster ran aground. The other, with Jeremiah O’Brien as skipper, chased the Margaretta.

As she headed toward the open sea, inept seamanship caused the Margaretta to lose her gaff and boom. That made the vessel hard to sail, and the crew had to capture another vessel for replacements. Then it had to fix the rigging.

That gave O’Brien’s sloop plenty of time to catch up with the Margaretta and ram into her side. The rebels then boarded her. Shooting and hand-to-hand combat resulted in the death of two Americans, four British and a mortal wound to Midshipman Moore.

Aftermath

Jeremiah O’Brien and his men captured two more British vessels, which made up a small privateer fleet.

Americans later staged several futile invasions of British territory from Machias. The British tried to attack the village in the summer of 1777, but broke it off as the aroused populace counterattacked.

As long as Machias held out against the British, they couldn’t seize the territory.

But they could retaliate, and retaliate they did: against Falmouth, now Portland, Maine. A fleet of British naval vessels fired flaming cannonballs into the town, burning down the harbor installations and most of the town’s buildings.

After the Battle of Margaretta, the Burnham Tavern was used as a hospital to tend the wounded of both sides. Moore died of his wounds in the tavern. Today a chest in the tavern said to be stained with his blood.

The Hannah Weston Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution now runs the Burnham Tavern as a museum. For more information about the Burnham Tavern, click here. This story was updated in 2022.

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