Free Patriot Pirates by Robert H. Patton Page A

rampant enemy privateers to absolve them from liability should their cargoes start disappearing at sea.
    The Royal Navy captains “on cruising station” in North America privately shared the same foreboding about the enemy’s spreading ocean insurgency. “Time is drawing fast,” one of them wrote a colleague in August 1776, “that requires our presence in the English Channel.”
    1776
    B OSTON, M ASSACHUSETTS
    His capture of
Nancy
in November 1775 made John Manley famous throughout Massachusetts. “As many towns contend for the honor of his birth as there did for that of Homer’s,” wrote one fan. A Salem pub was named after him, and he was the subject of a popular drinking song with the refrain, “And a’privateering we will go.” Washington gave Manley the honorary title of commodore so that it “could inspire,” he wrote, “the captains of the other armed schooners.”
    The first to fulfill that hope was James Mugford, a twenty-six-year-old Marblehead seaman. In the final days of the British occupation of Boston he’d been pressed into service aboard HMS
Lively
, gaining release after his wife persuaded the captain that the newlywed couple should be reunited. He then talked his way into command of a Continental schooner,
Franklin
, on the basis of having overheard his captors discussing late-arriving British supply ships that were unaware of Boston’s recent evacuation.
    Royal Navy frigates still patrolled Massachusetts Bay. Within sight of their anchorage just south of Boston’s main channel, Mugford intercepted
Hope
, a three-hundred-ton transport, and brought it into the harbor after threatening to execute its crewmen if they didn’t sail where he directed them. Its cargo of a thousand muskets, ten cannon, and seventy-five tons of powder made it the richest prize of the Revolution.
    British frigates had been unable to prevent
Hope
’s capture due to “the wind being easterly.” Their commanders therefore were “intolerably vexed and chagrined that the above ship should be taken and unloaded in their open view” and were ready when
Franklin
and its crew of 16 returned to sea two days later.
    Hugging the shore in order to elude capture, the schooner ran aground at the north end of the harbor. Five longboats carrying one hundred armed soldiers bore down from two frigates hovering in deeper water. According to the
Boston Gazette
, Mugford surprised “our base and unnatural enemies” by cutting his anchor cable to let the current swing his vessel perpendicular to their approach. He got off a broadside of grapeshot at point-blank range with “two boatloads killed” as a result. His men hacked with cutlasses as boarders climbed over the rail, strewing the deck with severed fingers and hands. Mugford himself was seen “righteously dealing death and destruction” to five redcoats with his pike.
    Night fell. A small privateer,
Lady Washington
, joined the fight, in the darkness confusing the British into thinking they were outnumbered and prompting their retreat. The Americans claimed “fifty or sixty” enemy killed. British officers listed seven in their logbooks. Aboard
Franklin
, Mugford and one crewman lay dead. He received a grand burial in Marblehead complete with muffled drums and poetic elegies. “Don’t give up the vessel, you will be able to beat them off,” went down in local lore as the dying words of a fallen hero.
    John Skimmer was
Franklin
’s next skipper. In 1777 he was upgraded to a fourteen-gun Continental brig called
General Gates
in honor of the victor at Saratoga. The last of his many sea battles was against
Montague
, a loyalist privateer.
    Prowling the sea without international license, the loyalists feared that capture meant a pirate’s noose. Consequently, they fought “with ferocity rather than bravery” through three hours of beam-to-beam volleys. When
Montague
ran out of ammunition, its gunners jammed every available piece of metal down their cannon barrels,