Free Patriot Pirates by Robert H. Patton Page B

“including jackknives, crowbars, and even the captain’s speaking tube.” A double-headed shot (used to shred an opponent’s rigging) that had torn through its main cabin was retrieved, loaded, and fired back at
General Gates
. The shell struck a swivel gun and sent its shattered pieces through Skimmer’s skull, the happy sight of which inspired the loyalists to fight for two more hours until the last of them surrendered.

    James Mugford captured the supply ship,
Hope,
from under the guns of Royal Navy frigates. His gallantry in defending his schooner made him a local hero. But the cutthroat maneuvering by maritime agents to profit from
Hope
’s sale would bring scorn from the privateering community.

    Skimmer had seized twenty-two prizes in his career, yet few had paid out due to muddled prize procedures, leaving his widow and eleven children destitute. Their plight came to the attention of Robert Morris, who demanded of his congressional colleagues that “something must be done for poor Captain Skimmer’s family.”
    In September the captain’s survivors were awarded an annual pension of $400, a generous sum. Wartime inflation would cut its value by more than 90 percent by the time the pension, for budgetary reasons, was terminated three years later.

Three
    Those who have been engaged in privateering are making large fortunes in a most rapid manner. I have not meddled in this business which I confess does not square with my principles.
    —Robert Morris to Silas Deane, September 1776
    I propose this privateer to be one third on your account, one third on account of Mr. Prejent and one third on my account. I have not imparted my concern in this plan to any person and therefore request you will never mention the matter.
    —Robert Morris to William Bingham, December 1776
    T he patriot expedition against Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, which secured the artillery pieces instrumental in driving the British from Boston a year later, had been financed with £300 surreptitiously drawn from the Connecticut treasury by Silas Deane, the colony’s thirty-seven-year-old representative in Congress. He left promissory notes for the money that later were honored, and any fallout from his disregard of proper accounting procedures vanished in the euphoria of the expedition’s success. But as an episode in which a desirable end justified dubious means, the affair exemplified Deane’s lifelong penchant for improvisation and hustle.
    His Yale education had brought into tantalizing reach the advantages of status and wealth not always available to the sons of blacksmiths. Left sole guardian to six siblings while still in his early twenties, he added an
e
to the Dean name to distance the family from its middling roots. He engaged in constant legal disputes with relatives and business partners, and ascended in society via two “brilliant marriages” to women from prominent families. His first wife, with whom he had a son, died in their fourth year of marriage, his second while he was abroad in 1777.
    Deane liked luxury and stylish company, and wasn’t one to cut his personal spending even when money was tight. He called it “a peculiar fatality” that he bounced from “one scheme and adventure after another,” but his expensive tastes and the expediency of many of his dealings made his fate by and large his own fault.
    In early 1776 Deane was chosen to be Congress’s undercover emissary to Paris. He got the job through the influence of Robert Morris of the Secret Committee for trade and the Committee of Secret Correspondence, the latter a foreign relations group seeking to establish a formal alliance with France. Like Deane, Morris had no patience for bureaucracy. “How tedious and troublesome it is,” he wrote the new emissary, “to obtain decisive orders on any point wherein public expense is to be incurred.”
    In observing that war’s chaos and devastation “are circumstances by no means favorable to finance,” Morris