Plunder and Pillage by Harold Horwood

Author:Harold Horwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIOGRAPHY and AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Criminals and Outlaws, HISTORY / Canada / General
Publisher: Formac
Published: 2011-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

THE SPIRIT OF ’76

“THE YEARS OF THE PIRATES” still fresh in the folk memory of Canada’s Atlantic provinces are, strangely enough, years of glory celebrated in American history. The “pirates” in question were privateers carrying letters of marque from some embryo American state or other, occasionally even from the Continental Congress. But since some of them specialized not in attacking merchant ships but in raiding towns and villages and in campaigns of pillage through the countryside, they are remembered as pirates not only in folklore but in most of the documents of the time.

When the War of Independence erupted in 1775, the rebellious colonies expected Nova Scotia, and perhaps even Newfoundland, to join in their campaign to throw off the yoke of the King. When this failed to happen, they turned loose a swarm of raiders against the “Tories” of the north. Anyone not bearing arms against Great Britain was a legitimate target: his jewellery, money, and silverware free to be seized in a swift night attack, or his house burned at dawn.

The American naval historian D.W. Knox estimates that the American colonies issued letters of marque to some two thousand ships (all but a handful of them converted merchant ships) with eighteen thousand guns and seventy thousand men, not all serving at once but at sea throughout some part of the war. Some ships prowled along distant shores. Some fought out of French ports in the home waters of Great Britain. Others hugged the coastline of North America, raiding fishing settlements as far away as Labrador, carrying off cargoes of salt cod and barrels of oil, sinking small boats, and burning fish stages. Their most lucrative raids were in Nova Scotia, against the wealthy outports and the comfortable farms of the Annapolis Valley.

Though the rebels certainly got the better of the war at sea, they didn’t have things entirely their own way. Michael Francklin, Joshua Mauger, and Malachi Salter were all privateering merchants operating out of Halifax in 1758, and Alexander Brymer owned a ship named the Halifax that he armed and equipped to raid rebel shipping. The Revenge and the Liverpool were two others that brought prizes to the Nova Scotia capital.

Then there was the Lucy, sailing out of Liverpool after the economy of that port had been all but ruined by rebel depredations. A committee of merchants got together, outfitted her, and raised a crew under Captain Freeman (a name famous in privateering a generation later), claiming they had suffered great losses and hoping to make good some small part of the same. The names of those who bought shares in the Lucy crop up again and again in the records of privateering at Liverpool: Tinkham, Freeman, Bradford, and Collins. She sailed with “twenty-three officers and men, three owners, a boy, and a cripple.” A cripple? Not, perhaps, as odd as it sounds. He was likely the captain’s clerk, keeping the accounts, for the captains of such ships weren’t always master mariners and in some cases might even be illiterate.

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