Naval History Archives - 250 and Counting

The Battle of Split Rock is really just a continuation of the Battle of Valcour, and a lot of it takes place in a location called Button Mould Bay (or Buttonmold Bay).

So why is it called the Battle of Split Rock?

That’s a fine question. On the western shore of Lake Champlain, just north of Button Mould Bay, is a formation called Split Rock Mountain. It rises sharply from the lake to an altitude of just over 1000 feet, and it’s where the confrontation between the British and the Americans resumed.

Button Mould Bay is an area of shallower water on the opposite side. It gets its name from a series of clay masses which have hardened almost to the point of concrete, into a shape much like an oversize button, or like the molds used in button making. Those concretions actually made it easier for Benedict Arnold to run his ship, and the galleys accompanying him, aground and set ablaze. This was the ship that had all of Arnold’s papers on it that I told you about the other day.

The post Battle of Split Rock–October 13, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

The Battle of Valcour Island didn’t really take place on the island; rather it was in Valcour Bay, a strait between New York and Valcour Island, in Lake Champlain.

After the failed invasion of Quebec the Continental forces retreated south to Fort Ticonderoga, at the south end of Lake Champlain. As they retreated they destroyed materiel they couldn’t use and left it behind in the relatively shallow, relatively narrow lake. This made navigating the lake tough for the British, so they took their time to get more reliable ships to assist with their next move.

That turned out to be a mistake.

As both sides prepared for the next conflict, the Americans scouted the lake and determined that they could effectively steer the British ships into Valcour Bay, where they would have ships waiting to fight them off. In addition, the wind was blowing the “wrong” way for British navigation, making things even tougher. Some British ships actually ran aground near the island but the battle itself was pretty brutal, with ships on both sides being badly hit. One British vessel’s powder magazine was struck and the entire ship exploded.

In the long run, however, darkness began to fall and both sides backed off. The Americans retreated, and the British basically stopped their attack largely because they were getting low on ammunition.

Benedict Arnold realized that Crown Point was no longer a viable defense point, so he destroyed and abandoned the fort, moving the forces to Ticonderoga. The next day, the British took Crown Point and remained there for about two weeks. Unfortunately, cold weather was already settling in and the decision was made to winter back up in Canada.

Remember when I said that taking their time was a mistake? Had they acted more quickly, they’d have beaten the weather AND caught the Americans by surprise. General Carleton and other officers recognized this in hindsight. Hessian commander Baron Riedesel noted, “If we could have begun our expedition four weeks earlier, I am satisfied that everything could have ended this year.”

And in a weird way, this battle was the catalyst for Benedict Arnold turning against the Americans. He’d lost a lot of personal papers during the battle, and when he requested compensation for some of his expenses in and following Quebec, he couldn’t provide documentation. He’d already been secretly negotiating with the British to change alliances (this would have been in late 1779), but that incident pushed him into resigning his command in order to be transferred to West Point, which he’d planned to surrender to the British.

Fortunately his plot was discovered and he fled to New York City, which was still occupied by the British. Eventually he got passage for himself and his family to England. He never set foot in the United States again.

The post Battle of Valcour Island–October 11, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

It took a month to figure it out, but the British ship movement up the Hudson River was a sign that they’d finally decided how they were going to implement their plans.

Rather than concentrating on New York City, which was going to be problematic because George Washington’s troops were pretty dug in over in Harlem Heights, Admiral Howe made the choice that ran closer to the original plan: start sending warships up the Hudson and establish a new foothold in the Pelham area of what we now call the Bronx. This could then become a base of operations for moving further up the Hudson Valley and make it very difficult, if not impossible, for materiel and information to pass between New England and the rest of the states. And since New York had a pretty sizeable chunk of Loyalists there, the downstate area should be fairly easy pickings.

So the British ship movement came as a surprise to nobody on the American side; what probably did come as a surprise was that it wasn’t as difficult to get through as they probably hoped they’d made it.

Washington and his War Council did plan for this possibility and there will be troops waiting when the British make their landing. We’ll talk about that in a few days.

The post The British Finally Make Their Move–October 9, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

…but the situation was not excellent, for the American side, anyway.

George Washington got a wake-up call in the form of a letter from Congress. In that letter he was told that it was not a good idea to burn down New York City; what’s more, they weren’t quite so invested in his holding the City as he thought they were. This was a good news/bad news situation for him, since he knew that strategically, the British occupying New York had the potential to be a huge problem, especially if they were able to take the entire Hudson Valley.

But even if they didn’t, having one of our biggest and busiest ports was going to create a lot of headaches, regardless of what was supposed to be moving in or out of the city.

Meanwhile, we have Ezra Lee making his first attempt at genuinely deploying the Turtle submersible. The currents plus the darkness made maneuvering very difficult, and while he did get close enough to Admiral Howe’s ship to stick the explosive charge to it, the spear he used couldn’t penetrate the hull enough to stick. In recent years it’s thought that he tried to pierce the hull near the rudder, which had an iron plate on it; another theory involved the recent use of copper on ships’ bottoms, but this copper was quite thin and would have been easily pierced.

Lee made one more attempt with the Turtle, on October 6, but that try also failed. The Turtle was lost less than a week later when the sloop serving as her tender was sunk by British ships. Who knows? Maybe there are still pieces of her in the Hudson River.

The post All Under Heaven Is Chaos–September 7, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

We’ve visited Esek Hopkins in the past, when we told you about the transgressions he committed that led to today’s activity.

To be fair, when Hopkins chose to engage in the raid on Nassau, the reaction in Congress was mixed, especially at first. John Hancock was happy that the Continental Navy had seized badly-needed war supplies from the British, but members from the Southern colonies were upset by this failure to follow orders. The whole situation became politically quite complex. Part of the problem was that privateers were easier to hire than Continental Navy sailors, and here we had a guy behaving like a privateer. This could only make the problem harder to solve, because privateers wound up getting paid more.

The debate went on for several weeks, with John Adams, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Richard Henry Lee, Robert Treat Paine, and John Paul Jones (who was at Nassau) coming to the defense of Hopkins. Regardless, in the end he was formally censured. In the long run it wound up worse than if he’d simply lost his command, because he had to return to his ship disgraced and with the respect of his officers lost.

The post An Official Reprimand–August 16, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

The career of John Paul Jones, or Captain Jones, as he became on this day, is marked by both brilliance and controversy.

Jones was born in Scotland and sailed on merchant ships before coming to America and joining the nascent navy here. Through the Revolutionary War, he was involved with several key battles, many times off the English coast rather than on this sise of the pond. This led to his having an international reputation.

But in 1787 he was left without a command, so he took on a position with the Imperial Russian Navy, rising to the rank of rear admiral. Unfortunately, he was forced to leave after being accused of raping a 10-year-old Russian girl. (He admitted to having sex with her, but not raping her, and he also claimed that he was not the one to have taken her virginity. Neither of these claims really helped his case.) The whole thing turned into a mess and Empress Catherine eventually exiled him for a minimum of two years.

Captain Jones moved to Paris and was eventually appointed as the US Consul to Algiers, but he died before he could begin that position. After his burial, the records were lost and so his specific location was unknown for many years. What was known was that his body had been preserved in alcohol and that he had a lead coffin. In 1905 he was located and an autopsy completed, which confirmed the original suspicion that he’d died of interstitial nephritis.

Captain Jones’ body was returned to the United States and he was re-interred in a bronze and marble sarcophagus at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

The post Captain Jones–August 8, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

David Bushnell came up with the idea for the Turtle submersible only days after Lexington and Concord. He’d been working on several different experiments he’d conducted at Yale College, and found a way to integrate them into a single device to use against the British.

The Turtle was revolutionary (heh) in a couple of ways: first, nobody had successfully created anything like it before, and more importantly, Bushnell (along with Isaac Doolittle) came up with the screw propeller as a means of maneuvering the vehicle. No water vehicle had ever used a propeller as a means of getting from one place to another, and while the design has been refined for various purposes and to improve efficiency, Bushnell’s propeller is easily recognizable today for what it is.

It was pretty brilliant for its time, and in September we’ll see it in action, in New York Harbor.

The post Testing A Turtle–July 21, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

Captain enlisted in the Continental Army not long after the battles at Lexington and Concord. He was commissioned as a Captain and immediately put to work capturing British ships.

One of the more surprising things about the battle between the USS Franklin is not so much the victorious outcome, which was starting to feel a little bit of a foregone conclusion at this point, or that the ships moving in on the Franklin at first pretended to be friendly Bostonians, since that was actually a common tactic.

It was the fact that his birth date and death date are the same calendar day. Mugford was born in 1789, and died in 1776, on May 19. That seems like the sort of coincidence that might get a little more attention.

The post Mugford’s Last Stand–May 19, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

The HMS Roebuck was a ship that tangled with the Americans numerous times. One advantage that she had over other British ships was a relatively shallow draught (vertical distance between keel and waterline), which proved helpful when it came to navigating some of the shallower waters off the American coast.

The HMS Roebuck had already had an encounter just south of today’s events back in March. She was also involved in the Battle of Long Island, which took place during the summer, in a battle on the Hudson River in October 1776, and then in 1777 during another attempt to take Philadelphia, this time as part of a successful assault.

There were other small battles that went on for another couple of years before she was finally recalled to England for a refit, after which she returned to America, successfully engaging again with the Americans. I

In 1783 HMS Roebuck finished her war service and was recommissioned as a hospital ship for the French Revolutionary Wars. In the late 1790s she was recommissioned as a warship and participated in the Anglo-Dutch War and then the Napoleonic Wars. Once the Treaty of Amiens was ratified, Roebuck was was used as a guardship, then a receiving ship. Finally in 1811 she was formally decommissioned and broken up.

HMS Roebuck was in action–most of it battles–for 37 years, a relatively long time for any ship of that era. Even though they were on the enemy side of the war, we can’t help but admire her record, which was quite glossed-over in this relatively small space.

The post Thwarted On The Delaware–May 8, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.

When you have seven ships and you encounter a single ship belonging to the enemy, the Battle of Block Island teaches us that it’s still possible to be overconfident.

Some people tried to frame the Battle of Block Island as a draw, but those people really weren’t paying attention. The HMS Glasgow took some damage, but far more damage was done to the ships that engaged her: The Cabot had its steering disabled and mostly just got in the way, the Alfred lost its tiller as well and also served as an obstacle. Providence held back and was undamaged; Columbus came in late and her fire was ineffective; likewise the Andrew Doria, which got stuck behind the Alfred. And the Glasgow got away, besides.

Between Esek Hopkins’ earlier disobeying of his orders and now this debacle, among other transgressions, he was formally censured. By 1778 he had been dismissed altogether from the Navy.

The post Battle at Block Island–April 18, 1776 appeared first on 250 and Counting.