570 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

Archer’s work is valuable in prompting readers to reconsider what they might have heard about those events. With American soldiers patrolling foreign cities, experiencing sullen welcomes or worse, the Boston Massacre resonates today as much as ever.

J. L. Bell maintains the website Boston1775.net, devoted to “History, analysis, and unabashed gossip” about Revolutionary New England. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/83/3/570/1791777/tneq_r_00038.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 He has published articles on the roles of town watchmen and saucy boys in the Boston Massacre.

Commodore Abraham Whipple of the Continental Navy: Privateer, Patriot, Pioneer. By Sheldon S. Cohen. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010. Pp. xxii, 232.$69.95.) Of the twenty-seven men who were commissioned as captains in the Continental Navy, only two are famous today: John Paul Jones and Benedict Arnold. (Although remembered for his army exploits and treason, Arnold also commanded the American naval forces at the Battle of Lake Champlain.) A few of those twenty-seven are rea- sonably well known, such as John Barry, Joshua Barney, and Silas Talbot, but most of the men who made substantive contributions to the Revolutionary War’s maritime cause have largely been forgotten. Sheldon Cohen’s biography of Captain Abraham Whipple is thus a welcome literary tapestry, a vivid depiction of events woven together with threads of strong scholarship and attention to detail. There are occasional cross-stitches of supposition, but these are both fully ac- knowledged and judiciously chosen to put the biography in context. This work is framed by tightly written reviews of the early history of the Rhode Island colony, the Continental Navy’s recruiting and main- tenance of crew challenges, the long tragic Revolutionary War siege of Charleston, South Carolina, the often outrageous financial dealings that service veterans endured when trying to receive compensation from the nascent United States government, and the settling of lands just west of the Alleghenies. Cohen skillfully employs a mixture of primary and secondary sources throughout the book. The young Abraham Whipple entered his maritime career as a merchantman. During the French and Indian War, he captained a privateer vessel. He then engaged in smuggling and ran fast and loose with the British Revenue Service. (This was almost a sport for New Englanders, particularly for Rhode Islanders.) His flouting of the Crown’s revenue laws engendered hostility on the part of British BOOK REVIEWS 571 naval officers, which in turn caused Whipple to grow disenchanted with British imperial politics in the colonies. In 1772 he played a piv- otal role in the burning of the royal revenue schooner HMS Gaspee´ when it went aground a few miles south of Providence in Rhode Is- land’s Narragansett Bay. This was the first armed incident in which a king’s revenue vessel was destroyed prior to the Revolutionary War. After battles at Lexington and Concord marked the opening of the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/83/3/570/1791777/tneq_r_00038.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 Revolution, Whipple volunteered for naval duty, first as a commodore in the Rhode Island state navy, later as one of the first captains ap- pointed to the Continental Navy, and ultimately as a commodore. As captain of the Columbus, he was involved in the first major Conti- nental Navy expedition to capture arms for the Revolution at New Providence (Nassau). This task force, under the overall command of fellow Rhode Islander Commodore Esek Hopkins, included men who would later gain notoriety during the war: Dudley Saltonstall, John Paul Jones, and, for part of the sojourn, Joshua Barney. The New Providence expedition also produced a number of courts-martial con- cerning the escape of the British warship Glasgow. There were whis- pers about Whipple’s less-than-valorous actions during this fiasco, so Whipple requested a court-martial against himself so that he might be exonerated of a charge of cowardice. Good-natured, Whipple was generally well liked by his men, although, along with many of his fel- low naval officers, he had professional difficulties with the contentious John Paul Jones. Whipple’s greatest maritime success occurred while he was in com- mand of the frigate Providence.During1779, Captain Whipple suc- cessfully made the largest single capture of enemy prizes during the war on a voyage off the fog-bound southern coast of Newfoundland. Most of these successful seizures were accomplished by a subterfuge in which Whipple’s ships masqueraded as friendly British vessels. During these encounters, almost no shots were fired. The captured vessels, sent to Boston under prize crews, allegedly produced vast sums of money, and the outcome was called by some “the million dollar cruise.” Shortly after this highly successful expedition, Whipple’s greatest tragedy befell him. Forced to surrender his fleet, which was bottled up in the ill-fated defense of Charleston, Whipple became a British pris- oner for the remainder of the war. After peace was achieved, he fell into poverty, embellishing his resum´ e´ in hopes of prying loose the pay he thought he deserved for his naval service. Frustrating years were spent petitioning Congress for monetary compensation, to little avail. 572 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY

In his final years, the commodore and his family emigrated to Marietta, Ohio, where he became both a pioneer and, oddly enough, a mariner once again. His nautical skills were needed in Marietta, which sat at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers. At Marietta, Whipple helped build and then command the brig St. Clair—the first vessel to sail down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans and the Gulf. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/tneq/article-pdf/83/3/570/1791777/tneq_r_00038.pdf by guest on 02 October 2021 The commodore died of natural causes at the relatively ripe age of eighty-five in 1819. A portion of the inscription on his tombstone summarizes his contribution to American naval history: “He was the first on the sea to hurl defiance at proud Britain, gallantly leading the way to wrest from the mistress of the ocean her scepter, and there wave the stars and stripes banner.” The biography of Abraham Whipple is about an overlooked and somewhat tragic naval figure, one largely lost in the sea smoke of the history of the Continental Navy. Cohen’s work is relatively brief (179 pages of text), but his scholarly, well-written narrative should go a long way in establishing Whipple as a naval hero during the early years of the United States.

Louis Arthur Norton, Professor Emeritus at the University of Con- necticut, has published extensively on maritime history. His recently published books include Joshua Barney: Hero of the Revolu- tionary War (2000) and Captains Contentious: The Dysfunc- tional Sons of the Brine (2009).