Download or read book American Privateers of the Revolutionary War written by Angus Konstam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the American War of Independence (1775–83), Congress issued almost 800 letters of marque, as a way of combating Britain's overwhelming naval and mercantile superiority. At first, it was only fishermen and the skippers of small merchant ships who turned to privateering, with mixed results. Eventually though, American shipyards began to turn out specially-converted ships, while later still, the first purpose-built privateers entered the fray. These American privateers seized more than 600 British merchant ships over the course of the war, capturing thousands of British seamen. Indeed, Jeremiah O'Brien's privateer Unity fought the first sea engagement of the Revolutionary War in the Battle of Machias of 1775, managing to capture a British armed schooner with just 40 men, their guns, axes and pitchforks, and the words 'Surrender to America'. By the end of the war, some of the largest American privateers could venture as far as the British Isles, and were more powerful than most contemporary warships in the fledgling US Navy. A small number of Loyalist privateers also put to sea during the war, and preyed on the shipping of their rebel countrymen. Packed with fascinating insights into the age of privateers, this book traces the development of these remarkable ships, and explains how they made such a significant contribution to the American Revolutionary War.
Download or read book Two Revolutionary War Privateers written by William T. Packwood and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-15 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Connecticut naval merchants become privateers and make numerous voyages to the Caribbean to obtain wartime supplies.
Download or read book Patriot Pirates written by Robert H. Patton and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this lively narrative history, Robert H. Patton, grandson of the World War II battlefield legend, tells a sweeping tale of courage, capitalism, naval warfare, and international political intrigue set on the high seas during the American Revolution. Patriot Pirates highlights the obscure but pivotal role played by colonial privateers in defeating Britain in the American Revolution. American privateering-essentially legalized piracy-began with a ragtag squadron of New England schooners in 1775. It quickly erupted into a massive seaborne insurgency involving thousands of money-mad patriots plundering Britain's maritime trade throughout Atlantic. Patton's extensive research brings to life the extraordinary adventures of privateers as they hammered the British economy, infuriated the Royal Navy, and humiliated the crown.
Download or read book Two Revolutionary War Privateers written by William Packwood and published by . This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two Connecticut naval merchants become privateers and make numerous voyages to the Caribbean to obtain wartime supplies (gunpowder, provisions, and armaments) to support the American Revolution.
Download or read book Rebels at Sea Privateering in the American Revolution written by Eric Jay Dolin and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature Winner of the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award A Massachusetts Center for the Book "Must-Read" Finalist for the New England Society Book Award Finalist for the Boston Authors Club Julia Ward Howe Book Award The bestselling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters reclaims the daring freelance sailors who proved essential to the winning of the Revolutionary War. The heroic story of the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America’s first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation’s character—above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos. In Rebels at Sea, best-selling historian Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately owned vessels, mostly refitted merchant ships, that were granted permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of war. As Dolin stirringly demonstrates, at a time when the young Continental Navy numbered no more than about sixty vessels all told, privateers rushed to fill the gaps. Nearly 2,000 set sail over the course of the war, with tens of thousands of Americans serving on them and capturing some 1,800 British ships. Privateers came in all shapes and sizes, from twenty-five foot long whaleboats to full-rigged ships more than 100 feet long. Bristling with cannons, swivel guns, muskets, and pikes, they tormented their foes on the broad Atlantic and in bays and harbors on both sides of the ocean. The men who owned the ships, as well as their captains and crew, would divide the profits of a successful cruise—and suffer all the more if their ship was captured or sunk, with privateersmen facing hellish conditions on British prison hulks, where they were treated not as enemy combatants but as pirates. Some Americans viewed them similarly, as cynical opportunists whose only aim was loot. Yet Dolin shows that privateersmen were as patriotic as their fellow Americans, and moreover that they greatly contributed to the war’s success: diverting critical British resources to protecting their shipping, playing a key role in bringing France into the war on the side of the United States, providing much-needed supplies at home, and bolstering the new nation’s confidence that it might actually defeat the most powerful military force in the world. Creating an entirely new pantheon of Revolutionary heroes, Dolin reclaims such forgotten privateersmen as Captain Jonathan Haraden and Offin Boardman, putting their exploits, and sacrifices, at the very center of the conflict. Abounding in tales of daring maneuvers and deadly encounters, Rebels at Sea presents this nation’s first war as we have rarely seen it before.
Download or read book Privateers of the Revolution written by Donald Grady Shomette and published by Schiffer + ORM. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narrative of the forgotten privateering war on the Jersey coast during the American Revolution Addresses the maritime conflict period 1775-1783 from both Patriot and Loyalist perspectives Reveals the hitherto untold account of the British “Death Ships” on which 11,000 died
Download or read book Ships and Seamen of the American Revolution written by Jack Coggins and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This carefully researched account of a lesser-known but vital aspect of the American war for independence chronicles exciting ship-to-ship battles, Benedict Arnold's efforts to build a fleet in Lake Champlain, the harassment of British ships by privateers, David Bushnell's "sub-marine" vessel and floating mines, uniforms, and much more. More than 150 black-and-white illustrations.
Download or read book Captains of the Privateers During the Revolutionary War written by John A. McManemin and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Citizen Sailors written by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-12 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the decades after the United States formally declared its independence in 1776, Americans struggled to gain recognition of their new republic and their rights as citizens. None had to fight harder than the nation’s seamen, whose labor took them far from home and deep into the Atlantic world. Citizen Sailors tells the story of how their efforts to become American at sea in the midst of war and revolution created the first national, racially inclusive model of United States citizenship. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal immerses us in sailors’ pursuit of safe passage through the ocean world during the turbulent age of revolution. Challenged by British press-gangs and French privateersmen, who considered them Britons and rejected their citizenship claims, American seamen demanded that the U.S. government take action to protect them. In response, federal leaders created a system of national identification documents for sailors and issued them to tens of thousands of mariners of all races—nearly a century before such credentials came into wider use. Citizenship for American sailors was strikingly ahead of its time: it marked the federal government’s most extensive foray into defining the boundaries of national belonging until the Civil War era, and the government’s most explicit recognition of black Americans’ equal membership as well. This remarkable system succeeded in safeguarding seafarers, but it fell victim to rising racism and nativism after 1815. Not until the twentieth century would the United States again embrace such an inclusive vision of American nationhood.
Download or read book The American Privateers written by Donald Barr 1902- Cn Chidsey and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-10 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Forgotten Patriots written by Edwin G. Burrows and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-11-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1775 and 1783, some 200,000 Americans took up arms against the British Crown. Just over 6,800 of those men died in battle. About 25,000 became prisoners of war, most of them confined in New York City under conditions so atrocious that they perished by the thousands. Evidence suggests that at least 17,500 Americans may have died in these prisons -- more than twice the number to die on the battlefield. It was in New York, not Boston or Philadelphia, where most Americans gave their lives for the cause of independence. New York City became the jailhouse of the American Revolution because it was the principal base of the Crown's military operations. Beginning with the bumper crop of American captives taken during the 1776 invasion of New York, captured Americans were stuffed into a hastily assembled collection of public buildings, sugar houses, and prison ships. The prisoners were shockingly overcrowded and chronically underfed -- those who escaped alive told of comrades so hungry they ate their own clothes and shoes. Despite the extraordinary number of lives lost, Forgotten Patriots is the first-ever account of what took place in these hell-holes. The result is a unique perspective on the Revolutionary War as well as a sobering commentary on how Americans have remembered our struggle for independence -- and how much we have forgotten.
Download or read book A History of American Privateers written by Edgar Stanton Maclay and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Naval Documents of the American Revolution written by United States. Naval History Division and published by . This book was released on 1964 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Struggle for Sea Power A Naval History of the American Revolution written by Sam Willis and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating naval perspective on one of the greatest of all historical conundrums: How did thirteen isolated colonies, which in 1775 began a war with Britain without a navy or an army, win their independence from the greatest naval and military power on earth? The American Revolution involved a naval war of immense scope and variety, including no fewer than twenty-two navies fighting on five oceans—to say nothing of rivers and lakes. In no other war were so many large-scale fleet battles fought, one of which was the most strategically significant naval battle in all of British, French, and American history. Simultaneous naval campaigns were fought in the English Channel, the North and Mid-Atlantic, the Mediterranean, off South Africa, in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, the Pacific, the North Sea and, of course, off the eastern seaboard of America. Not until the Second World War would any nation actively fight in so many different theaters. In The Struggle for Sea Power, Sam Willis traces every key military event in the path to American independence from a naval perspective, and he also brings this important viewpoint to bear on economic, political, and social developments that were fundamental to the success of the Revolution. In doing so Willis offers valuable new insights into American, British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian history. This unique account of the American Revolution gives us a new understanding of the influence of sea power upon history, of the American path to independence, and of the rise and fall of the British Empire.
Download or read book History of the American Privateers written by George Coggeshall and published by . This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coggeshall, the author of this work, is both well known and highly regarded by those interested in chronicles of the great days of sail during the early nineteenth century. Coggeshall's two volume work of his voyages as a crewman and officer of American schooners and his experiences with the navy of the United States are vital reading .... This book concerns the American privateers-- a subject the author knew well by close personal experience. Coggeshall commanded two letters-of-marque during the War of 1812-- David Porter and Leo. In this history he has attempted to embrace the fortunes of every ship, crew and commander and to describe the many battles at sea and the taking of 'prizes' that typified this engrossing conflict between the emergent American nation and the British--Publisher's description.
Download or read book Dark Voyage written by Christian M. McBurney and published by . This book was released on 2022-05-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dark Voyage: An American Privateer's War on Britain's African Slave Trade is the never-before-told story of the extraordinary 1778 voyage of the American ship Marlborough that sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to attack the heart of the British slave trading empire in West Africa. Conceived and funded by prominent Rhode Island merchant John Brown, the 20-gun double-decked brig and its mission would have been forgotten were it not for the little-known primary source document, Journal of the Good Ship Marlborough, recognized by the author for its extraordinary importance to the history of slavery and the American Revolution.
Download or read book Privateers of the Americas written by David Head (Historian) and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Head examines raids on Spanish shipping conducted from the United States during the early 1800s. Because privateering further complicated international dealings during the already tumultuous Age of Revolution, this study offers a new perspective on the diplomatic and Atlantic history of the early American republic.
