anger with grudges more robust. They
had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the Bay of Biscay to
Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental Congress ready to issue
privateering commissions and letters of marque than for them it was up
anchor and away to bag a Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled
his arrival with a deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than
he received orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for
mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred eager
privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern rendezvous. The
timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms and nine-pounders,
muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases, boarding-pikes, hand
grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and doubleheaded shot.

In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and Baltimore,
crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a strapping recruiting
officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and able-bodied landsmen who had
a mind to distinguish themselves in the glorious cause of their country
and make their fortunes." Many a ship's company was mustered between
noon and sunset, including men who had served in armed merchantmen and
who in times of nominal peace had fought the marauders of Europe or
whipped the corsairs of Barbary in the Strait of Gibraltar. Never was a
race of seamen so admirably fitted for the daring trade of privateering
as the crews of these tall sloops, topsail schooners, and smart
square-riggers, their sides checkered with gun-ports, and ready to drive
to sea like hawks.

In some instances the assurance of these hardy men was both absurd and
sublime. Ramshackle boats with twenty or thirty men aboard, mounting one
or two old guns, sallied out in the expectation of gold and glory, only
to be captured by the first British cruiser that chanced to sight them.
A few even sailed with no cannon at all, confident of taking them out
of the first prize overhauled by laying alongside--and so in some cases
they actually did.

The privateersmen of the Revolution played a larger part in winning the
war than has been commonly recognized. This fact, however, was clearly
perceived by Englishmen of that era, as "The London Spectator" candidly
admitted: "The books at Lloyds will recount it, and the rate of
assurances at that time will prove what their diminutive strength was
able to effect in the face of our navy, and that when nearly one hundred
pennan