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Posted on 10/23/2003 12:01:40 AM PDT by SAMWolf
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 are acknowledged, affirmed and commemorated.
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Joseph Bucklin fired a musket and hit a British military officer in an intentional attack on the English Navy. That shot caused the immediate surrender of the English Navy ship Gaspee. In short: Joseph fired the most important shot in the capture and burning of the ship Gaspee. Some call this shot the first shot in the American Revolution.  The Gaspee was an English revenue cutter, preventing smuggling and collecting taxes. When the Gaspee went aground, a number of men of the Providence area rowed out, and attacked the ship. Joseph Bucklin shot and wounded the English Navy captain, the attackers successfully boarded and overpowered the crew, the attackers took the English navy crew off the ship, and burned the Gaspee. The English Attorney General gave a legal opinion that it was "treason" and an "act of war". England attempted to find who was involved, and bring the attackers back to be tried in England. The colonists insisted that this violated the rights of Englishmen to be tried by a jury of their own vicarage. Although the attackers included many prominent men of Rhode Island, the people of Rhode Island successfully kept the identity of the attackers secret from the English until after the end of the Revolutionary War. The Rhode Island 1772 attack on the British Navy's armed schooner Gaspee gives us insight into the thoughts and motives of the American colonists in the years immediately preceding the 1775 battles of Concord and Lexington. The men who led the assault on the King's ship Gaspee were not struggling farmers, or persons without land, apprentices, or unemployed sailors. The leaders of this assault were leaders of the Rhode Island colony: merchants, sea captains, and lawyers - some of them members of the General Assembly. The leaders were not acting on the spur of the moment, because of some immediate action of a tax collector. The attack was planned, by men who had thought about the structure of society and the relationship there should be between Rhode Island and the English in England.  The shooting of the English navy commander was not planned, but obviously taking 100 men to the Gaspee meant that the Rhode Island attackers expected the use of force to board the Gaspee. After the attack, the English Attorney General joined with the English Solicitor General in London to give a formal opinion by the most senior law officials of the day that the attack was "treason" and an "act of war." Until then, each of the acts of violence or resistance by the colonists had not been so labeled by the English legal system. Little wonder that the Rhode Island governor feared that in retaliation to the Gaspee attack, there would be an invasion of the colony by the British troops then stationed in Boston. Early in 1772 the British Government sent ships, including the Gaspee and Beaver, armed navy schooners, to Rhode Island with orders to assist the Revenue Officers of the colony in stamping out smuggling and illicit trade. Lieutenant Dudingston, Commander of the Gaspee, was an energetic young officer who detested what he called the 'piratical scum' that piloted their ships on the seaways of Rhode Island. It is true that the Rhode Island ship captains and merchants made a regular business of smuggling and otherwise ignoring the imperial English taxes on Americans importing goods. Among the 'piratical scum' were some of America's great sea captains: Abraham Whipple, Samuel Dunn, John Hopkins, Joseph Tillinghast, and Simeon Potter.  John Brown Dudingston proceeded to make his ship an anathema to the seafarers of the colony. He stopped and searched all ships that entered Narragansett Bay, not pleasantly, but in a harsh manner intended to secure obeisance of his commands. The cargoes of two coastal ships were impounded, and, in probable violation of the law, he sent them, not to the local Rhode Island court for condemnation as smuggling ships, but to Boston for trial. Governor Wanton of Rhode Island sent a vigorous protest to Admiral Montague, Commander of the British North American Fleet and Dudingston's superior. In reply Wanton received an insolent letter threatening to hang anyone who might attempt to obstruct his officers in the performance of their duties. Governor Wanton then sent a letter of complaint to the Earl of Hillsborough, one of England's Secretaries of State.  Joseph Tillinghast Meanwhile the interference with what the Rhode Island merchants thought of as lawful trade (and the English thought of as smuggling) continued, and the bitterness of the colonials mounted. Then fate, guided by Captain Benjamin Lindsey, gave the Rhode Islanders an opportunity to repay the pestiferous Lieutenant Dudingston. About noon on June 9, Captain Lindsey, in command of the sloop Hannah, arrived at Newport from New York and after reporting her cargo at the Custom House, proceeded up the river toward Providence. The Hannah had cleared the Newport harbor when the Gaspee, like a watchdog, moved to intercept the Hannah.. Lieutenant Dudingston signaled the Hannah to hove to for boarding but Captain Lindsey did not obey. Either as a plan to ground the Gaspee, or on the spur of the moment, the response of Lindsey was to not stop, but rather flee and let the British pursue. Pursue they did. All afternoon the two ships tacked back and torch against a northwest breeze. Lindsey's kept the Hannah out of cannon range of her pursuer. As they neared Providence, the American skipper, who knew these waters like the back of his hand, instead of fleeing sensibly, tacked his ship sharply to westward, clearing a long underwater sand-bar at Namquid Point, then in apparent confusion tacked further toward shore and lost headway. Lieutenant Dudingston headed the Gaspee straight toward his quarry, confident that a quick straight course would win the prize. With all sails set, the Gaspee plowed into the underwater sand bar and was firmly grounded.  The British sailors watched the Hannah turn and sail toward Providence. Captain Lindsey immediately went ashore and reported the plight of the Gaspee to John Brown, a member of one of the richest and most influential merchant firms in colonial America. John Brown, several years before, had been grounded on this same point with the same moon and tide conditions. He knew that the English ship would be hard aground until flood tide - about three o'clock the next morning, and the night would be dark.
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It wasn't susposed to make it harder to see. It was susposed to make it hard for enemy submarines to determine range course and speed when veiwed through a periscope.
It'd work on me. I got dizzy just looking at the picture. I can't imagine what it would look like through a periscope.
As soon as I saw the picture I was said "What the heck!". Made my eyes cross! LOL.
arrgh!
Usually, I love my home. But in the winter it is just plain h-e-doublehockeysticks. Can't avoid it, I suppose.
The logo on the society's badge is formed by taking the square logo of the Bucklin family [the blue field with an English flag lion upon it ("a field azure, a lion passant, guazant, or") and the white field with a red fire above it ("a field argent, a fire gules )], and adding, below the square of those two fields of the Bucklin logo, a third plain red field ("a field gules"). The red field is a heraldic reminder that the Society specially remembers the military fortitude and sacrifices of those who gave their fortunes and lives in forming the new country that became the United States of America.
The burning of the Gaspee took place on June 20, 1772. The only "lyric" to commemorate the affair came from the pen of Captain Thomas Swan of Bristol, one of those who took part in it. His effusion has never appeared in any history of American literature, for good and sufficient reasons, but it is printed in full in Munro's History of Bristol.
In January 1881, Bishop Smith of Kentucky, born in Bristol in 1794 and a graduate of Brown in 1816, wrote to me calling my attention to a slight difference between the "Swan Song", as I had given it in my History of Bristol, and a version pasted upon the back of a portrait of Thomas Swan's father by Thomas Swan himself. Captain Swan was Bishop Smith's uncle. The Bishop wrote, "I should not have troubled you on so inconsiderable point had not the tradition in our family been that the Bristol boat was manned by men in the disguise of Narragansett Indians."
When Bishop Smith penned these lines several men were living in Bristol who had heard the story from Captain Swan's own lips. He delighted in telling it and was accustomed to give the names of Bristol participants. Those names have unhappily escaped the memory of his auditors.
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From: The History of Bristol, R.I.- The Story of Mount Hope Lands. by W.H. Munro. Prov. 1860
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Montague in a later event:
When all was through, Lendall Pitts led the patriots from the wharf, tomahawks and axes resting on their shoulders. A fife played as they marched past the home where British Admiral Montague had been spying on their work. Montague yelled as they past, "Well boys, you have had a fine, pleasant evening for your Indian caper, haven't you? But mind, you have got to pay the fiddler yet!"
Regarding "muffled oars", the only references to the how of this are the clarification of a boat handler that it relates only to muffling the oarlock, and this narrative of OSS in 1944:
An urgent request by the Office of Strategic Services for PT’s to land and pick up agents on the French coast resulted in the hasty commissioning of a new Squadron 2 (the original squadron had been decommissioned in the Solomons in November 1943) on March 23, 1944, at Fyfe’s Shipyard, Glenwood Landing, Long Island. The squadron, commanded by Lt. Comdr. John D. Bulkeley, was made up of three early Higgins boats, PT’s 71, 72, and 199, which has had almost two years of service as training boats in Squadron 4 at Melville. After a rapid overhaul at Fyfe’s Shipyard, the boats were shipped to England, arriving at Dartmouth on April 24. There they were fitted with special navigational equipment to give them pinpoint accuracy in locating their objectives on the French coast. Officers and men practice launching, rowing, loading, and unloading four-oared pulling boats, constructed with padded sides and muffled oarlocks, until they could land men and equipment on a beach swiftly and silently on the darkest night. The common conception is of oars wrapped with the drapes from the dining room which would seem to make the net hydrodynamic effect a very tiring zero.
Modern oarlock.
Rowing at Y camp five summers in Indiana the oarlocks were squeaky and creaky, but it would seem some grease would have helped.
That and a bit of care in not simply splashing the oars.
Morlock.
More difficult to muffle than an oarlock, Morlocks exist only in the future and then, only underground, hence won't be covered this semester.
Thanks for all the extra innfo on the Gaspee Affair.
More difficult to muffle than an oarlock, Morlocks exist only in the future and then, only underground, hence won't be covered this semester
LOL! I still like the original "Time Machine" and Yvette was one good looking Eloi. Hurray for Weena!!
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