http://www.usmm.org/revolution.html
The above is an interesting link. During the Revolutionary War, privateers (private fighting ships) had almost 15,000 cannon compared to the Continental forces 1,250. The first sea battle was two privateers against a British ship. (We won!)
“About 55,000 American seamen served aboard the privateers. When captured by the British Navy, they were given a choice: join the British Navy or prison. The conditions of captivity aboard the prison ships, mostly abandoned ships moored in New York harbor, were inhuman. The most infamous of these was the HMS Jersey. About 11,000 privateers died of disease and malnutrition, their bodies dumped onto the mud flats of Wallabout Bay, where Brooklyn Navy Yard now stands.”
From my earlier link. The God-given natural right to bear arms is not a guarantee of victory. And certainly that victory comes at a great price. A price that we need to honor every day, and to continue the fight against the liberals that would like to take away our freedoms secured at such a high cost.
Excellent!!
Thank you so much! Just the sort of information I was hoping for :)
” ... , privateers (private fighting ships) had almost 15,000 cannon compared to the Continental forces 1,250. The first sea battle was two privateers against a British ship. (We won!)”
There were no state-owned (government) gun foundries in the original 13 colonies, so all cannon produced in the fledgling United States had to be privately produced. The Continental Congress was endlessly short on cash, and so purchased few guns for any of its forces (gunmakers were reluctant to fork over the goods for an IOU from a new nation that didn’t really exist yet and might not make it).
The comparison between privateers and naval vessels does not tell the whole story.
Privateers were venture-capital efforts by non-government parties (”private” parties - hence the term), to finance and equip and crew vessels that sortied to attack enemy merchant shipping: essentially, piracy made legal. Crews on privateers tried to capture defenseless merchantmen, sail them to a friendly port, and cause a prize court there to condemn the captured vessel, then sell it and its cargo at auction.
Privateers were lightly armed and ran from a fight with a real warship when they could.
Sailors signed on hoping to catch numerous prize vessels and get rich; hence the larger number of privateers, and the seemingly skewed number of guns carried by privateering vessels. Gun size was no bigger than needed to cause a cargo vessel to strike it colors: four- to six-pounder guns were the commonest. Lighter by a giant margin than a man of war, which by the late 18th century mounted guns of nine-pounder caliber or bigger.
John Barry, nicknamed “the fastest man of the 18th century” for record-long-distance on one day, as master of a merchant ship, commanded the first US warship to force an enemy to strike its colors.