Rogue Island: Smuggling in Colonial Rhode Island and the Gaspee Affair

           On June 9, 1772 the British customs schooner Gaspee ran aground in Narragansett Bay while pursuing a Rhode Island sloop suspected of carrying a cargo of smuggled French rum and molasses. That night, while the Gaspee’s crew waited for high tide to free their vessel, a group of colonists from Providence led by the merchants John Brown and Abraham Whipple rowed out to the stricken vessel. Swarming over the sides, the colonists shot the Gaspee’s commander and forced the rest of the crew to surrender. The despised schooner was then burnt to the waterline.

            The destruction of the Gaspee sent shockwaves throughout the Thirteen Colonies as the first act of overt violence against British authority—preceding the Boston Tea Party by over a year. But less well known are the reasons for the customs cruiser’s presence in Rhode Island. The vessel had been sent to the colony as part of renewed British efforts to enforce the Navigation Acts, the foundational laws that gave shape to its American empire. These seventeenth-century laws forbade Britain’s colonies from trading with foreign nations except in a few narrow circumstances. However, for nearly a century the Navigation Acts were largely ignored by colonists who traded with foreign nations and colonies wherever a profit was to be made. Colonists particularly sought two items that legal trade supplied only at exorbitant prices: molasses and loose-leaf tea. Both were essential to the two most popular drinks in the Thirteen Colonies: rum and tea.

            Smuggling was a cornerstone of Colonial American commerce, practiced in every port in every colony. Nowhere was it more widespread and organized than Rhode Island—dubbed “Rogue Island” by officials. Traders and seaman talked about it openly in their letters and records, many of which survive in the holdings of the Rhode Island Historical Society. One particularly detailed account can be found in a set of instructions given by an unknown Newport merchant to Captain Nathaniel Whitting (ca. 1743-1780) just a week before the Gaspee was destroyed. As commander of the sloop Little Polly, Whitting was ordered to sail to Newfoundland. There he was to trade his cargo of foodstuffs and candles for a cargo of salted cod. From Newfoundland, he was to sail to Gothenburg in Sweden where he was to sell the fish in exchange for a cargo of Bohea tea. This was flagrantly illegal under the Navigation Acts, but Whitting’s employers had a detailed plan to ensure his clandestine cargo reached Rhode Island safely.

Instructions given to Capt. Whiting

            Whitting was to disguise his vessel as a “wood sloop” carrying timber from Maine by blackening the sides of his vessel, and if he encountered anyone on his voyage was to tell them he was “John Smith” of the Dolphin bound for New York. Upon reaching Narragansett Bay, he was warned to “be very careful of being deceived by the [customs] cruisers” like the Gaspee who “used many stratagems to deceive vessels such as hiring fishing schooners…and boats with wood” then offering “to assist vessels in running goods” as a pretense for getting near and boarding them. Taking all care, the Captain was to land his mate on a deserted beach from where he was to proceed alone to Newport, find “Mr. Stevens’ house…[and] go to the lower window at the [North] East corner of the house fronting the street and knock twice.” Stevens would then provide detailed information about the location of the customs patrols and instructions for the best place the sloop could land its illegal cargo safely.

Detail from Whiting's instructions.

            While it is unknown if Nathaniel Whitting successfully delivered his cargo of illicit tea, his instructions demonstrate the high degree of organization smuggling had reached in Rhode Island. With every merchant house, including the colony’s largest traders such as the Browns of Providence, involved in contraband trade and with smuggled rum and tea major consumer products, it is unsurprising that the belated effort by British officials in the 1760s to combat smuggling was met with such hostility. Joined with the Gaspee’s heavy-handed habit of seizing of every ship it encountered for inspection, a violent confrontation was all but inevitable. And with it a major step towards Revolution.

Andrew Rutledge

January, 2019

Mary Baker Eddy News

The Mary Baker Eddy Library’s collections pertain to the life of Eddy as well as to the history of the Christian Science movement. Now, newly reprocessed papers from the archives of The Christian Science Monitor are open for research. They shed light on the people, events, and ideals that helped the Monitor develop into an internationally-respected newspaper, based on Eddy’s vision for better journalism.

These documents consist primarily of material that Erwin D. Canham used to write his 1958 book Commitment to Freedom: The Story of The Christian Science Monitor, which presents a history of the newspaper’s first 50 years. Canham worked for the Monitor for much of that time, starting there in 1925 and rising to editor-in-chief before his 1974 retirement. Most of the records he used to write Commitment to Freedom were compiled by Paul S. Deland, an original staff member. The material includes written reminiscences by Monitor staffers, clippings, letters and memos on policy, stylebooks, correspondence relating to the newspaper’s fiftieth anniversary edition, and early drafts and proofs of Canham’s book.

These papers provide rich context for the Monitor’s editorial policy, vocabulary, and advertising decisions. They elucidate challenges that workers faced in establishing a publication with broad international appeal, fulfilling its mandate“to injure no man, but to bless all mankind.” Among many areas, this is a collection of interest in the study and research of newspaper history, Christian Science publications, World War II news coverage, religious identity, and twentieth-century culture.

Assorted papers from the Commitment to Freedom collection, including copies of the Monitor, photos, and notes.

Photo credit: Dan Bullman

The Concession of Captain James Card

            A document defying easy characterization lies in folder five of the James Card Papers at the Rhode Island Historical Society. In it William Pearce, a sailor aboard the sloop Rising Sun, testifies that Captain James Card paid him fifty pounds in old tenor “in full satisfaction” of striking and beating him twice while Pearce served on the Rising Sun’s voyage between Rhode Island and the Bay of Honduras in 1765. As a result of the payment, Pearce pledged not to bring a suit against Captain James Card and further declared that he freely forgave Card for the abuse he received at Card’s hand. Thus, the price of abusing Pearce and securing his silence in court was approximately the value of two and a half months of the average sailor’s wages.[i] Admiralty law protected Captain Card from repercussions, yet Captain Card paid the object of his wrath to keep him quiet. The paradox inherent in the William Pearce document illustrates how individual concessions supported shipboard hierarchies.

 

            In the waters between Europe, Africa, and the Americas, captains abused sailors, which expressed the power of colonial hierarchies. Captains hoisted sailors by their ankles, turning rigging into an instrument of torture.  Captains whipped sailors with the stinging cat o’ nine tails. Captains struck the sailors in their employ and pushed their sailors off the quarterdeck on to the main deck below. As long as their abuse did not leave lasting damage, admiralty laws allowed captains to perpetrate violence against their sailors with impunity. These laws underpinned and reinforced the hierarchies that defined early-Americans’ lives. Yet, Captain Card paid William Pearce not to bring suit against him. The legal reality makes it all the more surprising that Captain Card compensated Pearce for the abuse he endured.
            
           Perhaps Captain Card simply felt guilty and desired absolution. Yet, he required Pearce to refrain from bringing charges against him, which suggests more self-centered motivations. The simplest explanation is that William Pearce had a family member or benefactor with powerful connections in the merchant community whose wrath Card wished to avoid. However, there are at least two other possible explanations. Captain Card may have compensated Pearce because hierarchical relationships entailed reciprocal responsibilities. Though the power dynamics inherent in the master-seaman relationship limited a sailor’s recourse if a captain failed to provide for his sailors, captains were legally and culturally responsible for their sailors’ well being. Wide scale abuse might have been viewed among land-dwellers as a failure to perform the captain’s half of the social contract. Alternatively, while impressment cooled after the 1763 Treaty of Paris, finding experienced, skilled, and effective sailors proved a perennial problem for mercantile captains. Captain Card may have paid Pearce to stave off threats to his reputation among the sailors he wished to employ. The latter explanation seems the most compelling given that the social world of sailors invited intelligence-gathering and sharing while in port.

             William Pearce’s paradoxical pledge is one of many maritime documents including wage disputes and successfully defended mutinies that illustrate how long-distance trade and the maritime environment challenged landed systems. Card’s concession shows that human relationships and market forces limited the power of cultural hierarchies. On a systemic level sailors followed their masters’ orders, could be abused by their masters without recourse, and found it difficult to successfully sue when captains violated contracts or failed to pay the wages due them. But studying the hierarchical systems that ordered colonial society encourages us to ignore the concessions some men gained from their masters. The case of Captain Card and William Pearce shows how the clash of the market and landed cultural systems allowed sailors like Pearce to carve out spaces for themselves amidst a rigid social order. It also illustrates that in port captains sensed the broader implications of their actions. While in the Bay of Honduras his power was uncontested and, thus, Captain Card made no concessions. But after arriving in Newport, Card recognized that Pearce could damage his reputation as an employer and an honorable trader.

             Even rigid colonial hierarchies provided outlets for discontent to prevent large-scale social upheaval. This phenomenon played out repeatedly in the maritime Atlantic when captains gave their sailors bonuses to lengthen the voyage, ignored their mutinous oaths, or, as in the case of Captain Card, compensated a sailor for violence perpetrated against him. Documents like Pearce’s testimony do not reject colonial hierarchies but they illustrate its limitations. For individual sailors like William Pearce, those limitations made all the difference. 

 Transcription:Newport May 3, 1765“Then rec’d of Capt. James Card Junr fifty Pounds old Tenor in full satisfaction for his striking me in the Bay of Honduras & also for his Beating me this Day on Bourd the Sloop Rising Sun for Which aforesaid Sum Received I promise that I will not Commence any Action or Suit in the Law against the Said James Card Junr. but do freely forgive him for the abused recd as above saidWilliam PearceWitness Martin Howard” 


 Post by NERFC Fellow Hannah Knox Tucker

---

[i] After 1750 £1,000 Old Tenor = £100 Sterling.  John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600-1775: A Handbook, (Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 133. Sailors made approximately £2 per month, Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700-1750, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 304-305.

Hoyt Family documents return to Deerfield

A trove of 19th-century documents, consisting of journals, account books, maps, drawings, and notebooks, has recently been purchased at auction and will be available to researchers at the Memorial Libraries, Deerfield, Massachusetts.  These manuscripts created by Epaphras Hoyt (1765-1850) and his son Arthur (1811-1899), have been in private hands until now and afford a new perspective on Deerfield's history and the influence the Hoyts exerted on wider events.  

Born in 1765 in the Old Indian House, the only residence within the stockade to survive the devastating 1704 French and Indian raid on Deerfield, Epaphras Hoyt became a leader in town and county affairs.  Beyond holding numerous civic offices such as postmaster and justice of the peace, he worked as a surveyor, served as a general in the Massachusetts militia, wrote on military theory, the French and Indian wars, and the American Revolution, and contributed to the Medical and Agricultural Register (Boston) and the American Journal of Science (New Haven). His tenure as Sheriff of Franklin Co. is documented in an account book he kept between 1815 and 1831. Copies of speeches he made at anti-Masonic conventions are but one example of his involvement with the political life of western Massachusetts.  Epaphras Hoyt was an avid reader and a keen observer of local and national events - all of which are reflected in his extensive journals.

Hoyt played an important role in the education of his nephew, Edward Hitchock (1793-1864), a clergyman, professor and the first Massachusetts state geologist before becoming President of Amherst College. Hoyt's only son, Arthur, followed in his father's footsteps by becoming a talented surveyor and civil engineer. Arthur inherited his father's library of books and manuscripts, and amassed his own substantial library, all of which are recorded in a hand-written catalog that came as part of the papers acquired. The new materials document Arthur's work as an engineer constructing the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, and the Central Massachusetts Railroad, and speak to the early development of regional transportation networks. A previously unknown c. 1830 manuscript map of the village of Deerfield and the contiguous north meadows drawn by Arthur was also purchased. 

These materials will join Hoyt papers already in the Memorial Libraries that include surveying notebooks of both Epaphras and Arthur, journals, correspondence, legal documents, and books. Acquisition of these Hoyt documents was made possible in part through the generous support of Margaret E. C. Howland, Ann Lord, and a bequest from the estate of David Proper (1933-2014), former Librarian of the Memorial Libraries.

The Memorial Libraries, comprised of the book and manuscript collections of Historic Deerfield and the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, is located at 6 Memorial St., Deerfield, MA. Hours are Tue.-Fri., 9:00-noon, and 1:00-5:00.  Information regarding the collections can be found at:  http://library.historic-deerfield.org, or:  http://deerfield-ma.org/about/library/

New England Historic Genealogical Society NERFC Fellow Update

Visit  ‘Indifferent to the world’ at the New England Historic Genealogical Society to get an overview of the research done there by NERFC Fellow Peter Walker. Thanks to Scottt Steward for sharing Peter's post about his work at NEHGS.

The Rev. Samuel Fayerweather (1725-1781)
in the NEHGS Fine Art Collection

Visiting Researchers Inspire CHS Displays 

The CHS is pleased to continue its partnership with the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC), and to host visiting scholars whose research is supported by grants from NERFC. In December of 2017, two NERFC scholars shared their work during brown-bag lunches with CHS members and staff. 

Shira Lurie, Doctoral Candidate at the University of Virginia, presented her project Politics at the Poles: Liberty Poles and the Popular Struggle for the New Republic. She explained that during the 1790s, an old way of protest in American politics re-emerged. Federalists, who dominated New England, were cast by Republicans as autocratic elitists who ran roughshod over the Republican minority. In protest, the Republicans revived the Revolutionary-era practice of erecting liberty poles in town squares. The poles stood as symbols of opposition to tyranny. Federalists denounced this as an illegitimate form of political expression. In their view, the vote and the legislative process were the only proper way to express dissent. They worried that Republican opposition would undermine federal authority and drag the country back into the chaos of the 1780s. Local Federalists tore down the poles, leading to violence, acerbic press coverage, and legal action.

Kathrinne Duffy (below), doctoral candidate at Brown University, is working on a project entitled Skulls, Selves, and Showmanship: Itinerant Phrenologists in Nineteenth-Century America. Phrenology was a controversial and influential science in the mid-1800s. Proponents believed that the shape of one’s cranium revealed one’s character — a materialist conception of the self that gave rise to novel modes of introspection and observation. To promote their science of the mind, practical phrenologists traveled from town to town, offering lectures and examinations. Ms. Duffy sketched the backgrounds of several prominent phrenologists, and the reaction of audiences, ranging from credulity to skepticism.

Both presentations have inspired future displays at the CHS. Ms. Lurie’s research prompted the CHS Collections staff to plan a display about liberty poles and their depiction in early America; we have examples of them popping up on items as varied as swords and currency. Similarly, the CHS will mount a display of ephemera related to phrenology in the 1800s. Look for these displays at the CHS this year. Both displays will be mounted in our Nawrot History Nook, just outside the Waterman Research Center.

Please visit chs.org/events to learn about upcoming NERFC scholar presentations, or sign up to be notified of future events via email.

A New Baker Library Exhibit Explores the Polaroid Corporation

At the Intersection of Science and Art

Edwin H. Land and the Polaroid Corporation: The Formative Years

Baker Library recently opened a new exhibition, At the Intersection of Science and Art: Edwin H. Land and the Polaroid Corporation: The Formative Years, organized by Baker Library Special Collections. The exhibition is on display until July 28, 2017 in the North Lobby, Baker Library | Bloomberg Center, Harvard Business School.

Polaroid's Land Camera

At the Intersection of Science and Art draws from the wealth of material in the Polaroid corporate archives at Baker Library, bringing into focus the formative years and trajectory of the Polaroid Corporation and the career of Edwin H. Land. A scientist and inventor, entrepreneur and CEO, aesthete and humanist, Land fostered invention and creativity within the culture of a small, science-based research and manufacturing company. He argued that the industrial process should be “dedicated to the discernment of deep human needs.” His philosophical insights into those needs coupled with an eye for beauty and artistic expression guided the groundbreaking research ambitions of Polaroid—an iconic, 20th-century startup company whose pioneering achievements in optics and engineering continue to have profound technological, social, and artistic significance.

Visit http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/polaroid to view the on-line exhibition and to find materials for further research.

Please contact Baker Library Special Collections at histcollref@hbs.edu if you would like to request a copy of the exhibition catalog or to learn more.

For more information about Baker Library Special Collections visit www.library.hbs.edu/hc/.

Contact: Laura Linard, Director, Baker Library Special Collections, 617-495-6360, llinard@hbs.edu.