Gloucester

A brief clash near the outset of the Revolutionary War broke out at Gloucester, Massachusetts, on either August 8 or 9, 1775. John Linzee, a Royal Navy captain in command of the sloop-of-war HMS Falcon, caught sight of two schooners making their way home from the West Indies. He seized one of the vessels outright, then pursued the other into Gloucester Harbor, where it ran aground. Local residents rallied their militia, overpowered the British sailors dispatched to claim the stranded schooner, and reclaimed both the grounded vessel and the ship taken earlier.

This confrontation formed part of a broader pattern of hostilities that later spurred Royal Navy Captain Henry Mowat to launch a punitive mission in October 1775. The most significant episode of that voyage, the burning of Falmouth, would later be invoked by the Second Continental Congress as justification for founding the Continental Navy.

Background

By the spring of 1775, friction between colonial inhabitants of Massachusetts Bay and its royal governor, General Thomas Gage, had escalated into open conflict. Gage ordered soldiers to Concord to seize stockpiled military supplies, prompting warnings across the countryside, and on April 19 fighting erupted between colonists and troops at Lexington and Concord. In the following days, additional militia units converged on the area, trapping the British forces within Boston under siege.

Because this encirclement only cut off routes by land, the army came to rely heavily on naval support for fresh food and supplies. Residents in towns surrounding the city began moving cattle and hay away from the harbor islands and nearby shorelines to keep them out of reach. Meanwhile, Gage and Vice Admiral Samuel Graves organized raiding parties to seize livestock and hay from coastal settlements and to disrupt colonial vessels at sea. These raiding efforts often provoked confrontation whenever troops or sailors came ashore to gather animals. Barely a month into the siege, on May 27, one such clash broke out near Boston over supplies located on an island close to the city.

On August 5, the warship Falcon, under the command of John Linzee, arrived off Ipswich Bay. Linzee dispatched a barge holding roughly fifty men toward shore, aiming to obtain mutton from sheep grazing on the Coffin farm in West Gloucester. Major Coffin, however, noticed the approaching boat and guessed its purpose. Rallying about half a dozen companions, he armed them with rifles and positioned them behind the dunes, from where they fired steadily enough to convince the approaching sailors that a much larger force awaited them. Believing further advance too risky, the men abandoned their attempt to gather sheep and rowed back to the ship. Once aboard again, Linzee ordered the barge out once more, this time to examine a schooner spotted in the harbor, but it proved to be carrying nothing but ballast. For several days afterward, Linzee kept his vessel patrolling near Cape Ann, during which time he also forced a number of local men from nearby ports and ships into naval service.

Aftermath

What Linzee tried to do at Gloucester, torching the settlement in response to local defiance, would not remain an isolated episode. The following October, Admiral Graves gave Captain Henry Mowat orders to sail against coastal towns throughout New England as retaliation, naming Gloucester specifically among the intended targets and pointing to Linzee's defeat there as one justification for the campaign. When the moment came, however, Mowat passed Gloucester over, judging that its structures stood too far apart for shipboard guns to inflict much damage.

Mowat went on to carry out only one significant strike, the burning of Falmouth, in what is now Portland, Maine. Accounts of that destruction reached the Second Continental Congress and helped push the delegates toward creating the Continental Navy.