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Preble Hall: Ben Schaffer: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Preble Hall: Ben Schaffer

R2 Studios38min

Speaker 1

00:00

This is Preble Hall. Welcome to Preble Hall, a podcast about naval history from the United States Naval Academy museum and Annapolis.

R2 Studios

00:16

Welcome back to Preble Hall. I'm Abby Mullen. Today we're talking about the Mary, a ship in the Massachusetts provincial Navy with Ben Shafer, whose paper about it won the Clark D Reynolds prize from the North American Society for oceanic history, you're not going to want to miss our conversation, where we talk about everything from pirates, to smuggling to witchcraft, and a lot of other stuff. So let's get into it. I'm actually really excited to talk to you today. Because this is a part of history that I don't I should know more about than I do. So would you please introduce yourself?

Speaker 2

00:55

Sure. My name is Benjamin Shaffer, and I am a history of PhD candidate at the University of New Hampshire. And I should have my degree by early September. So I'm kind of nearing the end there. And my focus is on early American naval defenses. So looking at the 17th, kind of mid to late 17th century, all the way up to the Revolutionary War. And I started this project as a, you know, somebody in Charleston hearing a lot about pirate hunting. And there was no Royal Navy ships here. So just kind of researching the men who took part in pirate hunting expeditions. And I slowly came to realize that every colony or almost every colony had their own form of private naval expeditions sponsored by governments. So it's become a whole Atlantic World project when it started out just as a Charleston centric project, and it's my hometown.

R2 Studios

01:46

So your paper is about this vessel named the Mary, that sailed during the late 17th century from Massachusetts, right? Yes. So can you describe the vessel for us as much as we can know?

Speaker 2

02:00

Sure. So the Mary was one of several vessels that were commissioned by Edmund Andros, Edmund Andros was this governor of what was called the dominion of New England and the dominion of New England is this mega colony that pretty much included many of the Northern eastern states that we have today from pretty much Maine all the way down to New Jersey. And it was an attempt by King James the second to govern a colony directly with direct kind of autocratic rule. And it didn't work out very well. It only lasted a few years. But in 1686 1687, when Andros is taking over, he decides to build a provincial Navy. And the Mary was one of the loops that were commissioned sometime in the late part of his rule, it's a mystery as to who exactly built it, because he claims he built it and what will become Massachusetts relic rebels, later on will claim they built it. So there's some mystery as to its origins, we have a good amount of educated guesses as to what it looked like. We do know that one of the Mary's sisters loops in that provincial Navy was a 40 ton vessel. And if you look at similar vessels and the Atlantic road at this time that were sloops, they were usually single mastered vessels, around 40 to 60 times bourbon, you've got anywhere from five to 10 guns, and you can have a crew usually of a couple dozen at its max. So it was a fairly small, nimble, fast vessel, if it was anything like it sisters loops. And it was an Anglo American built vessel. This was not part of the Royal Navy, this was basically part of a Massachusetts Navy pretty early on, and it was a vessel that got it in a fair share of trouble and drama far more than any of the other vessels in that Navy.

R2 Studios

03:50

So this is a naval vessel. But I think during this period, the late 17th century, people who studied things like me, early American Republic are like what are the actual threats from the sea at this point to the colonies or to this? Dominion of massachi or Dominion of New England? What Why would they even need a Navy?

Speaker 2

04:15

Well, it's actually a combination of external and internal threats more than you could even there is a the traditional threat of wabanaki Native American Raiders. And there's been some really great scholarship lately from from Professor Bahar, who wrote a book called storm of the sea, and it looks at how the Native Americans and the main frontier essentially had their own naval force that when we think of Indian Wars, it's easy to imagine it all being land based, but a lot of good scholarship lately has shown how it's been at sea as well. So they had an actual potent, capable naval native threat on the north eastern Borderlands of the dominion of New England and oftentimes, they were very, very aggressive Raiders. You We also have pirates Anglo American pirates. That's been an issue since the first English colonists get to Massachusetts in the 1630s. Whether ships going at sea, there's going to be opportunistic Raiders stealing and, and that becomes an issue of particularly when one of the Mary's own former captains becomes a pirate later on. And I assume we'll get to him. We also have the French at the moment when the dominion of New England starts. King James the second, who is a Catholic king wanted to maintain good relations with the French King Louie the 14th. But there was a lot of hostile actions between the English and their native allies and the French and their native allies, both in New York and in New England. So that will eventually boil over into what we call the king William's war. And they also have to deal with smuggling. So New Englanders, well, throughout colonial history, a lot of smuggling. So the Royal Navy usually was used to try to enforce what were called the Navigation Acts, which were royal acts that prevented colonists from certain trading, but they're almost rarely successful. So you've got a mixture of internal and external, military and criminal threats. At the same time and other colonies, you have actual man hunts on the water for escaped prisoners on boats. So it's, it's a big, big mess of different maritime threats.

R2 Studios

06:25

So let's drill down into some of these threats. And think about the Mary in particular, and how this vessel interacts with some of those threats. So first of all, where does the Mary's crew come from before we get to what they did, like, Who are the people that are actually on this vessel?

Speaker 2

06:43

So it's actually hard to say who and where the people serving on the merrier from later on. And in Massachusetts history, they actually will keep full pay scales of, you know, the sailors leaving, sometimes we'll mention their race. They'll mention what rank they were, but we don't like if they're a ship's boy, or if they're a regular crewman. But that seems to be a little later in Massachusetts history. Because of the lack of documentation on the Mary. We have, I kind of have to use some educated guesses. But Massachusetts was the biggest shipping colony. We're looking at times of having, you know, several 100 ships coming out of Boston alone and many other colonies, like my home state of South Carolina, a very small shipping industry. So New England was the shipping industry of the Western Hemisphere. So many of these men are likely native in the sense of native Anglo Americans, not Native Americans. They may have been multiracial, some of the other provincial navies and also later Massachusetts ships do seem to have African American and indigenous sailors but primarily white merchant sailors from the New England area. They could have been paid. as volunteers we do know they got rewards for hunting pirates. There were other times in Massachusetts's colonial history, were they impressed or forced sailors just like the Royal Navy, did at the time. So knowing all this about other ships, we can assume a lot of that same characteristics applied to the Mary but outside of the captain's I don't have a great deal of information on the sailors themselves other than what we know about sailors in this time period. But the captains we do know quite a lot about because they're a well known Englishman, who are well known new Englishman, I guess who were trading in the area. Samuel Pease was such a well known Captain that he was hired by various Dukes in Europe to be a personal cargo carrier. So he had that reputation when he became a captain of the Mary. JOHN elden, who will become a subject in the witchcraft trials had a reputation of being a multi lingual Indian trader. So man, who is the kind of constant cycling and cycling out of captains usually came from officers who are well known, well respected members of the merchant community in Boston.

R2 Studios

09:03

So who owned the Mary?

Speaker 2

09:06

That's a great question. So when it was built, Andrus, is Andrus, his fleet at a combination of what were privately owned vessels that He impressed into his fleet and commissioned vessels. The likely story is that he probably in his very late reign before being overthrown, and early 1689, had commissioned it with some sort of taxpayer money. But historians have a lot of contradictory information and I can't find in primary sources what happened to it. Now that might, there's 1000 explanations for that. But considering that the ownership of the Marion was such a hot topic, it would not surprise me that an original roster was burnt somewhere or destroyed or lost intentionally, but you know, that's all speculative. My best guess is that Andrew himself or Andrew So the combination of Massachusetts authorities commissioned the building of the ship with tax money locally, but unfortunately, I can't track down a single owner. We do believe a guy named john cook, who was a shipbuilder from some of the other sleeps in his fleet may have helped build it. And the treasurer of the colony demanded repayment for having dished out funds for it as many as 20 years after its construction. So it was a big kitchen with a lot of cooks, as far as I can tell.

R2 Studios

10:22

So who then was appointing the captains to the ship?

Speaker 2

10:26

That's a great question that's a little easier to answer that would be the governor. So governors of Massachusetts, also known as Captain generals, and most colonial governors have that kind of military authority. So they're acting as generals and they're saying, you know, Samuel, PS, you are commissioned to go here and there and do this and that and we do have surviving Commission's actually on family search online. It's a repository for the Massachusetts archives. There's a number of original Mary Commission's oddly, we have no idea where the ship came from. But pretty early on. In its history, we have commissions to Nathaniel hatch to Samuel p, signed by the governor saying, I want you to do this and that on this mission. And you'll bring me x Cargo or you'll attack y target. So it's almost gubernatorial, at the top from the very beginning.

R2 Studios

11:14

So let's talk about some of those targets. Then, let's talk first about the interactions between the Mary and perhaps other ships in this provincial Navy, with the native people with the wabanaki. What kind of interactions did they have, specifically the Mary with natives.

Speaker 2

11:32

The Mary is, in a lot of the naval missions we'll see in Massachusetts really starting with Mary but going all the way up to really the period before the American Revolution. One of the big tasks of the various provincial Navy ships that happened in Massachusetts is native deployment, native diplomacy, we'll see the Mary and we'll also see some later vessels carrying Indian diplomats to the northern border lands. We'll see the Mary and other later ships actually involved in supporting infantry operations. So kind of a naval shield or naval auxiliary support for Benjamin churches, operations. He's a famous New England Ranger. In fact, he is cited by some as one of the originators of Anglo American guerrilla warfare, he adapted some of his warfare style from the natives themselves. So they're there to bring supplies, they're there to support on land operations, and there are actual battles that happen. Left so with a Mary and more so with some of the later provincial Navy ships where wabanaki sloops are fighting New England's loops. But that does seem to happen a little bit with Mary, but it seems to be more common with later Later, I guess, follow up ships. So the memory serves as a as a transport vessel for diplomats as a kind of a gunboat diplomacy sort of tool to support New England, not only diplomats, but one of the most common interactions that will have natives is redeeming of captives. Captain john Alden makes dozens and dozens of trips with the Navy, with Mary rather to redeem captives at the wabanaki had captured and it's in that environment, he gets into some hot water,

R2 Studios

13:14

which we'll get to. Oh, yeah, cuz we can't leave that part out. Oh, yeah. So okay, so the native people are sort of an unknown quantity, in some ways, but the thing that British people are really good at is fighting the French. So what does the Mary do in relation to the French?

Speaker 2

13:37

Oh, she. So the Mary was involved with the opening stages of King William his war in King William's war was the first of what many scholars call the French and Indian Wars, although that term is not as common as it used to be. So one of the many Imperial conflicts that will happen that lead up to the Revolutionary War. So from about 1689, through about 1698. And the war ended in conclusively It was pretty much I guess, you could say a status quo antebellum ended in a tie. It was a it was definitely a stalemate, but the marry was instrumental in New England's early naval efforts in supporting missions against French align native peoples like the wabanaki and also in the capture of parts of French Canada. It was involved in the Port Royal expedition of 1690, which may have been the only easy capture by a New England force of an enemy port. They basically sailed up to Port Royal surrounded the French inhabitants and demanded they declare allegiance to the to King William of England because it's by this point, we're looking at King William after the Glorious Revolution. So the Mary was part of the naval force that that was supposed to attack but ultimately didn't have to attack. Port Royal. It was supposed to be involved in what's later known as the Quebec expedition, but I think, Massachusetts Authorities decided to keep it as a Home Guard, rather than sending it as part of what they call the massive, quote, Navy, unquote, to attack Quebec, which was a absolute disaster and ended in a lot of shipwrecks and a lot of men killed by smallpox. So it's probably for the best that the Mary stayed out of that one very major action. So in the first three or four years of the war, it's, it's one of the flagships of the Massachusetts naval effort, I guess.

R2 Studios

15:26

And then, of course, you mentioned already that the Mary, and other ships during this time period have to fight a lot with pirates. So can you talk a little bit about piracy?

Speaker 2

15:38

So in the late 17th century, piracy was welcomed by New Englanders primarily because they were not the victims of piracy. Typically, in this time period, there was a lot of, you know, pirate rage against the Spanish. This is around, you know, a decade or two after Henry Morgan and some of the famous buccaneers by the late 1680s. There's a move and some of this can be found in Mark Hanna's really instrumental book pirate nests. But there was a move of many of us kind of pirates that operated as buccaneers there's more more North American activity and even at this point, while there's still some tacit support for for piracy, as long as it's not us getting attacked, as long as it's our you know, the people we don't like down the road, the Mary, when it's Captain john Alden is commissioned to hunt pirates in the later 1680s, early 1690s. It's it's homegrown pirates, we do see some of the English I guess privateers or buccaneers turning against their own. And one thing that occurs in 1689, the Glorious Revolution happens. So the locals in Boston, as well as many English men throughout the Atlantic world, take up arms and rise up against King James the second, King James was the second being Catholic and being a little autocratic, lost a lot of support both in America and in England. So there's a literal revolution that happens. England gets taken over in a sentence by William the third, William the third will Ennis and his wife, Queen Mary will rule England and get popular support in the colonies, but because he was a minister or a governor under the rule of King James, Edmund Andros is overthrown. So there's this chaos and there's this rioting in Boston. And that's the opportunity pirates seize on to get some plunder. One of the main pirates that takes this advantage is a guy named commerce pound so the pirate Thomas pound and I guess you want to Annette it this part. So one of one of the issues is the pirate Thomas pound, who was a former captain of the Mary decided to start pirating, he got some supporters and he went around and caused a lot of more chaos even though the Glorious Revolution was causing enough unrest in Boston. So the Bostonians who had just dismasted the Royal Navy guard ship there because they were concerned that their captain was in like in league with Andros or without any defenses on the on the on the entire coastline. They kind of shot themselves in the foot. So they decided to commission the Mary, they send Captain Samuel PS to attack the former captain of the Mary, who is now a pirate Thomas pound. So the Mary's being sent after its former captain, there's a great big battle off of Martha's Vineyard, a lot of men are killed. Luckily, though, the Mary's crew are successful, and they captured Thomas pound, but it was a moment of real historical irony. And one of the early cases of the Mary being connected to some really big dramas in the Atlantic world, the golden age of piracy, the the Glorious Revolution and what will ultimately become the Salem witchcraft trials.

R2 Studios

18:49

So let's talk about the Salem witchcraft trials because you don't typically think about ships as being instrumental in witchcraft trial. So tell us how the Mary relates to some of Salem's more sordid history.

Speaker 2

19:06

Oh, absolutely. So say Hello, Mr. C port. That's one thing that doesn't get covered much in a lot of our traditional histories of the Salem witchcraft trials we look at you know, so and so lived in this part of town so and so I lived in this part of town. The hangings happened on this hill, but one thing people forget is it was an act and still is an active port in Massachusetts. And it had ties to the sea and this is a time of warfare and a lot of great scholarship has been done, connecting the king William's war and really the many defeats the New Englanders are facing to the general social unrest that led to the fears of witchcraft. And in the popular mindset of New Englanders at the time, and particularly the Puritans. They believe the devil was working with Catholic agents and fringe agents. So you got to look at King James, you got to look at King Louie the 14th he had a very conspiratorial view of the world to take down the quote unquote godly Commonwealth of Massachusetts. So the fear with the Salem witchcraft trials was that much of this satanic conspiracy was a fifth column. Many of the folks that you think you can trust, apparently you can't because, you know, a good emailer down the road might be casting a spell on your couch. So we got to be a bit of an internal fear and one of the Mary's captains in the Mary does have a revolving cast of captains, which is something I found interesting it becomes a less common trend in later provincial navies because of the unrest switching your commander provides. One of the Mary's captains john Alden was an Indian trader, he was accused of having Native American mistresses even though he was a married man. He was accused of trading with the French and giving them information he was accused of not being serious and rescuing captives from the wabanaki. And actually, famously, he takes his long time to rescue his son, john aladin, Jr. So he was definitely self interested. There's no doubt about that. And he was perhaps a little corrupt while captain of the Mary and he had specific suspicions by the Massachusetts government, that he was operating in less than honest ways. And it got so bad that actual New Englanders were scared to go on the merry with him because they thought that he was a fifth column fringe supporter. So ultimately, he is captured and he's accused of witchcraft, because of his mismanagement as captain of the married, and many of the girls who are in Salem, accusing people of witchcraft themselves are victims of Native American massacres of English settlers. So they're likely hearing gossip that john aladin is trading with the enemy. And of course, in their mind, this probably creates him as a candidate. He was notoriously sassy and Esalen witchcraft trials. It's quite entertaining to read the transcripts of his of his role. He was accused of looking at the girls and making them faint. And so when the judge asks him, why is he doing this? He looks at the judge and says, If I'm making them faint, why are you not fainting when I look at you, so he was accused of not taking his hat off, which was a sign of disrespect. He was accused of taking part in the Black Sabbath, that that were part of the you know, the general images of witchcraft in the woods of New England. And ultimately, he is likely he could have been hanged and tried. He was an ideal candidate. He was sort of like Giles Corey, the one of the other main men, or George Burroughs. But he escapes. He's in the 60s at this point, he makes his way I forget exactly where I think he makes it to another part of New England, waits for the dust to settle, goes back up to to where he was living near Boston and lives to his 80s. So very lucky man. But he could have prevented all of this had he just been more forthcoming and forthright with his leadership with Mary. But how this connects to the Mary, if you look, the Mary's already had to chase down and hunt down its former captain who had turned to piracy. Now it's got a later Captain being accused of witchcraft. At the same time, while all of this is going on, Edmund Andros is in England and New England, dissidents are in England, and they're arguing with each other about the legacy of the revolt in the Mary gets named dropped and brought up. And they accuse Edmund Andros, his soldiers of planning to seize the Mary and use it to serve the French. So the Mary not only has actual crew members and officers involved in these dramas, but it becomes a bit of a chess piece for those who are arguing about the Glorious Revolution in England. And you got to imagine this is a tiny little gunboat of 40 or 50 times and it's caught itself up in an international set of dramas that no boat I know of other than this has gotten involved in.

R2 Studios

23:56

So it seems like the marry actually gets involved in a lot of political and legal wrangling throughout its history, not just at this moment, but kind of at the beginning. And then here again. So why are these legal wrangling so important? What is it that they tell us about maybe how the colonies relate to each other and how they relate to the Empire what, what's so important about the legal issues?

Speaker 2

24:23

So a little context, Massachusetts in the 1630s, when they first become you know, a colony in the Puritan settle there gets a charter from the king at the time and basically grants them the right to be a theocracy and to kind of run their own show. When King Charles the second comes in office, he tried to institute a series of reforms where some more of the American colonies were more directly ruled by the king. He revoked near the end of his life in the 1680s. He revoked Massachusetts his charter. He didn't like the fact they weren't honoring the Church of England. He didn't like the fact that they were not following royal orders. They had own money. They're acting like their own country essentially. So he revokes their charter. And they're basically without a charter throughout much of King Charles a seconds remaining years. And then his heir, his brother, the Catholic King, who gets overthrown. James the second, continues that policy, he's not going to give them their charter and he makes them part are part of that larger Dominion of New England. So they're very, very, very, very autonomous. And they're not happy with the kind of royal mandates that have kept them in the position of not having a charter for a very long time. So when they overthrow Andros, and they join in this transatlantic revolution in 1689 6090, they want to make sure that this new king is going to give them their charter back. So they send agents, including the famous preacher, Increase Mather, who, you know, you could do a whole series of books on, father of Cotton Mather, who you can even do three series of books on, but he increased Mather and a few other Massachusetts agents go to the new king, King William and the new queen, Queen Mary and say, Please give us our charter back. They run into a speed bump, Edmund Andros, that man they just imprisoned is now in England. And he is not happy. And he's trying to prove to the king that his administration was completely just and he was overthrown by some rabble. And so they duke it out in in Whitehall for a while and ultimately King William does honor the requests of the Massachusetts agents with some, you know, particular exceptions. He makes sure that they're not as autonomous as they previously had been, but they are given much of their freedom, if you could say freedom, much of their more autonomy back and in this process. During this wrangling transatlantic battle over the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, the Mary and its crew come up as a talking point, the New Englanders say, well, Edmund Andros didn't defend our coasts. Look, why do we have these pirate issues, and the Mary could have been stolen by Catholic agents and use to bring down our godly Commonwealth. These are all arguments that are advanced and Edmund Andros responds, I did my best. I tried to defend your coast. And I made sure there were forts filled with soldiers and chips filled with men. So the Mary becomes a conduit of a lot of this fighting now how this relates to what we know about the Atlantic world. At the time, the colonies, there was a lot of disarray, when the Glorious Revolution happens. The news of it takes, you know, above a year to get around the colonies. There's different types of colonies, Massachusetts by this point as a royal colony, Virginia as a royal colony, Carolina, which will later become North and South Carolina, brand new colonies is proprietary. It's owned by private landlords. So the ability for the Metropole to enforce its well in such a scattered and disarranged area known as the the colonies in North America is seriously challenged. And we don't see any kind of uniformity till the 18th century. So the Mary's role in its bigger drama points to the disarray and disunity in the colonies, and also the very real implications that an undefended coast can provide.

R2 Studios

28:08

So one of the things that I found interesting about the Mary and its situation is that it is part of what we might call a Navy in, such as it is, so why do you think that these sort of provincial navies haven't gotten as much press as maybe later versions of a colonial type Navy or a revolutionary Navy?

Speaker 2

28:36

I'm glad you asked. That's one of my big points of my dissertation that I'm and also just in general, that I like to emphasize. So the last person to really take seriously the idea that the colonies had their own navies, was about 100 years ago, his name was Howard shaping, and he wrote a book called The privateers or privateer ships of North America. And the big issue even with his scholarship is he doesn't explain what a privateer versus a Navy is he does a little bit, and subsequent scholars have just casually thrown out the word provincial Navy. So I don't, I didn't create that term. I definitely adopted it from other scholars. But it's never been a focus of more than a few pages and studies of colonial warfare. And I think one of the big reasons my theory as to why these many navies throughout the 1670s through the 1760s have been ignored is simply the term private hearing. The term private hearing is so confusing. If you even look at dictionaries from you know, Samuel Johnson, the term privateering in 18th century generally was understood to mean a private vessel, a commerce rater that had a letter of marque given to them by a governor that said, go and attack who you want where you want, so long as you bring your prizes back to me get back to me in a year. It's very privatized and decentralized. There are laws in England about privateering that pop up later, but is that the Same thing as a colonial governor or a colonial legislature fearing pirates off the coast, and taking one of their militia leaders. And in pressing a few ships to defend their harbor. My argument is it's a very different concept and actually cheap and made this point, but then he kind of contradicted himself later on and use the term private here. And to be fair, the term private tear is very vague. And it was thrown around loosely by the colonists to describe state funded fleets and commerce Raiders that are on their own. But my point is, we need to be careful how we use the term private tearing because it's gotten too big as an umbrella. Does it? Does it just mean private vessels and private, you know, captains who are operating as, as commerce hunters with letters of marque? Or does it also mean government owned ships that are funded with tax money? I mean, I think it's a little less private when you get to that point. So the old term provincial Navy hasn't been used and above 40 or 50 years, and it hasn't been taken seriously in 100 years, in the 1920s book, so I my my entire purpose with my dissertation and with this manuscript, the solute marry is to bring attention back to the actual state funded fleets of the colonies and maintain they were more than private years, although they certainly were similar in many cases intersected with private tearing, but they're deserving of their own contextual study. And what you find are some pretty interesting cases like witchcraft trials, pirates. You cover a lot of the big issues in America, in South Carolina, I actually recently was reading about a group of enslaved Africans and freed people who served in the South Carolina provincial Navy, who were campaigning for monetary compensation for their sacrifice, and they were not given it but these men were on a provincial navy ship, if you ignore the provincial navies, America, you'd ignore this entire case of African American resistance to the south carolina government. So that provincial Navy is not just a study of naval defense, it allows us to look into social, racial, religious, and even witchcraft tensions throughout the colonial governments that we discuss, and really every colony that had a seaport had a provincial Navy with a few exceptions, very, very, very much the majority from the Barbados all the way up to Nova Scotia had some manner of local naval fleets to defend their shores,

R2 Studios

32:20

it strikes me that even if their purpose is somewhat similar commerce Raider, sort of things, I mean, many of the activities that you were describing earlier about the marry, you could potentially shoehorn into commerce rating. But I think you're right, that there's a huge difference between a ship that's owned by a private individual, and a ship that's not owned by a private individual, because the ways in which you can use a publicly owned ship or a government owned ship are so different, even if that's not how they did get used. It seems like there's a big difference there to me.

Speaker 2

33:02

Well, and that's a good point. And also it's a matter of accountability. So when you're a privateer, you have to I mean, you do answer to the governor to an extent, you can't violate your letter of marque or you'll be a pirate. So that's, that's a whole that's a whole legal minefield, but generally, you are given a little more autonomy. If you're a provincial Navy captain, you're operating under specific orders, you will go to Nova Scotia with this expedition. Also, while the Mary was an actual purpose built ship, the majority of provincial navy vessels in the Americas were not they were merchant ships that were forced by local governments to serve almost like a conscription to serve in local defense efforts. So I really hesitate to call privateers, people who had no choice but to serve at the pain of imprisonment. It's, it's it's the symbol, it would be the literal equivalent of calling a volunteer in the US military. The same as somebody who is conscripted, it's theirs, they're doing the same job, but it's a very different group of individuals who are taking part in warfare,

R2 Studios

34:08

and that makes total sense to me. So today in 2021, why should we care about the Mary and its history?

Speaker 2

34:17

The Mary allows us to look at some traditionally well covered historical topics from a maritime field. And you know, there has been traditional scholarship that has used maritime you know, Lippman salt waters frontiers book, for example, use water, or the Atlantic Ocean as a conduit to look at affairs on land. But it also allows us to look at how naval warfare connected to larger crises on land naval warfare is not always about fighting pirates or fighting the Spanish or French or natives. It can also be fights over money and taxation if it out your ships. It can be fights over witchcraft, religious differences, cultural differences, racial issues. differences. These are all exacerbated by the costs of outfitting fleet. So it's another factor that, I guess you could say at risk of being too punny a porthole to allow us to investigate the tensions in colonial America in greater detail. Also, in the modern day, we've seen cases where I don't want to say exactly provincial navies, but we've seen cases of modern piracy, where locals have faded out little flotillas to go pirate hunting, I teach a course on the history of piracy, at the College of Charleston as an adjunct. And one of these news stories from 2016 occurred in Venezuela where local fishermen put together a little fleet to go pirate hunting and I when I saw that I, you know, favorited it five times. And so there it is. So we do see in some cases where there are institutional navies, locals taking the ability to build their own fleet seriously, I don't think that'll be very common. But it does show you that that that concept is not lost in humanity, despite us having larger navies and greater global capabilities today. So the idea of local naval defense, I think is going to be a relevant issue for as long as pirates are on the seas.

R2 Studios

36:05

Yeah, for sure. So, to close out here, when did the mairie stop operating and what happened to the provincial Navy of Massachusetts or of New England? After that,

Speaker 2

36:18

on one hand, the Mary had a very undramatic ending. So for a ship that had a sloop that had such a really interesting service life. By 1694, the the sloop gets disbanded, basically, they said it's kind of worn out. By this point, Massachusetts has more Royal Navy protection from the British Navy, which is something I get into a little in the solute marry paper, but it was never adequate enough to completely disband a provincial Navy. So there were always going to be Royal Navy ships in Massachusetts, but they can't control the whole coast alone. So throughout the 1790s, all the way down to the 17, late 1760s. Massachusetts continues to build its own provincial ships and they get bigger and bigger and bigger. The salute Mary was something of a early ancestor. We, by the 1750s, we see a major warship built by the Massachusetts government, and that warship was called the King George, and that that was a very large vessel, you know, 20 guns, it was it was borderline of six, the rate British frigate, and it served alongside the Royal Navy, it was seen as a warship, even though is built and operated by the Massachusetts government and some of the people on that ship. So we're looking nearly a century after the marry some of the people on the Massachusetts ship will later serve in the continental Navy and the American Revolution. So we see a I don't want to say a direct connection for the Mary to the original continental Navy, but there certainly is if you wanted to follow the family tree of provincial ships, you know, that ship, we got that ship, we got that ship and you do end up with a continental Navy in Massachusetts. So I think there's something to be said for looking for the origins of an American Navy a little earlier than 1775.

Speaker 1

38:24

Preble Hall is in no way intended to reflect the official positions of the Department of the Navy or the Naval Academy.

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