"The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution" is a must for students of Rhode Island history, although the author misses an opportunity to truly capture the drama of the historic event.
"The Burning of His Majesty’s Schooner Gaspee: An Attack on Crown Rule Before the American Revolution," by Steven Park. Westholme Publishing. 188 pages. $26.00.
On June 9, 1772, the captain of the Hannah, a small packet vessel, evaded capture by the British naval ship the Gaspee, forcing the larger vessel into the shallow waters off Namquid Point, five miles from Providence.
The captain of the Hannah quickly reported the incident to the prominent Providence merchant John Brown at Fenner’s Wharf. In the early morning hours of June 10, Brown and fellow merchant Abraham Whipple assembled a raiding party and set out for the Gaspee. In many ways they were taking part in a long-standing tradition.
As historian Steven Park notes in his new book on the subject, when viewed with a wide lens, it was only a matter of time before the HMS Gaspee would run into a horde of angry Rhode Islanders. In 1769, in an incident resembling the destruction of the Gaspee, the Liberty was torched near Goat Island in Newport. In March 1772, after learning of the arrival of the Gaspee in Narragansett Bay, Deputy Gov. Darius Sessions wrote to Gov. Joseph Wanton, complaining that the captain of the Gaspee had “no legal authority to justify his conduct, and his commission ... [was] more of a fiction than any thing else.”
Throughout the book, Park carefully examines the “intersecting components of 18th-century British law and politics,” including the authority of customs officials, the law of treason, inter-colonial committees of correspondence, and the conspiratorial political atmosphere in Revolutionary America. Park explains why other Revolutionaries, most notably Thomas Jefferson, watched events in Rhode Island with a careful eye and why the greatest legacy of the burning of the Gaspee might be a little known Thanksgiving Day sermon delivered by The Rev. John Allen at the Second Baptist Church in Boston in 1772.
Park, a professor of maritime studies at the University of Connecticut, has written a highly readable and well-researched book utilizing both American and British sources that should be required reading for students of Rhode Island history. His extensive section of endnotes (50 pages) and comprehensive bibliography will be invaluable to researchers. However, the book will not be the last word on the subject. The author to a degree missed an opportunity to write a narrative that truly captured the drama of the historic and momentous event that as the Rhode Island abolitionist Frances Whipple McDougall noted in 1844, marked “the first blood in the Revolution.”
We learn little, for example, about the lives of John Brown, Abraham Whipple, Darius Sessions or Joseph Wanton and how they fit into the broader Revolutionary movement, or what historian T.H. Breen has called “American insurgents, American patriots.” Ironically, at times the author seemed hesitant (though he supplied the evidence) to talk about the significance of an event that involved the boarding of a British ship at sea, shooting the captain in the leg, burning the ship, and the creation of a royal commission that could, in the words of a resolution passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses in March 1773, “transport persons accused of offenses committed in America, to places beyond the seas to be tried.”
These points aside, however, Park’s book does further our knowledge and for that we are in his debt.
Erik J. Chaput, Ph.D., a long-time reviewer, teaches at The Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and is the author of "The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion" (2013) and the co-editor with Russell J. DeSimone of a digital edition of the letters of Thomas Wilson Dorr which can be found at: library.providence.edu/dorr.