*This is Part II of the Luke Ryan Story, for Pt I, please see my previous blog.
* Dubliner Luke Ryan had sailed his ship out of home waters as a British privateer to fight the Americans. But he had decided that profit and duty would be best served by turning pirate for the French Crown, and going to war against the British Navy for the freedom of the United States.
In Dunkirk, he placed himself in the service of a man called Torris - a sort of super-agent for promising young pirates.
A Model Of The Black Prince - Ryan's Ship |
* Jean Francois Torris was an armateur
– a middleman who supplied the capital needed to arm, outfit and commission the
privateers – and his native Dunkirk was a privateer’s port, as close to a pirate
town as you could get in northern Europe in the latter half of the eighteenth
century. Privateering in Dunkirk was big business and was administrated by the
French civil service; revenue came from charging rewards, fines and duties
levied on behalf of Louis XVI. The French government supplied the port
facilities for the conversion and fitting out of smuggling vessels and sold
former naval ships for privateering. The town was a magnet for rogues and
adventurers of all nations, drawn by the prospects of high-rewards for
high-risks. And now, through his controlling stake in the Friendship, the
Frenchman Torris was in the slightly strange position of owning a
privateer crewed and commanded by Irishmen and (nominally, at least) carrying a
letter of marque from the English admiralty.
Ships of The Port Of Dunkirk 1760s |
The Irish smuggling ship, turned British
Letter of Marque was now a renegade French privateer. And it was bound for
Dublin in May 1779 with a cargo of brandy and other contraband goods, to turn a
profit for its French owner. However, the ship ran foul of the ever vigilant
revenue men, who seized the Friendship and its crew at Rogerstown, near
Rush shortly after they docked.
Wilde and his crew were thrown into the
Black Dog Prison, close to the quays in the heart of Dublin at Cornmarket.
Ryan, by now a very worldly twenty-five-year-old, had not been on board when
the ship and its crew was seized and soon hit on a plan to free his crew and
retake the Friendship. He organised a force of smugglers from Rush to go
up the River Liffey in armed river ferry boats, they subdued the guards in the
dead of night and sprung Wilde and the rest of the men from The Black Dog.They
then boarded the Friendship, cut the anchor lines and sailed her back to
Rush, along with a small group of unwilling passengers, Revenue men who had
been surprised on board the ship by the sudden arrival of the men from Rush.
After taking on additional crew in an inlet in North County Dublin, Ryan
sportingly dropped the Dublin Revenue officers across the Irish Sea in Dorset
before making away for Dunkirk.
Remains of the Debtors Prison - Close to the Old Black Dog in Dublin |
Once out of reach of the British revenue
and navy at Dunkirk, it was time for Luke Ryan and the Friendship to
change their identities and sign up to help Benjamin Franklin win the War of
Independence.
Franklin had been on the lookout for likely
vessels to carry American letters of marque. Jean François Torris was able to
offer the American ambassador to the court of King Louis XVI some likely
candidates, and top of the list was the lightning-fast Irish cutter with its
enterprising captain and a crew that, after the Black Dog breakout, owed Ryan
their lives and their liberty. Torris sold Franklin on the idea, the Friendship
would be renamed the Black Prince and her Irish crew would sail under
American colours.
Torris and Ryan wanted
profit. Franklin wanted chaos. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement even if
there was one slight sticking point.
As a
pirate, wanted by the British, Luke Ryan could not legally command a US
privateer. So Torris and the Dubliner came up with a simple solution, an
unemployed merchant seaman from Boston called Stephen Marchant would be the
nominal captain and front-man for the operation. Ben Franklin was told the Black
Prince was sailing under an American captain. But it was a twenty-five-year-old
Dubliner, a pirate, smuggler and wanted man, who was really calling the shots.
The Black Prince went to work,
sailing from Dunkirk in June 1779 and quickly snapping up eight British prizes
which were sailed back to the French port of Morlaix. In July, Ryan and his
ship captured a further thirteen British coastal trading vessels, which were
stripped of their cargoes and then ransomed back to the English owners. A
Waterford brig (a quick and highly-manoeuvrable ship with two square-rigged
masts) called the Sally-Anne was one
of eighteen vessels brought into the ports of Morlaix and Dunkirk after a
particularly productive cruise to the waters off the South West coast of
England. In September, the Black Prince, which now included another Rush
man as officer, one Patrick Dowling, went on a longer cruise, all the way up to
the Outer Hebrides off the far north west coast of Scotland to seize an
impressive thirty-four prizes.
Part of the secret of the Black Prince’s
success was its ability to stalk its prey while projecting an pacific appearance. Sailing with its gun-ports closed
(but with slow-match burning and cannon-fully loaded, ready to be run out at a
moment’s command) it could look like an innocent trading vessel.
Privateers like Ryan
would go to such lengths as making their ships look scruffy, ill-handled and as
different from a tautly sailed and obviously disciplined and dangerous
man-o-war as possible.
It was only when you got up close to the
cutter that you might notice the extra gun-ports, the 70-odd, evil-looking
crewmen packed on deck and the murderous swivel guns bolted to the rails.
By then it was usually too late. Ryan and
his crew were close enough and well-armed enough to threaten a broadside that
would blow your ship to matchsticks. If you resisted and they were able to
board with cutlasses, flint-lock pistols and deadly musketoons (a primitive
form of shot-gun, often loaded with glass or old nails) they would make short
and bloody work of any resistance. Worthy prizes were sailed back to friendly
ports to be stripped, sold or ransomed back to their owners. Vessels that
didn’t warrant that effort were burned to the waterline. Ryan, the smuggler,
contraband runner and sometimes fisherman, knew the waters around Britain and
Ireland like few others.
Benjamin Franklin was impressed. There was
consternation in London, where the Black Prince was now causing great
dread and distress to the merchants and money men of the City. By this stage,
the nominal American captain Marchant had given up his paper command and
returned to the US, to leave the Irish to get on with the job. Torris and
Matthew Wilde (or ‘McCatter’) sourced a new vessel, which was named the
privateer Black Princess and put to sea. Their trusted Rush
compatriot Patrick Dowling would take
over the Black Prince under an American commission.
Ryan, who had been ill, now wanted to come
out of the shadows. Together with Torris, he wrote to Benjamin Franklin seeking
permission to outfit a new privateer with the Rush man as captain, sailing,
officially for the first time, with an American commission. Franklin was now in
on the secret. He realised that he had been hoodwinked by Torris and Ryan. But
the Founding Father was impressed. He recognised in Ryan the kind of
successful, leader of men who could get the job done. And it was war, whatever
the legal niceties. He responded by buying a new ship, the former French
man-o-war Sans Peur (or the Fear Not to her English-speaking
crew), making Ryan its official master (though not making him an official
commissioned officer of the American navy) and setting her on British shipping.
Franklin also presented Ryan with a highly-prized ‘night glass’, a telescope
that had been specially adapted to make the most of dim light. Franklin may have been exercising his noted sense of humour as
a night glass was the perfect accessory for a pirate.
The Fear Not was refitted and sailed
in early 1780 for the Orkney Islands, where she seized sixteen prizes on her
first voyage under her new master, Luke Ryan. With eighteen cannon and twelve
swivel guns, the Fear Not was a match for many armed ships and could
claim to justify her defiant name.
There were now three Irish-commanded and
crewed ships sailing under American commission for Benjamin Franklin against the
British. And while Wilde and Dowling were doing their bit for the Revolution,
it was Ryan in the Fear Not who was really making a name for himself.
The ship caused mayhem along the Scottish coast. When supplies ran low, Fear
Not sailed into one of the more isolated ports and demanded victualling at
the point of eighteen cannon. On more
than one occasion, Ryan was said to have blown up the storehouses of a Scots
merchant who was not coming across with the goods.
On 28 July 1780, the Dublin newspaper, The
Freeman’s Journal, reported on ‘letters recently arrived from Scotland’,
which ‘mentioned that the Fearnought (sic)
privateer, Luke Ryan commander, landed at Stornaway, in the island of Lewis,
and after plundering the town, carried off the principal inhabitants hostages,
as ransomers for the houses.’ To the British, Ryan and his men were fighting
for the Americans, but they were not American citizens, they were Irish pirates
and rebels. If captured, it was the hangman’s noose in short order. But as one American
officer who came into contact with Ryan observed, ‘I have sailed with many
brave men, but none the equal to this Captain Luke Ryan for skill and bravery’.
Torris, the hard-nosed French armateur,
also appears to have had a soft spot for Ryan. On at least one occasion he is
said to have asked Benjamin Franklin to accede to Ryan’s request for a formal
commission in the Continental Navy and US citizenship. Ryan himself wrote that
he would give ‘the last drop of blood to gain honour for the American flag.’
Franklin never did make Ryan and his men an official part of the Continental
Navy, with the protections that this would have brought. They always operated
in the para-legal world of the privateer. The American ambassador to the French
court may simply have not had the time to formalise Ryan's status further. But
it is also possible that when it came to dealing with the British, as it surely
must, it suited Franklin and his fellow politicians to have plausible
deniability of the Irish privateers. Negotiations with
the defeated British would be hard enough without having to raise the issue of
Irish rebels and pirates who sailed in shadowy waters between the law and
lawlessness.
Franklin may also have been irked by Ryan
and his fellow captains’ failure to bring in as many prisoners as he wanted for
exchange. Strangely, the Irish privateers seemed to be more intent on treasure
than the more complicated business of catching and holding British prisoners.
As the Fear Not joined the Black
Prince and Black Princess at sea, the British navy came under
increasing pressure to do something. There were reports in the English
newspapers that two Royal Navy frigates had been sent out to look for the Irish
privateers.
Luke Ryan and his fellow Irish privateers
were about to become the victims of their own success. Since the middle of
1779, events had gone Ryan’s way. He had sailed
in and commanded five different privateers, Black Prince, Black Princess,
Fear Not, La Marechal and Calonne, capturing an impressive 114 prizes.
He had ransomed seventy-five captains of British vessels and exchanged over 160
British seamen. He and his fellow privateers from Rush had sailed under three
different flags (not counting flags of deception) and fought on both sides of
the war, albeit briefly for the British.
In a little over two years, they had been by far the most active and
successful captains in a privateering fleet that had destroyed 733 British and
Irish prizes with cargoes valued in excess of two million pounds.
During a debate in the British House of
Lords at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, peers were told that the
actions of Yankee privateers during the recent conflict had cost the British
merchant navy an estimated £8m in damages. This did not take into account the
huge problems caused to the British war effort and the Royal Navy, which was
effectively forced to fight a sea war on the ‘wrong’ side of the Atlantic.
Benjamin Franklin’s proxy sea war, fought with American captains and Irish and
French privateers, had worked even better than he could
have hoped.
* Final Part of the story... Here
Josef,
ReplyDeleteExcellent write-up on the history of Luke Ryan and the Black Prince. This is more detail than I have seen in several historical accounts I have in published books on the American Revolution, as well as on-line.
One question, if you don't mind: Do you happen to know the flag the Black Prince sailed under? I may have missed it in your writings.
Thank you,
Scott (USA)
Hi Scott, glad you found it interesting - as for the flag the ships sailed under - they were privateers - so it was a case of any flag that suited them. They were never officially part of the US navy or anything like that - the full story is in my book - Murder, Mutiny & Mayhem - The Blackest Hearted Villains from Irish History - which is available from Amazon etc - thanks - Joe
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