Feisty locals dealt British navy first defeat of Revolutionary War 232 years ago today

Richard Gaines, staff writer

August 08, 2007 12:57 am

— Break out the grog, prepare the fireworks, fly high the flag, ’tis a day to celebrate.
Today is — or should be — a red-letter day in the history of this patriotic old city, a local historian says. Aug. 8 marks the anniversary of a military victory in Gloucester Harbor that was critical to the outcome of the American Revolution.
On this day 232 years ago, Aug. 8, 1775, Gloucester minutemen beat back an assault by the sailors of King George III, keeping the strategic port out of British hands and handing the imperial crown a stinging defeat, the first suffered by the Royal Navy in the war.
The Battle of the Falcon, the British sloop of war that was routed and driven off by patriots firing muskets and light artillery from points along the Inner Harbor, “is the signal event in Gloucester’s history and an early turning point in the Revolution,” argues historian Joseph Garland, author of a number of books on Gloucester’s past. “It has long been underappreciated.”
Garland’s book, “The Fish and the Falcon,” the expanded and retitled 2006 edition of his 1975 book, “Guns Off Gloucester,” tells the rousing story of H.M.S. Falcon.
Filled with hubris, Capt. John Linzee sailed the Falcon into the harbor in pursuit of a Colonial merchant vessel, only to be driven off by a band of locals from the town of 2,700.
In repulsing the Falcon early in the war, killing one of its crew, capturing 35 and seizing many guns, the colonials made sure Cape Ann remained a rebel stronghold. They also secured the freedom of the fledgling American Navy to maraud the sea lanes of the Gulf of Maine.
This bore delicious fruit less than four months later.
In November, the American armed schooner Lee set sail from Beverly and captured a great prize off Gloucester, the munitions brig Nancy. Taken into the free harbor of Gloucester, it was stripped of its precious cargo: armaments enough to turn the tide of war in Boston.
“The capture of the Nancy was the biggest boost to American morale since the Falcon fight,” Garland wrote in “The Fish and the Falcon.”
“As the tackles were sent down Nancy’s hatches, and her captors hauled them up, they could scarcely believe their eyes: 2,000 muskets, bayonets, and infantry accoutrements; 100,000 musket flints, 62,000 pounds of musket shot; 7,000 rounds of shot, 12- and 6-pound; 20,000 one-pound shot; bomb carcasses, 4 siege mortars, including a brass giant with a 13-inch bore; 21 6-pound cannon; 8,000 fuses, several barrels of power; a great variety of the implements of war.”
General George Washington, who had noticed Gloucester’s strategic significance even before the victory over the Falcon, had been hoping to take the Nancy. Weeks earlier, he had told the Continental Congress in Philadelphia that his army had “great want of powder, lead, mortars, indeed most sorts of military stores. A fortunate capture of an ordnance ship would give new life to the camp and an immediate turn to the issue of this campaign.”
Nancy’s munitions were quickly distributed to Washington’s army forming in Cambridge, dramatically shifting the balance of arms around Boston.
The British withdrawal from Boston the next spring, now celebrated as Evacuation Day, was the all but inevitable consequence of the loss of the Nancy — an event made possible by the defeat of the Falcon at Gloucester.
The invaders had underestimated the will and talent of the locals to defend their harbor and town, and their defeat 232 years ago today played a pivotal role in the outcome of the struggle for the freedom of Gloucester and its colonial cousins from Maine to Georgia.
“Even as I write, I glance across this protected bay of the Atlantic, and hear in my mind’s ear the clump of the barrage reverberating between these shores,” Garland wrote. “No Independence Day fireworks. The real thing. Just look out the window and there it is.”

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