preparing to build the navy, the regular marine committee had not been idle. By strenuous effort the committee assembled a squadron. A merchant vessel called the Black Prince, which had lately arrived from London under the command of John Barry (afterward a famous American commodore), was purchased and renamed the Alfred, after King Alfred the Great, who is commonly believed to be the founder of the British navy. She was a small, stanch trading vessel, very heavily timbered, and with unusually stout scantlings for a ship of her class, although of course not equal to a properly constructed ship of war. The committee armed her with twenty 9-pounders on the main deck, and four smaller guns, possibly 6- or 4-pounders, on the forecastle and poop, and she was placed under the command of Captain Dudley Saltonstall. Jones, whose name stood first on the list of first lieutenants, was appointed her executive officer. Hopkins selected her for his flagship. Jones had been offered the command of one of the smaller vessels of the squadron, but elected to fill his present station, as presenting more opportunities for acquiring information and seeing service. His experience in armed vessels had been limited; he knew but little of the requirements of a man-of-war, and deemed he could best fit himself for that higher command to which he aspired and determined to deserve by beginning his service under older and more experienced officers-a wise decision.
The next important vessel was another converted merchantman, originally called the Sally, now named the Columbus, after the great discoverer. She was a full-rigged ship of slightly less force and armament than the Alfred, commanded by Captain Abraham Whipple, already distinguished in a privateering way. In addition to these there were two brigs called the Andrea Doria and the Cabot, commanded by Captains Nicholas Biddle and John Burroughs Hopkins, a son of the commander-in-chief. The Andrea Doria and Cabot carried fourteen 4-pounders each.
Hopkins arrived at Philadelphia in December, 1775, in the brig Katy, of the Rhode Island navy, which was at once taken into the Continental service and renamed the Providence, after the commander's native town. She carried twelve light guns, 4-pounders. There were also secured a ten-gun schooner called the Hornet, and the Wasp and Fly, two eight-gun schooners or tenders, one of which Jones had refused. The work of outfitting these ships as generously as the meager resources of the colonies permitted had been carried on assiduously before the arrival of the commander-in-chief, whose first duty, when he reached Philadelphia, was formally to assume the command.
This assumption of command entailed the putting of the ships in commission by publicly reading the orders appointing the commodore, and assigning him to command, and hoisting and saluting the flags. The officers previously appointed had been proceeding somewhat irregularly, doubtless, by going on with their preparations prior to this important ceremony. At any rate, in the latter part of December, 1775, or the early part of January, 1776-the date not being clear, the authorities not only differing, but in no single case venturing upon a definite statement-all things having been made ready, Commodore Hopkins with his staff officers entered the commodore's barge, lying at the foot of Walnut Street, and was rowed to the flagship. The wharves and houses facing the river were crowded with spectators to witness so momentous a ceremony as the commissioning of the first American fleet.
It has been recorded that it was a bright, cold, clear winter morning. The barge picked its way among the floating ice cakes of the Delaware, and finally reached the Alfred. The commodore mounted the side, followed by his staff, and was received with due honors in the gangway by the captain and his officers in such full dress as they could muster. The crew and the marines were drawn up in orderly ranks in the waist and on the quarter deck. After the reading of the commodore's commission and the orders assigning him to the command of the fleet, Captain Dudley Saltonstall nodded his head to John Paul Jones, his executive officer. The young Scotsman, with, I imagine, a heart beating rarely, stepped forward and received from the veteran quartermaster the end of the halliards, to which, in the shape of a neatly rolled-up ball, was bent a handsome yellow silk flag, bearing the representation of a rattlesnake about to strike (and perhaps a pine tree also), with the significant legend "Don't tread on me." With his own hands the young lieutenant hauled the rolled-up ensign to the masthead, and then, with a slight twitch, he broke the stops and there blew out in the morning breeze, before the eyes of the commodore, his officers, the men of the ships, and the delighted spectators on shore, the first flag that ever flew from a regularly commissioned war ship of the United Colonies. The grand union flag, a red and white striped ensign with the English cross in the canton, was also hoisted. The flags were saluted by the booming of cannon from the batteries of the ships, and with cheers from the officers and men of the squadron and the people on the shore, and thus the transaction was completed, and the navy of the United States began to be.
The ships were slight in force, their equipments meager and deficient, and of inferior quality at best. The men had but little experience in naval warfare, and their officers scarcely much more. There were men of undoubted courage and capacity among them, however, and several to whom the profession of arms was not entirely new. At least two of them, Jones and Biddle, were to become forever famous for their fighting. Compared with the huge and splendid navy of England, the whole force was an unconsidered trifle, but it was a beginning, and not a bad one at that, as the mother country was to find out. The outfitting of the squadron was by no means complete, and, though the commodore with the others labored hard, the work proceeded slowly and with many hindrances and delays; it was never properly done. Then the ships were ice-bound in Delaware Bay, and it was not until nearly two months had elapsed that they were able to get to sea.
The principal difficulty in the rebellious colonies, from the standpoint of military affairs, was the scarcity of powder. There were guns in respectable numbers, but without powder they were necessarily useless. The powder mills of the colonies were few and far between, and their output was inadequate to meet the demand. It is now well known that although Washington maintained a bold front when he invested the British army in Boston, at times his magazines did not contain more than a round or two of powder for each of his guns. His position was a magnificent specimen of what in modern colloquialism would have been called a "bluff." There was, of course, but little powder to spare for the improvised men-of-war, and most of what they had was borrowed from the colony of Pennsylvania. To get powder was the chief end of military men then.
On February 17, 1776, the little squadron cleared the capes of the Delaware, and before nightfall had disappeared from view beneath the southeast horizon. It appears that the orders were for Hopkins to sail along the coast toward the south, disperse Dunmore's squadron, which was marauding in Virginia, pick up English coasting vessels, and capture scattered English ships cruising between Pennsylvania and Georgia to break up the colonial coasting trade and capture colonial merchantmen. But it also appears from letters of the Marine Committee that another object of the expedition was the seizure of large stores of powder and munitions of warfare which had been allowed to accumulate at New Providence, in the Bahama group, and that Hopkins sailed with much discretion as to his undertaking and the means of carrying it out. The Bahama project was maintained as a profound secret between the naval committee and its commodore, the matter not being discussed in Congress even.
With that end in view the commander-in-chief, by orders published to the fleet before its departure, appointed the island of Abaco, one of the most northerly of the Bahama group, as a rendezvous for his vessels in case they became separated by the usual vicissitudes of the sea. The scattered ships were directed to make an anchorage off the southern part of the island, and wait at least fourteen days for the other vessels to join them before cruising on their own account in such directions as in the judgment of their respective commanders would most annoy, harass, and damage the enemy.
Shortly after leaving the capes the squadron ran into a severe easterly gale off Hatteras, then, as now, one of the most dangerous points on the whole Atlantic seaboard. The ships beat up against it, and all succeeded in weathering the cape and escaping the dreaded perils of the lee shore. If lack of training prevented the officers from claiming to be naval experts, there were prime seamen among them at any rate. When the gale abated Hopkins cruised along the coast for a short time, meeting nothing of importance in the way of a ship. Rightly concluding that the fierce winter weather would have induced the enemy's vessels to seek shelter in the nearest harbors, and his cruise in that direction, if further continued, would be profitless, he squared away for the Bahamas, to carry out the second and secret part of his instructions.
It was for a long time alleged that he