fleets from their haunts off Newfoundland. This was to rob six
thousand sturdy men of a livelihood afloat and to spread ruin
among the busy ports, such as Marblehead and Gloucester, from
which sailed hundreds of pinks, snows, and schooners. This
measure became law notwithstanding the protests of twenty-one
peers of the realm who declared: "We dissent because the attempt
to coerce by famine the whole body of the inhabitants of great
and populous provinces is without example in the history of this,
or perhaps, of any civilized nation."

The sailormen bothered their heads very little about taxation
without representation but whetted their anger with grudges more
robust. They had been beggared and bullied and shot at from the
Bay of Biscay to Barbados, and no sooner was the Continental
Congress ready to issue privateering commissions and letters of
marque than for them it was up anchor and away to bag a
Britisher. Scarcely had a shipmaster signaled his arrival with a
deep freight of logwood, molasses, or sugar than he received
orders to discharge with all speed and clear his decks for
mounting heavier batteries and slinging the hammocks of a hundred
eager privateersmen who had signed articles in the tavern
rendezvous. The timbered warehouses were filled with long-toms
and nine-pounders, muskets, blunderbusses, pistols, cutlases,
boarding-pikes, hand grenades, tomahawks, grape, canister, and
doubleheaded shot.

In the narrow, gabled streets of Salem, Boston, New York, and
Baltimore, crowds trooped after the fifes and drums with a
strapping recruiting officer to enroll "all gentlemen seamen and
able-bodied landsmen who had a mind to distinguish themselves in