twelve and was a prosperous shipmaster at twenty-one with savings
invested in a house of his own in Providence. Enlisting under
Washington, he was made a captain of infantry and was soon
promoted, but he was restless ashore and glad to obtain an odd
assignment. As Colonel Talbot he selected sixty infantry
volunteers, most of them seamen by trade, and led them aboard the
small sloop Argo in May, 1779, to punish the New York Tories who
were equipping privateers against their own countrymen and
working great mischief in Long Island Sound. So serious was the
situation that General Gates found it almost impossible to obtain
food supplies for the northern department of the Continental
army.

Silas Talbot and his nautical infantrymen promptly fell in with
the New York privateer Lively, a fair match for him, and as
promptly sent her into port. He then ran offshore and picked up
and carried into Boston two English privateers headed for New
York with large cargoes of merchandise from the West Indies. But
he was particularly anxious to square accounts with a renegade
Captain Hazard who made Newport his base and had captured many
American vessels with the stout brig King George, using her for
"the base purpose of plundering his old neighbors and friends."

On his second cruise in the Argo, young Silas Talbot encountered
the perfidious King George to the southward of Long Island and
riddled her with one broadside after another, first hailing
Captain Hazard by name and cursing him in double-shotted phrases
for the traitorous swab that he was. Then the seagoing infantry
scrambled over the bulwarks and tumbled the Tories down their own
hatches without losing a man. A prize crew with the humiliated