Abstract
Even before the fledgling United States declared its independence in 1776, the war between the colonies and the British Crown had taken to the seas. The United States, as well as the individual states, would organize naval forces, but in the face of Britain's maritime power, these were largely ineffectual during the war. One area where sailors from the United States could make an impact was through privateering. Kylie Hulbert takes up the cause of rehabilitating privateering as part of the revolutionary narrative.
The Untold War at Sea is structured in five chapters, with their titles taken from ‘Manly. A Favorite New Song in the American Fleet’, a contemporary song extolling the exploits of privateers, and this is an inspired way of structuring the book. The first chapter, titled ‘Hardy Sons of Mars’, looks at privateers before they set sail – sailors and investors, and the process by which they acquired their commissions to go and hunt British shipping. ‘A Privateering We Will Go’ focuses on the daily life of sailors at sea and ashore during a voyage. Prizes could often not be taken without a fight. Chapter 3, ‘When Cannon Balls Do Fly’, details the experience of combat. Chapter 4, ‘Make Your Fortunes Now, My Lads’, goes into the adjudication process, since taking a prize did not mean one could keep the ship. To make privateering legal, a prize court had to examine the respective claims and judge the ship in question to be a ‘good prize’. This was no easy process, as the states had to implement their own rules and were at the same time competing with the Continental Congress over the right to appeal a local verdict. This chapter in many ways sheds the most light on the problems that privateers and privateer investors faced. The final chapter, ‘To Glory Let Us Run’, explores the reception of privateers’ exploits in the United States itself. This changed, from wildly enthusiastic in the early years to more critical over time. Privateers provided stories of success in the years when the Revolution seemed bound to fail. But, over time, criticism arose, as it was argued that privateers lured men away from the Continental Army and Navy.
The book is well written, and the anecdotes and cases drawn from the accounts of privateers make for a lively read close to the source material. One point that did catch my attention in the language used is the frequent allusion to ‘exotic islands’. This seems at odds with the allusions to the Atlantic World as a well-integrated and connected area of operations. If the connections were really so humdrum, Caribbean islands would not necessarily have been ‘exotic’ to privateer crews, especially as – again – many of them did not hail from the colonies/states to begin with.
The structure of the book already makes clear that this is not a campaign narrative per se. It gives the reader a feel for the progression of a voyage, rather than being a chronologically ordered account of losses and prizes. The book succeeds well in its stated aim of giving a taste of the life of Revolutionary War privateers and, as a cultural history, it succeeds. But there are some drawbacks to the chosen approach as well. The structure works well for providing the reader with what we might term an ‘inside view’ of American privateering during the War. What is sometimes lacking, however, is the context within which to place the experiences of the privateers Hulbert has studied. The lack of a chronological structure means that it is sometimes difficult to place the descriptions relative to one another and it is at times hard to see how it all fits together. Especially when it comes to making the case for the contribution of privateering to the overall American war effort, more context and information are needed.
Another question arises when we consider the aim to rehabilitate the contribution of privateers to the American war effort in comparison to those who fought in the armies and navies of both the individual states and the Continental Congress. Hulbert rightly stresses the importance of privateering, but her treatment of privateers as another combatant arm of the United States is at times problematic. Privateering as an economic activity is sometimes given short shrift. The exception here is the chapter on the prize adjudication process, which is very good. At heart, the problem is that this is a cultural and social history of American privateering during the Revolutionary War that also wants to make a point about the importance of privateering to the overall conduct of the War, for which the chosen approach is not best suited. Arguing that ‘Privateers were crucial to the Patriots’ success during the Revolution’ (9) does require the articulation of an argument as to why this was so. Did the economic damage wrought by privateers fatally undermine Britain's economy or will to fight? That argument is not best backed up by a focus on the lives and experiences of privateers. It would be better to drop these claims and simply do what the book does best – detail the experiences of privateers, crews and investors, and thereby bring their stories fully into the tale of the Revolution.