The Battle Off Fairhaven

The first naval skirmish in the American Revolution went down off Fairhaven on May 14th, 1775.

A seagull and an offshore lighthouse photo-bomb my shot of the battlefield.

I'm using these two boats going at each other to illustrate the story, but these two actually honked and waved to each other rather than board and kill each other.

After the Battle of Lexington/Concord, the British seized two ships (a transport and a sloop) from their Patriot owners. They rigged the sloop up for battle, put 11 men on it, and sent it off to Dartmouth to capture the boat of a smuggler named Jesse Barlow. Barlow got his goods ashore, but the Brits seized his ship.

I'm a landlubber myself, but I know enough fishermen to say that the one unforgivable sin among them is "f*cking with their boat." Stealing one is even worse. The patriots quickly put together a 30 man crew, armed a ship (the Success, a Dartmouth whaling sloop) and set off in pursuit of the "royal pirates."

They caught up to the two boats off of Martha's Vineyard. They took the transport without much difficulty. The sloop took off on the run, but they were overtaken and boarded off of Fairhaven. The patriots forced the Brits below deck after a brief squabble, and- just like that- the Americans won the first naval skirmish of the war. They won it against the world's best Navy, too. The POWs were offloaded in Fairhaven and sent inland to Taunton.