The riflemen in the Continental Army were a special breed of soldier. They weren’t subject to all the drudge work that most of the other soldiers had to endure.
The downside to this is, they knew it and they took advantage of it. So when one rifleman got himself in trouble, word got out and suddenly a relatively small problem turns into a relatively big one.
And while George Washington kinda-sorta recognized this stratification of soldiers, he didn’t do much to discourage it. He did, however, demonstrate more patience with the infantrymen than most people would give him credit for.
The Independence Hurricane from September 2 is still going strong, and on this day it made landfall again, this time in Newfoundland, Canada.
The devastation was immense, and perhaps would have been worse had it happened in modern times (we get it, there are satellites and stuff now). It remains Canada’s worst natural disaster and it’s still in the Top Ten chart for North Atlantic hurricanes.
As late as the 1970s, pioneers like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone had achieved a kind of mythical status, largely because of fictionalized stories created about them by the folks at Disney.
Sometimes it gets tough to determine what’s fiction and what isn’t, since they tend to embellish things that may have actually happened for the sake of a story. (Not a knock on Disney, so don’t sue us; that’s a typical practice when it comes to stuff like this.)
So these folks became larger than life for a while, and it’s not to say that they didn’t hold any importance in American history, but sometimes we have to temper those stories with the fact that these men were, after all, just men with real-life concerns, such as “how am I going to feed my family?” which was pretty much the calculus for the event we discuss today.
(P.S. the story about Washington and the cherry tree was written long after he died, so don’t count on that one either.)
The Turtle, or the American Turtle as it’s often called, was invented by a man who thought it should be possible to stealthily attach a bomb to a ship and then detonate it shortly thereafter, by approaching the ship from under the waterline.
The Turtle was a brilliant idea in concept, if not in execution. There were just too many things that had to go exactly right for the turtle to successfully execute its design purpose, and when it was first tried in genuine combat on this day in 1775, unfortunately it was not successful.
But every failure is one step closer to success, right?
The Second Continental Congress tried appealing to the Canadian leadership in order to get support for the Independence cause, but they apparently weren’t biting.
So George Washington tried a different tack: write to the Canadian people themselves. He reasoned that the folks in charge were mostly wealthy landowners who were doing all right financially under British rule. Maybe, he thought, the ordinary Canadian folks weren’t quite so happy with the King.
He was not, unfortunately, correct in that assessment and nobody was swayed by his argument.
American forces began to move on Fort St. Jean in Canada. Unfortunately they ran into a couple of unexpected obstacles on the way, so they had to adjust their approach. This led to a six-week siege of the fort.
An invasion of Canada seems a little absurd on its face, but when you think about it in the context of the Revolution, it actually starts to make sense.
After all, Canada was also a few British colonies in the North American continent, but they were a little more obedient to the whims of Parliament and they had Loyalist leanings. So the Patriots had a choice between bringing them over ideologically toward Independence, or ignoring them. Neither of these were likely to work, so they set about on the next best thing.
Invade and then occupy Canada.
But as we’ll learn in upcoming episodes, it’s not as easy as you’d think.
Anyone who’s been to Boston in the modern day has a hard time recognizing that the city of Boston was just the segment in the top center of the map. The area called Boston Neck is clearly marked at the bottom left, and wasn’t part of the city. The Continental Army’s line ran about where the blue line ends. (The blue line is modern-day Washington Street.)
It was the city having that kind of geography that made the Siege of Boston relatively easy for the Patriots. Unfortunately for them, the British were still able to use the surrounding waterways.
This made the siege not the battle of attrition that it could have been, since supplies were able to get in via water. Consequently it was an ongoing battle of wits, as we learn today.
Sometimes when we research these shows we learn stuff that doesn’t have a lot to do with history—not directly—but is interesting nonetheless, and does have some historical impact.
Hurricanes would be one of those things. On the east coast of the US, we pretty much take them for granted as a weather phenomenon. They’re definitely scary and destructive, and oftentimes the damage comes after the storm, when all that rain that came down starts looking for somewhere to go.
Now, I (Claude) knew that the west coast doesn’t get hurricanes, though they often get the remnants of tropical storms. That’s because the water is shallower in general. The Atlantic Ocean is very deep, and even near the shore it gets deep quickly. The water warms up a little more near the coast and that gives the storm extra power.
In Europe, hurricanes are a genuine rarity, because the water is both deep and colder (Europe is farther north than you probably think), and I’m sure they came as a big surprise to the first mariners making their way westward to the New World.
But the Independence Hurricane was huge, even for a hurricane, and it did a bunch of damage in the Colonies before weakening, then it picked up strength again and did huge, lasting damage further north in Canada.
Nothing beats the speed of gossip, and apparently the Virginia Gazette on this day had plenty of it to share.
A few of the stories were quite serious, relating to events in both Virginia and Massachusetts. They closed out with a local story that had a more humorous edge to it…though it’s likely that the people involved had a hard time seeing the humor in it all.
