Tag: Andrew Snape Hammond

Captain Andrew Snape Hamond, R.N. and Roebuck in the Summer of 1776

On By Eric SternerIn 1776, Battles, British Leadership, Campaigns, Navy1 Comment
Captain Andrew Snape Hammond (NYPL)

Captain Andrew Snape Hamond commanded the fifth-rate Royal Navy’s Roebuck.   Although her 44-guns and rating technically qualified her for a position in a line of battle, a fifth-rate was among the smallest vessels considered for such a role in the Royal Navy.  Yet, in February 1776, when Roebuck began operating off the American coast, she was one of the larger ships available to Vice Admiral of the Blue Molyneaux Shuldham, who had replaced Admiral Samuel Graves as the commander of the North American station.  

Rather than adding to the growing flock of vessels in Boston, Shuldham sent Hamond and Roebuck south to patrol the colonial coasts, enforce the Coercive Acts, and stop ships smuggling gunpowder and arms.   The task was all the more difficult since fighting had broken out and colonial governments had collapsed everywhere.  Royal Governors fled to Royal Navy vessels, from which they attempted to preserve some modicum of British authority and rally loyalists to the king’s cause.  Roebuck was not on station long before orders from Graves arrived and directed the captain to move his ship to the mouth of Delaware Bay and patrol the bay and river.[1]  An aggressive sort, he exchanged fire with Delaware’s militia near Lewes at the capes on April 7, and then took his little flotilla up the Delaware fought Pennsylvania’s little navy near Wilmington on May 8-9.  

Then it was down to the Chesapeake for the summer to provide some backbone to Royal Navy vessels operating in the lower Chesapeake Bay in support of Lord Dunmore, the royal governor, who had built his own little flotilla of ships to house loyalists and their defenders, but Hamond considered the task impossible.  He wasn’t happy with it and wrote an acquaintance in August, “I have been under the absolute necessity of giving to Lord Dunmore & his floating Town, consisting of a fleet of upwards of 90 Sail, destitute of almost every material to Navigate them, as well as seamen, has given full employment for three Ships, for these three months past, to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Enemy.”[2]  But, the assignment also convinced him that the Chesapeake was ripe for offensive naval operations, particularly if combined with significant land forces.  

Shortly after penning his letter, Hamond and Roebuck departed Virginia, bound for New York.  His crew was sick, as were the soldiers and civilians crowded aboard Dunmore’s ships and swampish haven on Gwynne’s Island.  Lord Dunmore, for one, was grateful for Hamond’s service in the Chesapeake.  As the vessel sailed north, Dunmore penned a letter to Lord George Germain, counting illness among his own forces, but praising Roebuck as “well regulated, and as clean a Ship as any in the Navy,” also noting that many of its crew were ill.[3]  Once in New York, Hamond and his vessel supported the Army’s landings and advance on American positions on Long Island.

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A Coastal Skirmish in Delaware

On By Eric SternerIn 1776, Navy, Uncategorized1 Comment
Thomas Mitchell, Forcing a Passage on the Hudson. From left to right, Phoenix, Roebuck, and Tartar run forts on the Hudson River later in the war. The smaller vessel on the far left is a tender. Maria or the Lord Howe may have looked like that.

In the spring of 1776, the Sussex County Delaware Committee of Safety sent the schooner Farmer under the command of Nehemiah Field to St. Eustatius for gunpowder, always in short supply in the rebelling colonies.  By then, the little Dutch island in the Caribbean was a well known haven for smugglers to sell and buy embargoed goods.  Indeed, leaders of the rebellion in America had been cruising Caribbean waters for months, always looking to acquire armaments from neutral colonies from under the nose of the Royal Navy, which lacked a sufficient number of ships to stop the practice.  Inevitably, the American smugglers found willing partners, some simply looking to earn a quick profit on high-value goods, others recognizing that islands throughout the area relied on the Americans for bulk foodstuffs.  If the Americans could not trade, some Caribbean colonies might go hungry.

Field successfully acquired a cargo and evaded British patrols between the Caribbean and his destination in the Delaware Bay, but his greatest test would come as he sought to enter the bay and unload his cargo in the lee of Cape Henlopen, near the town of Lewes.  The British fifth-rate Roebuck (44) under Captain Andrew Snape Hamond patrolled the lower bay with various attached small boats.  His chief task was to prevent smuggling, particularly of the kind Field and Farmer represented.  Delaware Bay is a large body of water shaped a bit like a rounded arrowhead.  It narrows at the top where the Delaware River enters and has a wider bottom, closer to the Atlantic Ocean.  But, that wide part starts to curve back on itself, and the mouth of the bay, between Cape Henlopen and Cape May, New Jersey is roughly 17 miles wide with shallows that constrain its navigability for deep-draft ships.  Those shallows limited Roebuck’s mobility and increased the demands on its smaller supporting ships and boats.  So, Captain Hamond relied heavily on his tender, Maria, and boats to intercept smugglers.  

At daybreak on Sunday, April 7, on a clear day, Hamond spied a schooner coming into the bay and already close to the Henlopen light house.  Roebuck set a course to the south in pursuit and dispatched the Maria and two armed boats to venture into the shallower waters.  Hamond was accustomed to chasing ships, but he didn’t know how lucky he was to stumble across the Farmer, originally sent to obtain gunpowder from the Caribbean.  When his prey seemingly ran aground, Hamond must have been delighted.

Read more: A Coastal Skirmish in Delaware

Ashore, guards at the lighthouse sent word to the village of Lewes that a schooner had arrived and was being chased into the bay.  Men were needed to help unload it.  Captain Charles Pope, of the Delaware Continental Battalion, quickly assembled his men and the local militia.  He needed boats to cross a creek, which the townspeople soon produced.  As Pope moved the town militia toward the beaches, the lighthouse guard descended on the Farmer, seven or eight miles south of the cape.  They quickly began unloading cargo: coarse linens.  If Pope was surprised or disappointed, he didn’t mention it.

As the militia arrived, they could see Roebuck’s tender bearing down on the schooner and hear the retort as it loosed a broadside of swivels and muskets at the Farmer and men unloading her.  The Farmer’screw responded by running right up on shore.  The guard returned the tender’s fire with muskets, which Pope’s men quickly augmented as they arrived on the scene.  A gunfight ensued as the militia and crew aboard the tender exchanged shots without doing much damage.  At one point, militiamen even began picking up many of the tender’s musket balls as they rolled on the ground, spent of all energy. But the distance was too great for small arms and eventually the militia laid off firing in order to expedite unloading.  According to Pope, the tender, still standing offshore, dispatched a boat back to the Roebuck, presumably for assistance.  

By the time the frigate rounded the cape, Pope and his men had managed to load two swivels on the Farmer and engage the Maria, which had moved closer and anchored.  As he reported, the exchange of fire between Pope’s men and the tender lasted a solid two hours.  The militia kept up a close fire on the tender to keep her from raising her anchor, probably because they thought they were getting the better of the fight. Pope thought he saw men fall, although Hamond didn’t note any casualties in his log.  Eventually, the Mariasuccessfully hoisted her anchor out of the sand and mud, but then a swivel on the Farmer shot away her halyards and the sail came down, forcing the tender to drop anchor again.  For her part, Roebuck remained in deeper water, visible, but largely out of the fight.  Eventually, she sent over a boat to tow off the Maria.   The boat drew militia fire and Pope thought they inflicted wounds on her crew too, but the boat and Maria eventually drew off, concluding the shoreline skirmish. There were no American casualties and Hamond did not report any from the affair.

Early in the afternoon, Hamond spied another schooner approaching the bay and hauled off to chase her.  He fired one shot at her before identifying her as the Lord Howe, another of his tenders, just arriving from Virginia.  Just another day for the Royal Navy on the American coast.