The Gaspee burns behind him

What happened

On the afternoon of 9 June 1772 HM schooner Gaspee, which had spent three months stopping and searching nearly every vessel in Narragansett Bay, ran aground on Namquid Point below Providence. That night John Brown sent eight longboats down the river with muffled oars. About one in the morning, after the moon had set, they closed on the stranded schooner; a shot from one of the boats hit Lieutenant William Dudingston in the arm and groin, and the boarders took his ship. A young medical student bound the wound, and the raiders rowed Dudingston and his crew, some with their hands tied, toward Pawtuxet. He wrote two days later that he was halfway to shore when he heard his own guns go off in the fire. By sunrise the Gaspee had burned to the water's edge. Rothbard sees an officer who "arrogantly stopped, searched, or fired upon everything afloat" (CiL, p. 1017), so that Rhode Islanders could hardly tell his crew from pirates, and a Crown reply worse than the raid: a Royal Commission that could ship suspects to England for treason trials, which he calls a "serious threat to colonial liberties" (p. 1018). The commission sat at Newport in 1773 and named no one. What it did do was push the colonies to set up committees of correspondence, the network that carried the resistance on to revolution.