The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Most smugglers got through, although few voyages would be as dramatic as that of the American brigantine Nancy. Returning in June from the Virgin Islands with rum, sugar, and 386 barrels of gunpowder for the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety, she was sighted through the haze off the New Jersey coast by the British thirty-two-gun frigate Orpheus and the fourteen-gun sloop Kingfisher. Chased onto a shoal in Turtle Gut Inlet, seven miles north of Cape May, Nancy’s eleven-man crew, aided by rebel sailors from several nearby vessels, manhandled all but a hundred barrels into the dunes while enemy gunfire tore Nancy’s sails to rags, riddled her hull, and sheared off the mainmast. Seamen dumped the remaining powder in the hold and fashioned a fuse from a spare sail and a hot coal. Just as British tars in a longboat pulled up to take possession of the brig, Nancy detonated with a blast reportedly heard in Philadelphia. “The pieces of the vessel was falling all round for some time,” a midshipman on Orpheus recorded, “and the air was totally darkened with the explosion.” Seven British sailors died, and the shower of debris included “two laced hats and a leg with a garter.”