By Paul Carrier
You’re a well-educated person, right? Someone who knows the basics of American history? So answer me this: What was the worst American naval disaster prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941?
Stumped? It was the Penobscot Expedition of 1779, which involved the largest American naval force of the Revolutionary War.
Never heard of it? All the more reason to grab a copy of Bernard Cornwell’s latest novel, The Fort, which chronicles a debacle that was doubly embarrassing because it could have been averted.
What happened, in brief, was this. In June 1779, the British began building a small fort at Bagaduce in Massachusetts, (now Castine, Maine). Alarmed by the incursion onto its territory, Massachusetts decided to kick the intruders out.
Aided by the Continental Navy and its Marines, the state cobbled together a massive fleet of more than 40 warships and transports, recruited or pressed a large contingent of militia, and sailed to Castine that July.
As Cornwell, one of the best-known authors of historical fiction alive today, makes clear, the only thing grand about the Penobscot Expedition was its size. Once the expedition arrived in Penobscot Bay, it recorded a series of small victories and defeats, while making no decisive assault on Fort George until it was too late. The American commanders, General Solomon Lovell and Commodore Dudley Saltonstall, were at odds from the start, and both men proved to be too timid for the task at hand.
While the Americans frittered away a real but fleeting opportunity to capture the undermanned and only partially completed fort, the defenders beefed up their fortifications. Eventually, a powerful British relief fleet sailed into view. What followed was the complete loss, through fire or capture, of the entire American fleet.
The Fort would be compelling enough if it only focused on key players whose names carry little meaning for the 21st-century reader: the gregarious but insecure Lovell; his brave, clear-eyed subordinate, Gen. Peleg Wadsworth; the arrogant, overly cautious Saltonstall; Francis McLean, the seasoned Scotsman in command of Fort George; and John Moore, a young, untested lieutenant assigned to McLean’s small force.
But another, far more familiar, player struts across the stage as well. Several years after his “midnight ride” to alert the countryside that the British were marching on Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere, a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts militia, serves as the expedition’s artillery chief.
Fervently patriotic, bombastic and self-assured, Revere is all the more intriguing because we think we know him, thanks to the notoriety of his 1775 gallop “to every Middlesex village and farm,” as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow put it years later in the poem that secured Revere’s fame.
But midnight ride aside, Revere seems to have been an insolent officer of dubious competence. He delays the departure of the American fleet by arriving late, repeatedly disobeys orders and pushes to abandon the siege of Fort George when other American officers are calling for a continuation of it.
Cornwell vividly captures the mismatched nature of the American force, with its mix of inept commanders, zealous subordinates, fierce Marines and ill-trained militia. A lengthy historical note shows that the author, who now lives in Massachusetts, did his homework before setting out to chronicle an American disaster that was so complete it rarely makes it into the history books.
