Bunker Hill

“there was nothing between them and the fire of the enemy but pure air” as he and his men, who were joined by President Joseph Warren, did their best to disable the schooner and the longboats. They fired with such deadly effectiveness that the longboat crews were forced to abandon the
Diana
, which, with her crew huddling belowdecks to escape the unceasing rain of musket balls, soon drifted toward shore, grounding itself on the wooden rails extending from the ferry dock around 10:00 p.m. Lieutenant Graves and his men attempted to use their anchor to drag the schooner to deeper water, but as the tide continued to ebb and the vessel began to roll onto her side, they had no choice but to abandon her for the sloop
Britannia
, which had been waiting in the deeper water to the south. The firing continued as the provincials plundered the schooner of her guns, rigging, and equipment and, with the help of some strategically placed hay, set her on fire. Around 3:00 a.m. the flames reached the vessel’s powder magazine, and the
Diana
exploded.
    For the newly promoted vice admiral of the white and his nephew, the former commander of the
Diana
, what came to be known as the Battle of Chelsea Creek was a humiliating defeat. For the provincials, however, the encounter was nothing short of “astonishing.” Not only had they taken their first British vessel; they had put Graves’s marines on the run. At least two marines had been killed in the action (although the provincials remained convinced that they had killed dozens more), while the Americans suffered just four wounded. “Thanks be to God that so little hurt was done us,” the ever-devout Amos Farnsworth wrote, “when the balls sung like bees round our heads.” That night Putnam and Warren returned to Cambridge to report to General Ward. “I wish we could have something of this kind to do every day,” Putnam crowed. “It would teach our men how little danger there is from cannonballs.”
    Ward countered with the concern that the engagement might provoke the British to launch a sortie from Boston they would all come to regret, but Putnam remained unrepentant. Turning to the president of the Provincial Congress, he said, “
You know
, Dr. Warren, we shall have no peace worth anything till we gain it by the sword.”
    The skirmish at Chelsea Creek had been a clear provincial victory, but it had also consumed a worrisome amount of gunpowder. Since those first overheated days after Lexington and Concord, when Joseph Warren had been in favor of an assault on Boston, he now had a more realistic view of his army’s preparedness for a major offensive against the British. Rather than agree with Putnam, Warren demurred. “I admire your spirit and respect General Ward’s prudence,” he said diplomatically. “Both will be necessary for us, and one must temper the other.”

CHAPTER NINE

    The Redoubt
    T he next day, May 28, Captain John Derby was guiding the
Quero
along the southern coast of England when he sighted the Isle of Wight. Once he’d found a safe place to leave his schooner, he hired a boat to row him to nearby Portsmouth, and after passing the docks of the massive naval shipyard, he was in a coach headed for London. By Monday, May 29, as Derby’s account of the fighting at Lexington and Concord circulated throughout the city, Lord North and his fellow ministers were, according to one writer, “in total confusion and consternation.” Secretary of State Dartmouth issued a statement insisting that the provincial account was not to be believed, but former governor Thomas Hutchinson, who knew Derby to be a reliable man, insisted that there was in all likelihood a disturbing amount of truth behind the captain’s claims.
    They called him the “accidental captain.” He seemed to have appeared out of thin air with his typeset account of the fighting, along with a sheaf of depositions from not only Massachusetts militiamen but a handful of British prisoners. Some claimed that Derby had first arrived in Southampton, the point of departure 155 years before of the Pilgrims’
Mayflower
, but there was no sign of his vessel along that port’s docks. Edward Gibbon, then at work on his monumental
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(which is as much about the British Empire as it is about Rome), wrote that “it is pretty clear [Derby] is no imposter” and theorized that his schooner was probably hidden “in some creek of the Isle of