Bunker Hill

stationed throughout Boston Harbor. A fleet of thirty boats led by Major Benjamin Tupper attacked and burned the Boston lighthouse on Little Brewster Island not once but twice. Finally, in response to a hint from Lord Sandwich that “you may be blamed for doing too little but can never be censured for doing too much,” Graves was moved to act. In October he gave Captain Henry Mowat of the
Canceaux
orders to put towns up and down the New England coast to the torch as a demonstration of the fearsome might of the British navy. After determining that the houses in Gloucester were spread too far apart to allow him to burn the settlement, Mowat settled on Falmouth (modern Portland, Maine), whose patriots had a few months before briefly kidnapped him. At first, the town’s inhabitants did not appear to take the British captain’s threats seriously, and they were thrown into a panic when he finally began to bombard the town. It took a while for Mowat’s two fourteen-gun vessels to lay the town to waste, but by 6:00 p.m. of October 18, about two thirds of the town—almost all of its waterfront—was “one flame.”
    The burning of this particular town at the edge of the Massachusetts wilderness did more to unite the opposition than it did to support the king’s cause. The British were experiencing the dilemma that afflicts any empire—ancient or modern—that is reduced to attacking an essentially defenseless civilian population. Even the successes are viewed as moral failures.
    But Admiral Graves’s ultimate indignity was yet to come. By the end of November, Washington’s nascent navy of armed schooners was beginning to have an impact on British attempts to supply the troops in Boston. “We are now almost as much blocked up by the sea,” one officer complained, “as we have been for these eight months by the land.”
    John Manley of Marblehead had received his commission directly from Washington and was captain of a schooner that had been recently renamed the
Lee
in honor of General Charles Lee. On November 29, Manley and his crew, pretending to be a Boston pilot boat, captured the British ordnance ship
Nancy
. Stored inside the
Nancy
’s hold was a virtual armory of artillery and munitions. “There was on board,” William Heath enthused in his diary, “one 13-inch brass mortar, 2,000 stand of arms, 100,000
flints, 32 tons of leaden ball, etc. A fortunate capture for the Americans!” Washington’s army had been provided with exactly what it needed if it were to have any hope of successfully attacking Boston.
    Within a few days, word of the
Nancy
’s capture had reached the British in Boston. “There is nothing to prevent the rebels taking every vessel bound for this port,” an officer lamented. “For though there are near twenty pendants flying in this harbor, I cannot find that there is one vessel cruising the bay. Surely our admiral cannot be allowed to remain here much longer [as] a curse upon the garrison.”
    But Graves was not entirely to blame for the ineffectiveness of his squadron. The British government had failed to provide him with enough sailors to operate his ships, given the inevitable effects of disease and desertion. One naval officer estimated that if you took all the sailors in all the ships presently stationed in Boston Harbor, there wouldn’t be enough to “man one half of the ships, which are likewise in want of all sorts of stores and necessaries.” The Admiralty, under the incompetent leadership of Lord Sandwich, was the real source of the problem, this officer insisted. “You may depend on it,” he wrote, “the remissness complained of did not arise from the admiral, who frequently left his own ship in too defenseless a state (in my opinion) in order to keep his cruisers at sea. . . . [He] has been cruelly used.”
    At the end of December, with the arrival of the fifty-gun
Chatham
,
Graves learned that, like Gage before him, he had been recalled and that Admiral Molyneux Shuldham was the new commander of the British navy in Boston.
    —
    Washington spent much of December peering at Boston through his spyglass, as often as not from the heights of Prospect Hill overlooking the Charlestown peninsula, the Mystic River, the harbor, and Boston itself. He could see the British soldiers preparing for the winter ahead, building barracks both in the town and on the Charlestown peninsula. The British appeared to be there to stay. But when Washington ordered successful advances