The Naval History of the United States

Abbot's fighting history of the American navy — privateers and frigates, the Bon Homme Richard and the Constitution, told battle by battle with the smoke still in the rigging.

Curious Facts

Everything below is in the book — each fact links straight to the page it comes from.

  1. Naval officers' coat cuffs were weighted with lead to make them hang correctly. The book's description of the 18th-century officer's finery ends with a detail no portrait shows: "The broad cuffs of the coat-sleeves were heavily laden with lead, to keep them in proper position." Beneath the three-cornered cocked hat, the hair's natural colour was "hid by dense layers of white powder" and tied in a short cue with black ribbons. Read it in the book →
  2. Captain Kidd was genuinely astonished to hear he was considered a pirate. Learning mid-cruise that he had been proscribed and a price set on his head came as a surprise to him: "He seems to have deceived himself into thinking that his acts of piracy were simply the legitimate work of a privateersman." He sailed to New York to prove himself an honest man, was arrested almost on arrival, and was hanged in England before a vast applauding multitude. Read it in the book →
  3. A British privateer hid in Boston harbour behind a deck-load of poultry and pineapples. Calling herself "The Betsy of St. Croix," the ship had "decks littered with poultry and domestic animals, her cordage flapped loosely in the breeze," and her captain told the dock-loafers he had come from the West Indies with lignum-vitæ, pineapples and hides to sell. The French consul was not fooled: "That innocent-looking merchantman is a British privateer." Read it in the book →
  4. An anonymous handbill turned rumour into riot in a few hours. The consul's suspicions "spread like wildfire; and his suspicions soon passed for facts, without any supporting proof," and by that afternoon Bostonians had a printed broadside thrust into their hands. "No one knows who was the writer, or who the printer." Read it in the book →
  5. Paul Jones was widely regarded in his own lifetime as a mercenary with "the daring of a pirate". Contemporaries thought him "a man of no patriotism, but wholly mercenary." Only after "he had died a lonely death, estranged from the country he had so nobly served," did opinion turn and make him the model naval officer. Read it in the book →
  6. Congress thought privateering too warlike to authorise for the first year of the Revolution. "For the first year of the war the Continental Congress was unwilling to take so belligerent a step as to encourage privateering." Letters of marque were finally issued in the summer of 1776, after which "in a short time all New England had gone to privateering" and the ocean "fairly swarmed with trim Yankee schooners." Read it in the book →
  7. Whoever is losing merchant ships always calls the other side pirates. The author notes the pattern coolly: the nation suffering from commerce raiders "invariably raises the cry of 'wanton vandalism and cruelty,'" and "brands the officers to whom falls so unpleasant a duty with the name of pirates." The British said it of Paul Jones and of the brig "Argus"; the North said exactly the same of the "Alabama." Read it in the book →
  8. The Boston handbill's grievance was against Bermuda, not Britain. The broadside urged citizens to remember "there have been near three hundred of our American vessels taken by these Bermudians, and have received the most barbarous treatment from those Damn'd PIRATES!!!" — three exclamation marks in the original. Read it in the book →
  9. The author admits most privateer heroics in his book are only hearsay. "An immense number of anecdotes of their prowess is current," he concedes, but as a rule they are "based only upon tradition, or the imperfect and often incorrect reports in the newspapers of the day." Telling the privateers' story in full "would require a volume thrice the size of this." Read it in the book →
  10. Beads, knives, bright clothes — "and sometimes, unfortunately, rum". Sloops like John Gallop's twenty-tonner traded such goods along Long Island Sound in 1636 for skins and peltries. The book frames the exchange in the assumptions of its own day, saying the Indians' "simple natures had not been schooled to nice calculations of values," so the traffic was "one of great profit to the more shrewd whites." Read it in the book →
  11. Spain insisted that Florida's boundaries took in most of the Carolinas. South Carolina was "continually embroiled with Spain, owing to the conviction of the Spanish that the boundaries of Florida... included the greater part of the Carolinas." To enforce the claim, Spain sent four ships-of-war and a galley against the colony in 1706 under a celebrated French admiral. Read it in the book →
  12. Bostonians reached for the precedent of the Tea Party twenty-two years on. When the handbill circulated, the mob needed no further instruction: "They well remembered the winter's night, twenty-two years before, when their harbor was the scene of the first protest against the oppression of" Britain. Read it in the book →
  13. One falling mast decided the fight between the "Constitution" and the "Java". As the ships met, American gunnery had already shattered the Java's jib-boom and bowsprit, and then "the mizzen-mast fell, crashing through forecastle and main-deck, crushing officers and sailors beneath it in the fall, and hurling the topmen into the ocean to drown." Read it in the book →
Rights & ReuseThe complete text of The Naval History of the United States (1896) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.