Shipwrecks, Prisoners, and Bombs

There are probably many, many stories of nautical adventures and misadventures along Waterford's shores. Recently I've encountered four.

The first involves a brig of the Connecticut Navy, called the Defence. Before winding up in Waterford, the Defence had captured an impressive 13 British ships and 600 prisoners, and earned a reputation for feats of daring. Abigail Adams was invited on board the ship at Plymouth, and wrote to her husband John that, “She is a fine brig, mounts sixteen guns, twelve swivels, and carries one hundred and twenty men...no private family ever appeared under better regulation than the crew.” She marveled than none of the men were allowed to swear. Adams and the other ladies drank tea, and the crew “showed us their arms, which were sent by Queen Anne, and everything on board was a curiosity to me. They gave us a mock engagement with an enemy, and the manner of taking a ship. The young folks went upon the quarter deck and danced.”

But in 1779, the Defence, “fleeing from a superior enemy, she struck Bartlett's Reef off Waterford and broke up...the ship was unsalvageable.”

The Defence was not alone in crashing against Bartlett Reef. Years earlier, a Spanish vessel called a snow, bearing indigo and other valuables, grounded here and was badly damaged. The ship, the St. Joseph and St. Helena, was towed to New London where the cargo was stored...and then stolen. It was 1752, so Spain complained to England, England investigated, and mayhem - which I won’t get into here because the setting is no longer Waterford and because I could see it growing to the length of a small book - ensued.

And then there's the odd little episode that took place in 1782. No one says much about it, at least not that I've been able to find, but it seems that during the Revolution, the Americans were so appalled by the conditions on British prison ships that they determined to retaliate. So they built their own floating jail, named it the Retaliation, and moored it on the Thames, “about a mile from the ferry” – that is, in present-day Quaker Hill. At one point there were 100 prisoners recorded held on the ship, which was only used for a short time. Some of them, civilian merchant seamen, escaped to West Farms. Apparently this was the only enemy intrusion on the land that later became known as Waterford.

Five years earlier, another incident unfolded here, this time in Niantic Bay. The British frigate Cerberus was anchored there when the crew of a schooner tied up behind it noticed a fishing line in the water. Pulling it in, they discovered it was tied to a barrel, which they pulled aboard. Unfortunately for them, it wasn’t just a barrel. Connecticut native David Bushnell (who had gained attention when his pioneering submarine, the Turtle, blew up in New York Harbor, failing to damage the British ships there but succeeding in frightening them off) had stuffed it with explosives, creating one of the first underwater mines. The barrel and its twin were meant to slam into the Cerberus and explode; instead the bomb went off on the schooner, killing three men and wounding another.

After finding these tidbits, I’m going to be looking out for more – and watching the ships in Waterford’s coves with far more interest than before.