Castine

The Penobscot Disaster: Castine, Maine, and the Worst American Naval Defeat of the Revolution

On the rocky, wind-scoured peninsula that juts into Penobscot Bay, the small town of Castine, Maine, holds a Revolutionary War story that most Americans have never heard — and that the young republic spent decades trying to forget. Here, in the summer of 1779, the largest American naval expedition of the entire war ended not in triumph but in catastrophic, self-inflicted destruction. The Penobscot Expedition, as it came to be known, resulted in the loss of an entire fleet, the court-martial of two of its commanders, and a strategic humiliation so complete that Britain wielded the memory of it at the Paris peace negotiations three years later. What happened at the place then called Bagaduce — and why it went so terribly wrong — is one of the Revolution's most dramatic and instructive episodes.

To understand why this remote corner of the Maine coast mattered in 1779, one must first understand what the British were doing there. In June of that year, Brigadier General Francis McLean sailed from Halifax with roughly 700 troops from the 74th and 82nd Regiments of Foot and a small naval escort of three sloops-of-war. His orders were to establish a permanent British post on the Penobscot peninsula, a position that would serve multiple strategic purposes: it would anchor British claims to the territory between the Penobscot and St. Croix rivers, which London hoped to carve off as a loyalist colony called "New Ireland"; it would provide a base for Royal Navy operations along the New England coast; and it would secure access to the region's invaluable timber, masts, and naval stores — resources critical to maintaining British sea power. The scheme for New Ireland had been promoted by exiled Loyalists John Calef and John Nutting, along with William Knox, the Under-Secretary for the Colonies, who envisioned a permanent province that would serve as both a refuge for persecuted Loyalists and a buffer protecting Nova Scotia and British Canada. Nutting, a Loyalist carpenter from Cambridge who had piloted a prior British raid against Machias, had personally traveled to London to press the case, describing the Castine peninsula's harbor as one that "could hold the entire British Navy." McLean's forces landed at Bagaduce on June 17, 1779, and immediately began constructing a fortification they named Fort George on the heights overlooking the harbor. Captain Henry Mowat of HMS Albany — a Scottish-born officer intimately familiar with the New England coast from years of hydrographic survey work — commanded the small naval squadron of three sloops: the Albany, North, and Nautilus. Mowat anchored his ships in a defensive line across the harbor entrance, their broadsides oriented to repel any approaching fleet, and sent sailors ashore to help with construction. The fort was still unfinished, its walls only partially raised, when word of the British occupation reached Boston and set in motion the most ambitious American military operation the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had ever attempted.

The response was swift and, by the standards of the war, enormous. Massachusetts organized and financed the expedition almost entirely on its own authority, without waiting for Continental Congress approval or coordination with George Washington's main army. The Massachusetts General Court authorized the expedition on June 24 and petitioned Congress for the use of three Continental Navy warships already in Boston Harbor: the 32-gun frigate Warren, the 14-gun brig Diligent, and the 12-gun sloop Providence. By mid-July, the state had assembled a fleet of approximately forty-four vessels: nineteen warships — including the Warren as the expedition's flagship — and roughly two dozen transports and supply ships carrying nearly 1,000 militia infantry under the command of Brigadier General Solomon Lovell, along with an artillery train led by Lieutenant Colonel Paul Revere, already famous for his midnight ride four years earlier but serving here in a far less celebrated capacity. Brigadier General Peleg Wadsworth — a Harvard-educated officer who had seen action at Long Island and Rhode Island — served as Lovell's second-in-command of the land forces. Command of the naval forces fell to Commodore Dudley Saltonstall of Connecticut, a Continental Navy officer whose orders from the Navy Board explicitly directed him to "preserve the greatest harmony with the commander of the land forces, that the navy and army may cooperate and assist each other." The remainder of the fleet consisted of Massachusetts State Navy vessels, a ship contributed by New Hampshire, and a dozen privateers — many of whose captains had been reluctantly pressed into service and resented the interruption to their more profitable raiding.

The fleet departed Boston on July 19 and stopped at Boothbay to pick up expected reinforcements that never fully materialized. On July 25, the American armada entered Penobscot Bay. The expedition enjoyed an overwhelming advantage in numbers and firepower — mounting over 300 guns across its warships — against McLean's partially completed dirt fortification and Mowat's three sloops. Initially, things went well for the revolutionary forces. On July 26, a force of approximately 200 Continental Marines captured the small British battery on Nautilus Island, just south of the peninsula, seizing four cannons and establishing an American artillery position that forced Mowat to withdraw his ships deeper into the harbor. However, a simultaneous militia landing on the peninsula itself was repulsed when British fire overturned the leading boat, drowning Major Daniel Littlefield and two of his men.

Two days later, on July 28, Wadsworth led a daring pre-dawn assault force of some 400 marines and militiamen ashore at Dyce's Head on the western tip of the peninsula. Under covering fire from the warships Tyrannicide, Hunter, and Sky Rocket, the men scaled the steep, nearly perpendicular bluffs — a climb of roughly 100 feet through dense brush — and drove the British defenders back toward Fort George. Lovell reported with evident pride that his men "ascended the precipice with alacrity" and that after "a very smart conflict we put them to the rout." The Americans established positions within a few hundred yards of the fort. Victory seemed tantalizingly within reach.

And then the expedition stalled. What followed were two weeks of paralysis born of the very failure of cooperation that Saltonstall's orders had warned against. Lovell wanted Saltonstall to attack the British naval squadron before pressing the assault on the fort; Saltonstall refused to engage Mowat's sloops until Lovell had taken the fort. Neither commander would move first. Saltonstall called the confined harbor "a damned hole," arguing that tidal currents and light winds made it treacherous for his square-rigged vessels, and he distrusted the privateer captains under his command. Meanwhile, every day the Americans delayed, McLean's soldiers labored to strengthen Fort George's walls and defenses. The Massachusetts authorities in Boston grew increasingly alarmed, dispatching urgent letters ordering Saltonstall to attack. On August 11, Lovell wrote desperately to the commodore: "any farther delay must be infamous." But Saltonstall would not be moved.

The reckoning came on August 13, when a British relief squadron of seven warships under Sir George Collier sailed into Penobscot Bay from New York. The Americans, who had squandered nearly three weeks of opportunity, now faced a superior naval force bearing down on them. What happened next stunned commanders on both sides. Rather than forming a fighting line, Saltonstall turned his fleet about and fled upriver. Lovell, anticipating a sea battle, had already begun evacuating his land positions. On the morning of August 14, to the astonishment of both the American Lovell and the British Collier, Saltonstall's entire fleet — warships and transports alike — was run aground, scuttled, and set ablaze by its own crews as they raced up the Penobscot River in a scene of complete panic. The flagship Warren was burned at Oak Point Cove near present-day Winterport. Not a single American vessel survived intact; all forty-odd ships were destroyed or captured. The panic-stricken crews and soldiers abandoned their vessels and fled into the wilderness, beginning a harrowing overland march back to more populated parts of Massachusetts with almost no food, arms, or shelter. Some survivors straggled into Boston months later.

The human and financial toll was staggering. American casualties totaled approximately 474 killed, wounded, captured, or missing — against British losses of roughly 25 killed and 35 wounded throughout the entire siege. The Massachusetts Board of War estimated the expedition had cost approximately £1,739,000 in inflated wartime currency — a sum so enormous it nearly bankrupted the state, decimated New England's privateer fleet, and left Massachusetts petitioning Congress for years to share the burden. (Massachusetts ultimately received $1.2 million from the federal government in 1793.)

Recrimination followed swiftly. A committee of inquiry convened by the Massachusetts General Court determined that the failure was primarily the result of "want of proper Spirit and Energy on the part of the Commodore." On September 7, 1779, a warrant for court martial was issued against Saltonstall by the Navy Board, Eastern Department. He was tried aboard the frigate Deane in Boston Harbor, found guilty of ineptitude, and dismissed from the Continental Navy on October 25 — declared "ever after incompetent to hold a government office or state post." He returned to Connecticut and, remarkably, reinvented himself as a successful privateer two years later. Paul Revere fared little better in the short term. On September 6, he was placed under house arrest and charged with "unsoldierlike behavior … which tends to cowardice" for briefly refusing an order from Wadsworth during the retreat. He was forced to resign his militia commission.