The 36-gun frigate Alliance was launched at Salisbury, Massachusetts, on 28 April 1778. She would serve under the command of two of the Continental Navy’s most celebrated captains—John Paul Jones (albeit briefly, following his 1779 victory over HMS Serapis) and John Barry—fight the final naval engagement of the Revolutionary War, and was the last Continental Navy ship to decommission following the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
She was thought to have been the finest warship constructed for the Continental Navy. In June 1779, John Adams, then the minister plenipotentiary to France, dined with Captain Antoine Jean-Marie Thévenard, administrator of the French fleet at Lorient. Adams described the commandant as being “certainly one of the most experienced, best read, and most scientific naval commanders in Europe.” Thévenard lavished praise on the United States. “In the hearing of the Chevalier de la Luzerne, the Marquis de Barbé-Marbois, and twenty officers of the French navy,” the future President of the United States would recall, Thévenard declared that he had examined the frigate and could thus pronounce that “there is not in Europe a more perfect piece of naval architecture than your Alliance.”
In the spring of 1781, the Alliance was under Barry’s command and was in much less than her best fighting trim. While crossing the Atlantic in early February, the Alliance was damaged while forcing her way through an ice field. Three months later, a bolt of lightning shattered her main topmast and carried away her main yard, injuring nearly a score of her crew. A significant portion of the ship’s company—already shorthanded because of the Continental Navy’s persistent recruiting difficulties—were British prisoners pressed into American service, two dozen of which were confined below after being implicated in a foiled mutiny. Still other hands had been detached as prize crews of captured privateers and merchantmen after the frigate departed France in late March.
So it was that the Alliance was under jury-rig and at half her normal complement on 27 May 1781 when Barry sighted two British warships. In the prevailing light winds 400 miles south of Nova Scotia, it took His Majesty’s sloops-of-war Atalanta and Trepassey until just before noon on the 29th to approach close enough to engage the Continental frigate. After first inviting the British sloops to surrender, Barry began the action by blasting the Atalanta with a full broadside, just as the wind died completely. Under most circumstances, a pair of 14-gun sloops would be no match for a frigate, but the Atalanta and Trepassey were fitted with sweeps. The Alliance, too large to be propelled in that manner, was left powerless to maneuver.
As the British warships were rowed toward the helpless and drifting Alliance, the Trepassey pulled too far forward and shot past the frigate. The Trepassey received a pair of broadsides in return, which killed her captain and several members of her crew. The Atalanta and the Trepassey were rowed to a position bracketing the Alliance’s stern quarters at an angle where the frigate was unable to return fire with any effect. For the next three hours, the Alliance was pounded by the smaller British vessels. The British sloops began alternating round shot with grapeshot to sweep the Alliance’s deck to disable more of her crew. Captain Sampson Edwards of the Atalanta reduced the powder charge in his guns so that his shots would have a lower velocity, thus tearing larger and more jagged splinters from the Alliance’s hull. Under Barry’s steadfast direction, two 9-pounder chasers were moved as far astern as possible in an attempt to bring them to bear on the frigate’s enemies.
Late in the engagement, Captain Barry was struck in the shoulder by a round of grapeshot; though he doggedly tried to hold his station on the quarterdeck, blood loss soon forced him below decks. Shortly after Barry was taken to the surgeon, one of the Alliance’s quartermasters was killed as he manned the wheel, and her colors were shot away. Left in command was Lieutenant Hoysted Hacker, an officer with the dubious distinction of having lost three Continental Navy vessels to the British. With the frigate taking still more damage, with casualties mounting, and unable to properly respond, Hacker saw no option remaining other than to surrender. He went below to report the worsening situation and to ask the captain (in the process of being bandaged after an impromptu surgery) “whether the colors should be struck.” Barry answered: “No, sir; and if the ship cannot be fought without me I will be brought on deck.”
As Barry prepared to resume command, Hacker returned to the quarterdeck and rallied the remaining crew with word of their captain’s determination. Almost miraculously, the wind suddenly returned, and the Alliance was able to answer her helm for the first time in hours. Hacker steered the frigate to unleash a full broadside on the Atalanta, then she came about to do the same to the Trepassey, which struck her colors under the onslaught. Hacker then guided the Alliance around the surrendered sloop in pursuit of the fleeing Atalanta. Captain Edwards of the Atalanta looked up in dismay as his damaged fore- and mizzenmasts collapsed just before his ship received another blistering broadside from the Alliance. The Atalanta struck her colors, and the battle was over.
Barry struggled up the companionway just as the guns went silent and was greeted by the cheers of his exhausted yet victorious crew. He allowed the surgeon’s assistants to help him to his cabin, rather than to the quarterdeck, wherein he received the formal surrender of Captain Edwards. The Trepassey parted company as a cartel ship with 250 prisoners to be exchanged for an equal number of Americans in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Alliance and the Atalanta spent two days after the battle making repairs before they could depart for Boston. The Atalanta, with a prize crew under the command of Lieutenant Hezekiah Welch, was captured off Cape Cod and taken to Halifax. The shattered Alliance limped into port on 6 June, where she spent the next half a year laid up for repairs and refitting before returning to sea on 10 December 1781.
Despite his ship having engaged two enemy vessels while already damaged and undermanned, and spending most of the action unable to maneuver, the unwavering courage of Captain Barry led the crew of the Alliance to a well-earned victory. It would not be their last under his command. Engaging the frigate HMS Sybil on 10 March 1783—more than three months after the Treaty of Paris was signed on 30 November 1782—Barry fired the final shot at sea of the American Revolution.
The Alliance remained in service until 1785, the last remaining ship of the Continental Navy. The Alliance had always been in a class of her own. “There [was] not, in the king’s service, nor in the English Navy,” in the words of Captain Thévenard, “a frigate more perfect and complete in materials and workmanship.”
She was sold in May 1785 and was overhauled as a merchant ship. Found at last to be unseaworthy, she was condemned in late 1789 and was broken up for her copper and iron. Her hulk was run up onto Petty’s Island, New Jersey, opposite Philadelphia, where it slowly deteriorated for more than a century. Though popular for relic hunting and for reflecting on the deeds of the American Revolution, her remains were finally dredged away in 1901.
Sources:
Charles Francis Adams, John Adams, Second President of the United States, Vol. 10 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1856).
Louis H. Bolander, “The Frigate Alliance: The Favorite Ship of the American Revolution,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 63, no. 9 (September 1937).
Charles-Marie Cunat, Saint-Malo Illustré par ses Marins (Rennes, France: F. Péalat, 1857).
Martin I. J. Griffin, Commodore John Barry (Philadelphia: Martin I. J. Griffin, 1903).
Tim McGrath, Give Me a Fast Ship: The Continental Navy and America’s Revolution at Sea (New York: NAL Caliber, 2014).
Louis Norton, “Alliance—The Last Continental Navy Frigate,” Naval History 22, no. 4 (August 2008).