Nantasket Road, Massachusetts
Nantasket Road, Massachusetts
NANTASKET ROAD, MASSACHUSETTS. 17 and 19 May 1776. When the British evacuated Boston, they left behind a small naval force in Nantasket Road (the point where vessels entering Boston Harbor from the open sea would assemble to await favorable tides) to protect transports and merchantmen known to be coming from Europe from interception by Washington's squadron or privateers. On 17 May, Captain James Mugford, in the sixty-ton schooner Franklin (sixty), captured the three-hundred-ton ordnance ship Hope, which was bringing a cargo that included one thousand carbines and fifteen hundred barrels of gunpowder from Ireland in sight of British warships. Two days later, while cruising in company with the tiny privateer Lady Washington (seven men), Mugford ran aground near Point Shirley. Eager for revenge, the British sent about two hundred men in a dozen or so small boats to attack her after darkness fell. After a half-hour fight in which the only American casualty was Mugford, who was killed, the battered British withdrew. Americans estimated that the enemy suffered forty or fifty killed or wounded. The British would lose several troop transports before the Americans constructed a heavy battery that chased the Royal Navy off.
revised by Robert K. Wright Jr.