 terribly well-known, but that's exactly why it needed to be studied, right, because we didn't know enough about it. And the three main things that we thought about the Gatsby in the 19th century, I think I've successfully challenged in my book of some of the conventional wisdom of what we thought we knew about the Gatsby. It was time for some revision. William Staples wrote a book in 1845, one of the founders of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Judge Staples really wrote the definitive book on it that stood for a century, and he did a great job with it. But we're able to challenge some of his assumptions now with a little more hindsight. So yes, so you can see my book, it's 48 hours old, it just came on Tuesday. We cut it a little close. My wife was texting me pictures of it, and I said, I said, I don't need pictures of it. I said, does it feel substantial? Is it like really cheap paper, you know, does it feel chinsy? You know, I want you to know that it feels like a high quality book. But so West Home Publishing is down in Philadelphia, and they're interested in micro histories. You know, my whole study is only looking at 18 months. I'm not trying to explain all of American history. I'm trying to explain what happened in these 18 months in Rhode Island. So what's funny about speaking at the Siemens Church Institute is I spent the 1990s studying Siemens missions, and I was part of the International Association for the study of Siemens missions, which is based out of England, out of the UK, and went to some of their conferences. I had them come to us one year at Mystic Seaport, and we had our conference there in Mystic, Connecticut. And so if you'd like, you can ask me questions about the Siemens Church movement and the Siemens missions. I'll try to answer them. My knowledge is 20 years old now, but that's my other area of expertise. So it's especially a joy to come speak at the Siemens Church Institute. I've given a similar talk at the one on Water Street down by South Street Seaport in New York City. So if we'll get started, the slide you're looking at right now was a ballad that drunken Rhode Islanders sang about the Gaspia Fair in 1773 and 1774 after they'd had a few pints. They would sing this tune. And in 1972, at the Bicentennial or the Gaspia Fair, there was a recording made of some local Rhode Island band singing it. But I see John Hattendorf just walked in. John, you have a seat. You're stuck with the front row. No room for the back row Baptist in this. You have to sit up front. Thanks for coming, John. So the reason I put this photograph of the Sultana. This is a two-masted schooner that serves down in Chesapeake Bay right now. That's a pretty good indicator of probably what the Gaspia look like about her size and shape. Maybe even her color scheme. We don't know exactly what she would have looked like. But I had to throw that in there nonetheless. So Liz, let's see if this, ah, it does do what it says it's going to do. Very good. So people say to me, Steve, how did you land on this topic? And I was looking around for a maritime topic. And I'm a maritime historian, as Liz said in my introduction. And sometimes when I speak, people are disappointed by that. They're like, oh, he's a maritime historian. So it's nice to come here where we're tolerated, right? But I was looking around. And Connecticut residents were actually a little burned out on the Amistad affair. That we'd heard so much and studied so much about the Amistad. So many books had come out about it. The movie was in the making at that time, right? No, the movie was already out at that time. 1998 was the movie, right? The Mystic Seaport had built a replica in 2000. They laid the keel for the Amistad. And she's still down there in New London. I drive by her almost every day. And so we were almost getting a little burned out on the Amistad. I thought, I need to turn over some new soil, right? What's something that hasn't been done in a while? So there was only one dissertation on the topic. And fortunately, the fellow had a fairly unusual name. And he gave me his middle name. So using Google, I was able to find him in a few seconds. And I picked up the phone and called him. And I said, Lawrence, tell me about your 1973 dissertation on the Gaspia affair. He's like, oh, I haven't thought about that in decades. He said, my wife's family was from Rhode Island. I was on a nine-month teaching appointment. We would spend the summer with her family in Rhode Island. So I was able to go to the Rhode Island Historical Society, the State Archives. I was able to go to John Carter Brown and to the Rock. I was able to go to all the libraries and see all the papers that were still in Rhode Island. And I dug through them pretty thoroughly. And I said, I can see that. And he had excellent footnotes. And I said, did you ever get to the UK? And he said, I did not. And I said, I can go on the public record office's website and see that they have 352 documents that got shipped back to the UK to what they're now calling their National Archives. I don't know that a lot of Americans have looked at this recently. And he said, I can promise you they haven't. And he's like, I haven't seen those documents either. So I thought, I looked at what it would cost me. I would have to pay a graduate student five pounds a document to stand there and scan them. Or maybe back then it was 10 pounds a document. It was some huge fee for somebody to stand there and make these high-quality scans and then send them to me digitally. And then I went on the British Airways website. And it was cheaper for me to fly there myself. I took a digital camera with me, which was kind of a novelty back then. Not everybody had digital cameras. And I went to the public record office. And I stayed with a friend of mine. He was a bachelor at the time. He had a flat in South Kensington, which was pretty swanky. And so I had my own bedroom. I can say, you stay as long as you need. And you can just take the tube right out to a queue garden. And the whole thing cost me next to nothing. And I was able to get, I found those 352 documents and took photographs of them. What happened is the paper turns yellow. And the black ink turns brown. So the two colors actually start to get closer together. So you're reading brown ink on yellowed paper. And the paper is falling apart in your hands. It looks like you've eaten cornflakes when you look down at your feet at the end of all the paper that's falling apart. And so actually it was easier to read it on my laptop than in real life. So I took the digital photos, loaded them on my laptop, and just kept, whoops, kept hitting increased contrast. And it was actually easier to read the digital copy than the real one. And then this way I didn't feel like I was manhandling the documents. There's a Japanese fellow in the carol next to me. And he read English fluently. But he didn't speak it very clearly. And he looked over and saw what I was doing. And then he looked at what he was doing, taking notes. And then he looked at what I was doing. And he disappeared for a couple hours. And he came back with a camera. So while we weren't able to chat much about it, we had an understanding. And he was able to get back to Japan much quicker with his camera. So in any case, like I said, here's my book now available on Amazon. It just came out 48 hours ago. So my advisor wrote a nice comment for the back. So let's have a little background on the Gatsby affair and how we got into this. Like I said, I was looking for a topic that was Southern New England that was local. Although it did end up having to take a lot of photographs. It took me nine days to take those photographs. I was taking about 70 photographs a day. Because what you don't want to do is just load a lot of JPEGs on your computer and not know what's what. So I actually embedded them into a database. This is a letter from Lieutenant Dunningston to Admiral Montague, July 9th, and the date and who wrote to whom and where he was. So that way, it made it easy to pull things back up again. Little background, here we are at the end of the Seven Years' War, what we sometimes call the French and Indian War. By 1764, England had a stunning victory over France. They'd been at war three times in the 18th century. Finally, we got a good, conclusive victory over France. And all of Canada is going to the United Kingdom. And so one of the things they had to do with that is what's Canada's great North Atlantic asset? It's the Grand Banks. It's the Cod or so dense there. So this is great fishing ground. We think Cabot may have, going all the way back to John Cabot, he may have found that fishing ground. We don't know for sure. But in any case, wonderful fishing off the Grand Banks. So the French have some traditional claims to fishing those grounds. New England has some traditional claims to fishing there. And so do the English. So you have three different people who don't always get along perfectly, fishing the same waters. And then they want to go to shore in Nova Scotia or maybe in Newfoundland and dry their fish or salt their fish, depending on what they're going to do. You need to keep these pretty rough and tumble fishermen from conflicting with each other and getting into little brawls with each other as they do. So that's where the Gatsby comes in. So we'll get to that in a second. All the new taxes have been repealed except the one on T. So it's funny, when I go to the Gatsby Day Parade, which if you haven't been up in Warwick, up in Cranston, it's a wonderful parade. It's almost four hours long. It takes 100 volunteers. They have to raise about $40,000 to make this parade happen every June. It's a wonderful little parade. And it's funny, somebody gets on the loudspeaker every year and talks about the Gatsby as being a protest against the Stamp Act. And I'm like, really, that was long since repealed by 1772, so everything's been repealed except T and you'll see how that becomes important later. But the thing that's dangerous about this is there's a pattern of behavior, right? Taxes go up, we protest, taxes go down. You get a new prime minister. Well, they didn't use the term prime minister back then, but it's basically their new prime minister. A new ministry comes in and they do the same thing. They raise taxes, we protest, they back off. You have this pattern of behavior going back and forth through the 1760s. You'll see why that's important in a minute. Where is this tucked in? Okay, 1772 is tucked in neatly between the King Street riot, where a couple of Colonials lost their heads and started throwing ice, you know, sticks and ice balls and snowballs and things at the Crown Soldiers who were peacefully guarding the Customs House. So when I flew black on British Airways, I flew in the Logan and they have like this 20 minute tourist video for the British visitors to see about Boston and this woman's going on and on talking about these unruly Colonials who are throwing snowballs at his King Soldiers who are, you know, just peacefully standing by and doing their duty at the Customs House and I'm looking at my wife and she's like, what is she talking about? I said, she's describing the Boston massacre, but there's not going to use the word Boston or massacre. Right, so, and then of course, on the other side of it is the Boston Tea Party, right? So December, December, 1917, 1973, when again we lose our heads and start throwing valuable tea into the harbor. So here's what happened. The Crown's answer to this is they said, let's take six small sloops and schooners and have them patrol around the Grand Banks and keep the French and these New England boys and the Canadians and the English from harming one another when they're trying to fish these banks. So they had carefully outlined who was supposed to do what, where and so the Gaspi is among these purchases. I'm not sure they even constructed any of these vessels. I'm pretty sure they were all purchased and you can see they're named after place names in Canada, the St. Lawrence River, Charleur Bay, Hope Island, Magdalen Island, Gaspi Point. So they were named after places in, but somewhat anglicized. We don't keep the accent agieu over the first E because we've anglicized these terms. Now I went back and forth with some wag on Wikipedia about this a few years ago. He kept, he would go in there and put an accent on every E and I said, that's great except it's wrong. And so I would hit revert and I would go back and I'd say they anglicized it, it's a proper noun. The English get to decide how to spell this, not you. And he would change it all back again. So finally I said to the guy, I'm like, will you please Google me, look at my webpage and tell me if you know more about the Gaspi affair than I do, you know, I didn't want to pull rank on him but finally he backed off. So in any case, so here's a precedent for the attack on the Gaspi. I was talking to some of the folks here up in the front rows earlier about the precedent for this and how this wasn't unusual. You know, our Rhode Island governors have liked to talk about this being the first attack of the American Revolution and well the first blow for American freedom and you've seen different slogans attached to the Gaspi affair but actually at first they're following a fairly traditional formula. The formula is if the crown government is overstepping its bounds, the local sheriff and can put out a warrant for a sea officer's arrest and can arrest him and this was not that unusual, right? So and the other thing you can do is with in the absence of a state police force in the absence of a large law enforcement presence you can form a posse of men and you can arrest somebody, right, and get a warrant for their arrest and go and arrest somebody. So forming a posse, having a local sheriff, having an arrest warrant for an officer in his majesty's navy was not that unusual but I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me go back. So you can see here a precedent for attacks on the Gaspi. All the way back to 1710 we had the justice of the peace may arrest a customs collector, naval officers for collecting too much. So a naval officer is a civilian who's on shore. A sea officer is standing on the deck of one of his majesty's vessels just to make that clear. Naval officer is on shore. A sea officer has water under his feet. So just a, but for collecting too much. Here's a riot in Rhode Island in 1718 that where Nathaniel Kay got swept up in it. The William and Mary smuggling in Boston in 1723. A customs official was nearly beaten to death. So violence against these people is not that unusual, right? Tide waiters attacked, customs, the vessel escaped the Rota in Rhode Island. That's what one of the more, the St. John mob threatened to burn the vessel. So here's threatening to burn a vessel. So here again, you see the similarity with the Gaspi affair. They dropped the case. The privy council inquired too late. The chaleur, one of her sister vessels right down in New York city. One of its boats was burned by a mob. Everybody forgot what happened. That sounds familiar, right? So collective amnesia. You know, so you can see there's some precedent here that the Gaspi isn't coming to us completely out of left field. Here's where Jesse Seville was abused by a mob in Providence. Then of course the famous one with John Hancock's Liberty, the vessel was seized in 1768, became a customs yacht. It was burned on Goat Island by a mob. Privy council took no action again. You see how the privy council keeps coming off looking weak, right? They don't take action. They take action too late. There's no good administrative response to this. Charles Dudley was beaten on a wharf. That was the most recent one here in Newport in 1771. So this is what our folks may know, right? John Brown may know some of this. Abraham Whipple may know some of this, right? Exactly how much I don't know. But here's what happened. So on June 9th, 1772, depends on who tells the story, right? I guess we should tell both sides of the story, right? Any of you who've done any parenting know about hearing two sides of the story, right? So let's tell both sides of the story. The patriot telling of the story, the local Rhode Island telling of the story is the Gatsby was there alone. She, Admiral Montaguew up in Boston had sent the beaver, not the Brig Beaver from Tea Party fame, but his majesty Schooner the beaver to help protect the Gatsby. That's how much they sensed that she was in danger. So this didn't come completely out of left field. There had been threats against the Gatsby and against Lieutenant Dunningston. Admiral Montaguew had sent the beaver down to help protect the Gatsby. So they should have been on high alert, right? So that's also another problem. But in any case, the beaver breaks off on June 9th and the Gatsby is down at the opening of Narragansett Bay at the mouth of Narragansett Bay by herself. The way the patriots tell the story, the Hanna, which is owned by John Brown, it's one of the vessels in his company, sails by sitting a little light in the water, right? There's other stories you'll hear about them flipping them off, mooning the crew. I've not been able to verify any of that with contemporary documents. Those seem to be great 19th century stories that were made up later. But the Hanna does seem to be sitting light in the water making them think that she's been offloading her cargo. So the way you smuggle in the 18th century, in the 18th century colonies is you don't go right into Providence or into Newport, right in the main wharf where the tide waiters and customs collectors are waiting to see you and are watching and are taking notes. You stop out near the mouth of the Narragansett Bay and offload your goods into smaller vessels that can go into every little nook and cranny in Narragansett Bay. They'll go over into East Greenwich, they'll go into the flats over there, they'll go into some marshy areas and they'll get away from the prying eyes of government officials. So that's how smuggling works. You take your, while you're still sort of out at sea in a little bit deeper water away from where people can see you, you offload your goods into smaller and smaller vessels. People complain that Dunningston was harassing people in every little small vessel. He was just doing his job, right? So the commander of the Gatsby, Lieutenant Dunningston was just doing his job. In any case, the Hannah looks a little light. They start sailing up Narragansett Bay up towards the Providence River and allegedly John Brown, well we know John Brown ran aground on Namquid Point, which we now call Gatsby Point in 1765. So John Brown already knew there was a shallow spot there. They also knew that the Gatsby didn't have its pilot on board. There's a man named Sylveon Daggett, who was a local boy, knew the waters really well, he wasn't on board. So the Gatsby sailing after the Hannah, racing up the Bay, heading towards a shallow spot that they don't know is there. The Hannah's able to sail right over it. The Gatsby runs aground, right? About three in the afternoon, she runs aground. The tide won't change in her favor until the wee hours of the morning, right? So she's stuck there for a while. So the men, Dunnington has the men get out, take advantage of the shallow water there, and they're scraping barnacles off the hull. It's a hot summer's day. It feels good to wade in the water a little bit. But then that also means the men are pretty tired that night and they sleep well that night because they're out scraping barnacles. The Hannah proceeds into Providence and reports that the Gatsby is running aground six miles south of Providence off Namquid Point. So that's the information they have in the early evening hours in Providence when the Lieutenant Governor, Darius Sessions, here's a boy beating a drum. What does a boy beating a drum mean in colonial 18th century America? It's a muster call, right? So he says, oh, they were just, little boys playing in the streets just mucking around. You can put a little bit more sinister look on that, that it was a muster call. And men start to gather in Sabin Tavern. And you can still see to this day where Sabin Tavern was in Providence. They gather there and they start melting down some lead in making some bullets, which makes them look a little bit more aggressive that they felt like they needed to make bullets. And they devise a plan and maybe by around 10 p.m., maybe as many as eight long boats go out with eight oars each, so that's 64 oars. And they start paddling the six miles down the Providence River towards the Gaspi that's run aground. When they get there, there's only one man on deck, Bartholomew Chievers. At first, it just looks like some rocks that he hadn't noticed earlier. There's a new moon, right? So the fact that there's a new moon makes it look a little bit planned, right? They knew it would be very dark. Was this planned? Did the Hannah lure them across Namquod Point? At Dunningston's Court Marshall, he says none of that's true. I was just sailing to Providence to pick up some men who were coming down from Boston. I was understaffed. I happened to run aground. It had nothing to do with the Hannah or any other vessel. And I couldn't get myself freed. Dunningston and his Court Marshall down place this whole thing. But in any case, as they approach the vessel, Bartholomew Chievers calls out to them and says, what's your business here? And they keep coming. So Lieutenant Dunningston comes up on deck. He's only in a night shirt. All the small arms are locked in the small arms chest. The only thing he has with him is a sword. He doesn't even have a pistol with him. And he says, somebody claiming to be the sheriff. I remember John Brown was the sheriff of Kent County, but they were actually in Kings County. But he was a sheriff. He says, I'm the sheriff of Kings County. I have a warrant for your arrest. And Dunningston says, why don't you come back at a more appropriate hour? So Dunningston had avoided going ashore as had the skipper of the beaver. They figured there'd be a warrant for their arrest. Why is there a warrant for his arrest? In February, he sees some rum from Jacob Green and the powerful Green family of East Greenwich, Rhode Island. He went to have that rum condemned. It became clear that he wasn't gonna get it condemned in Rhode Island. He wanted to go up to Boston to have it condemned. They told him he wasn't welcome there either. So now he's stuck with some valuable rum that he sure has been smuggled and he can't get rid of it. It's still on his boat. So they either want the rum back or the equivalent value to this rum. So this is part of the motive of what the patriots are doing. And you have to remember his majesty's government took a pretty dim view of Connecticut and Rhode Island. During the golden age of piracy, there is some evidence that we did trade with pirates and get a good price on things. We were the only two colonies left that didn't have a royal governor. So we had charters and we had independent governors that were democratically elected. Such as democracy was practiced at that time. So Connecticut and Rhode Island, our stock was already pretty low in Whitehall. They didn't take a very high view of the governments of Connecticut and Rhode Island. So nonetheless, here we are. A man named Joseph Bucklin and his descendants are still alive in Arizona and they come and march in the parade every year. He asks for a long gun and he shoots Dunningston. And one shot goes into his hand and the other into his groin. At first, Dunningston doesn't think he's gonna survive. They don't give him medical treatment right away. Ultimately, they call the colonial doctor out of the boats and who comes up and gives him medical treatment and they tear bandages down below. The reason that's important is is they tore bandages for Dunningston. It gave them a chance to get a good look at these people face to face with artificial lighting so they could see the face of these folks and they could see that they were gentlemen of Providence. They were well dressed, ponytail, wig, ruffled shirt. These weren't just, this wasn't just the rabble of Providence, I guess is what I'm trying to say. These are the prominent people of Providence who are engaged in this activity. And so the other thing that's important about the medical treatment is Dr. Mani is one of only two people, Ephraim Boa and the other one, who bothered to ever write anything down about what happened that night. Granted, they wrote it down 60 years later. We know how human memory works and we know what things we selectively remember and what we don't remember, which is why I wanted to go back to the court martial records and see what the English were telling, how they were telling the story at the time as well. But a lot of what we know in Rhode Island and a lot of what we talk about in Rhode Island are from those two witnesses who wrote it down many years later. After the War of 1812, people got a little bit bolder about admitting that they had been among the raiders of the Gaspi and they would put it in the newspaper with their obituary. So you would say, I, Stephen Park, blah, blah, blah, blah and there'd be a description in the paper upon my death and say I was among the Gaspi raiders. So what we're able to do now with the 14 people who did that, we go back and we look at how old were they? Where were they living? Where do we think they were sleeping that night? And if you were in Providence and you were the right age, you knew the sons of liberty or you were well tied in with this group, yeah, you're probably telling the truth and we'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But that's still a whole lot of raiders we don't know who have been lost to us in history. It's only 14 people who we have a pretty good idea of who was there that night. So nonetheless, Dunningston shot. They row his men ashore. Whoa, that didn't do what I thought it was gonna do. Where's the, there we go. So they brought the men right here. See, there's Gaspi Point. They brought them ashore and they thought they were being put on an island but it was just a spit of land. The men were unharmed. You know, a few people got hit with some baton, some wooden, what's the word? Thank you, a belaying pin. A few people got hit by a couple of belaying pins. Nothing serious for the average life of a mariner at that time. And so Dunningston's the only one who's seriously hurt. Ultimately he's taken down off Bretton Point to a farm of a Loyalist where he recovers and then sails back to England to stay in trial for the loss of his vessel. So that's what happened that night. You can see, here's where things went bad. So first of all, they were following a nice formula. Form a posse, get an arrest warrant, get the sheriff. Everything was going well until Bucklin shot Dunningston, which he probably shouldn't have done. And then the other thing is, whoa, it did it again. I gotta stop doing that. There we go. Somebody either set fire to the vessel or it accidentally caught fire. They're looking through Dunningston's papers. They wanna see if he really has orders to do what he's doing. They're angry at how good he is at customs intervention. Remember, Rhode Island, it's no secret that Rhode Island was smuggling a great deal within the mercantilist rules of the British Empire. Entire British Empire could only make a quarter of the molasses that Rhode Island needed. So at least three quarters of the molasses that Rhode Island needed had to be gotten through other means from the French or the Dutch, either coming from St. Eustatius or from the islands. Somehow, so Rhode Island is engaged in quite a bit of smuggling and this also hurts their reputation in London. Nonetheless, when this thing burned, when this vessel burned, surely people saw it, they heard it. I assume there was some kind of powder magazine that would have made an even more spectacular explosion. Very little could be salvaged. A man named Daniel Vaughn was asked to go out and salvage whatever metal fixtures he could get. He put them in a warehouse and then we lost them. So we don't know where those metal fixtures went. But the only thing I don't like about Doflinger's painting, Carl Doflinger painted this in 1994. I have a lithograph hanging up in my office. It's a beautiful painting. I love that day is breaking and you can see the men are returning. Maybe one vessel to Bristol was under the leadership of Simeon Potter. Maybe the other vessels went back to Providence, not under the leadership of John Brown and Abraham Whipple. You know, I like this painting. What's artificial about it? What's inaccurate about it? Whoa. Yeah, the sales are still up, right? So they're still standing on the accelerator, right? So if you've run it ground, you wouldn't keep standing on the accelerator, right? So the sales are up in the middle of the night. So, but it makes for a very dramatic painting. There is a painting that was reproduced in 1972. I have it on some plates and some pewter, where the men are dressed as Indians. We only have one source telling us some men were dressed like Indians. But other than that, I like. So nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything. Big fire, six miles from Providence. Probably a big explosion at some point. Nobody knows anything, right? So, you look at the, you look at what, how can we respond to this, right? Rhode Island already has a sophisticated court system, right? So his majesty can't just show up with its own court. But what he can do is he can have a Royal Commission of Inquiry. And there's a good historic precedent for this. This is a little bit like a congressional research group, right, where you do fact finding. A good Royal Commission of Inquiry not only looks at what the Colonials might have done wrong, but also looks at what British officials might have done wrong. So Britain had such a high view of their own governance and their own ability to govern well that if people are unhappy, it could be that there's a corrupt official, right? Cause we're so great at governing people. How could anybody be unhappy and be in the British Empire, right? So they have a pretty high view of their ability to govern. And so they are gonna look at Dunningston's behavior as well. But nonetheless, you can see going back into the West Indian merchant was tried in London for treason, so he was moved to London. So there is that precedent. And Bacon's Rebellion, you had a Royal Commission of Inquiry who went and probably did more harm than good in the 17th century. In Antigua, after the governor was assassinated, they did send a Royal Commission of Inquiry to investigate. And then, of course, New Jersey had unrest all through the 1740s and 50s back and forth between West Jersey and East Jersey of unrest and rioting. And a Royal Commission of Inquiry was sent there. 1749, that was the most recent case. But what the British like to do in the 18th century is they like to give a general pardon for most everybody and then just round up a few ring leaders and make an example of them, right? That's so they just want a few, they really just want the person who called himself the sheriff who we think was John Brown and the person who they called Captain who we think was Abraham Whipple. That's really, they're just mostly interested in those two people. And they'd like to see them executed. So can we charge them with piracy? No, they're too close to land. They're within the body of the colony. They're inside what sailors would call the line of demarcation. So they're too close to land to be guilty of piracy. And really a pirate is supposed to be an enemy of all nations. This was a very surgical strike. So I don't think we can call it that. So they're looking, what capital offense can we get them for? So that's what they're asking, you know, what can we get them on? And any of you who've read Albion's Fatal Tree, which as many came out in the 70s, many years ago now, but the research out of that monograph, you'll see, they showed how England had 150 capital crimes in the 18th century. So they like to set the stakes really high and then pardon people. It's not like they were executing people every day. They just set the stakes really high. When you have a very small police presence, a very small presence of law enforcement, you make the stakes very high to try to keep people in line, right? And so the stakes were very high, 150 capital crimes. And just like our government in the 1960s and 1970s, just like we were, England was going through and getting rid of all their capital crimes as many Western countries were in the 60s and 70s. They got rid of all but two. The Royal Dockyards Act is still standing. If you set fire to one of His Majesty's vessels while it's being built in a dockyard, that's a capital crime. And then you're not supposed to have sexual intercourse with the queen or her daughter. Because you're gonna mess up the royal line. So you're supposed to leave those members of the royal family of the female persuasion, you're to leave them alone. So those are the two capital crimes that remain. So it was funny, the friend I was telling you that I stayed with in South Kensington, a couple of barrister friends of his came over from Lincoln's Inn one night and I confirmed that with them and they assured me that that was the case. So what can you do? First of all, the governor, Governor Joseph Wanton and the lieutenant governor, Darius Sessions, need to look zealous in finding the perpetrators of this, right? They want the London government to think that they're zealously seeking out the perpetrators of this. And so they put up this proclamation for an award for 100 pounds right away. And so it looks a little bit like this. You can see these, they are not hard to find. We have them in Rhode Island, we have them in the United Kingdom. And then His Majesty replied on August 25th, 1772, a few months later, couple of months later, as soon as he got the bad news about this, offering a 500 pound reward with another proclamation. So those are your rewards. Only one person tried to come forward. One white fellow named William Gully came forward claiming to have information. It was all secondhand, it was all hearsay. And then one African-American came forward. Briggs, Aaron Briggs, Rhode Islanders call him Briggs. The British called him Biggs. I'd left the R out in my book. I went with the British spelling because he was actually standing in front of the British giving his testimony. So I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they got his name right. But nonetheless, he was an African-American. They claim his mother was a Native American from Little Compton, Rhode Island, and his dad was black, mom was an Indian. That's what they thought. Of course they said that about a lot of people in Colonial, Rhode Island. But he came forward claiming that he had taken part in the burning of the, he was among the men that night that he was a slave on Providence Island. He was leaving that night and when he met up with the crew that left from Bristol and he claims that he participated in the whole thing. We'll get back to Aaron Briggs here in a minute. But so immediately they get resistance. So the Crown puts together this Royal Commission to investigate and he brings together five prominent Colonials. Joseph Wanton is at the head of this. The Rhode Island governor is at the head of this commission. And then he brings over some prominent gentleman from New York and from Connecticut and this five panel crew is to investigate. Admiral Montague came down from Boston and gave them a list of people he thought they should question. And they get a lot of resistance. You can look at this. You know, this is William Thayer. He says, I'm 70 years old and I have rheumatism. I'm not gonna come. John Andrews, who was in the Sons of Liberty. He says his hand was swollen. This guy claims he can't come because the Providence River is frozen. Wouldn't it be easier to get there if the river's frozen? I can now can just walk, right? You know, so some of their excuses aren't very good. My excuse, I'm 74. You know, age seems to be a good one. I'm too busy with my current caseloads so these attorneys claim they're too busy. I'm in declining health. There's Sabin there at the bottom, the Tavern owner. He claims he's in declining health and debt. So people give various reasons for why they're not gonna come. They're meeting at Colony House here in Newport. It's wintertime. They take a break. They say, let's take a break through the spring and reassemble in the summer and better weather. Let the passions die down and we'll try again later. So here the Sons of Liberty, Hitchcock, Sabin, and Cole indicated that they would give a sworn testimony before civil authority if necessary. Andrews and Brown seem willing to go before the commissioners if necessary. Ultimately Andrews, Brown, and Cole did appear before the commissioners in June. The reason we know this is they get blasted in the local press. So both the editor of the Newport Mercury and the Providence, because that are both super patriots, radical wigs, and they blast them in their newspapers. So here's a timetable. I know this is gonna be hard for you guys reading in the cheap seats in the back. This is a pretty small font. This breaks the rules of how small your font can be. But this is a table that's out of my book. I just copied and pasted it in here. But here's what I'm showing. So William Staples, one of the founders of the Rhode Island Historical Society, the judge that I mentioned at the very beginning. In his 1845 book, he says, you know what? When it really came to the time to decide are you a loyalist or are you a patriot? Governor Wanton remained a loyalist. So we know he was zealous in what he did for his majesty's government in the Gaspia Fair. I challenged that because he very carefully made sure that anybody who could identify anybody else, they weren't in colony house at the same day and the same time. So let's say Dr. Hattendorf here was one of the Raiders, and I was one of his majesty's mariners on, he would just make sure we weren't there at the same time. Because if we walked by each other, we could recognize each other, right? And some of the Gaspia mariners claimed to recognize people on the streets of Providence. It's like, I recognize that guy, he was one of the people who raided the Gaspia, you know? And so you have to make sure that people don't pass each other in the hallway or arrive at colony house at the same time. So Governor Wanton, who's in charge of this commission, carefully spreads everybody out nice and neatly. So you know, you look at somebody like here, okay, here's Aaron Biggs indentured servant, we might call him a slave, not an indentured servant like they did, but he might be able to identify some of these Raiders. He named John Brown, the Brown's Potter, but he never got a chance to be face to face with them, right? Here's a couple of the Gaspia mariners, they might be able to identify some of these people. Look at how the dates are spread out. The right people never get face to face. Some of the other commissioners even commented on that at the time. The commissioners from New York, they said, they wrote back to Dartmouth, who was the head of the American department. They wrote back to Lord Dartmouth and they said, we never had the chance to get these people in the same room at the same time. We might have had more success. So in any case, you can see George Brown failed to appear in January, but he admitted hearing a drum at Sabin's Tavern. So people would admit to pieces of it here, he admitted to hearing a drum at Sabin's Tavern. John Andrews, I figure he probably wasn't among the Raiders, but in any case, so here's your resistance to face to face contact. Although named as possible ring leaders, John Brown, as in Brown University fame, the famous 18th century John Brown. Joseph Brown, Simeon Potter, Rufus Green, again part of the Green family with the seizing of the rum, were never summoned to appear before the commissioners. In the 16 days that they met in January, the commissioners only managed to examine 10 people, which was still more than they saw when the weather was milder in June. A severe weather complaint seemed hollow there and additionally, Reverend Stiles recorded that January 1773 was unusually mild. And Chief Justice Horseman Dinn, the fellow from New York, wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth that, my Lord, the commissioners did not enter upon counter evidence, though I myself was inclined to do it as we proceeded and bring the witnesses face to face. So that's what they failed to do. The Reverend Stiles I mentioned here is Ezra Stiles, future soon to be president of Yale. The reason why he's such a great source for us is Yale carefully saved all his papers, all his diaries, all of his letters, so we have a huge wealth of information about Stiles. The other good thing is he was a pastor of the local church here in Newport at the time, so he had tea with everybody. You know, everybody had to come through his living room and through his parlor and have tea with him and then that night he would carefully write down what happened, how great is that, right? That's a historian's dream. And then his fawning ancestors, the people who came after him, thank you. They carefully saved all his papers and made sure that they made it into Yale's archives. So here's John Brown and Sam Adams. Here's an image of King George III and Lord North. And that's where we get, pull the wool over your eyes from the wool and their wigs, yes. Wasn't Brown the one who shot the captain? No, we think it was Joseph Bucklin. His relatives have been taking credit for years, you know. I know, I know. And the only first-hand account we have is from Ephraim Bowen, right? And he's the one who says it was Bucklin. And so the Bucklin family runs their own website. They claims it was him. So there's two websites out there. There's Gatsby.org and then there's the Bucklin family website. But there's a mutual respect for each other. They each agree to support the other's website in the event of death of one and to the other so that they'll continue past their death. So these people left Savins Town then? Were they sober? No, they weren't, right. And so when I'm not in Rhode Island, I make a bigger deal out of that. But since I was talking to a Rhode Island audience, you notice I downplayed that. But when I spoke in Morristown last week, I made more out of that, yes. Was Savins Town the little pub there on the east side? Yes. And as it started to fall down in the early 19th century. Well, it was still hanging around it up there. Right, and so John Cancannon showed me that the other night where it allegedly was. Of course, they filled in by the river there, so it's further from the river than it would have been because there was some fill down in the 19th century. I was down at Waterfire the other night and he was showing me where it was because we did some interpretive stuff down for the Gatsby Day thing. Oh, that's great. Yeah, I don't know if you know John McNiff, he's at the Roger Williams site. Yeah, he's a lot older now. Yeah, right. But he was doing an interpretive thing down there right where we think Savins Tavern was. As it got, as it started to fall down in the early 19th century, people took pieces of it home and nailed it to the sides of their houses. What's interesting is that lasted into the age of photography. So we have some black and white daguerreotypes of pieces of Savins Tavern that were tacked onto this guy's house and then here was a window that was tacked onto this guy's house. You know, so people kind of carved it up and took pieces of it home like they did with the Liberty Bell and with the old glory. You know, 19th century tourism was all about taking a piece of it home with you. You know about Senator Whitehouse just gathering there on the other side every year? You know about the burners? Yes, yeah, yeah. And so two years ago, we did a little interpretive thing in period clothing and then tied it into water fire that Barnaby was doing down there in the river. So yeah, and then the governor had a ball there right after that. It was very nice. It was very well done. Oh, yeah. And the Lafayette came up from Colonial Williamsburg. He was amazing. I mean, that guy, the guy who interprets Lafayette with the accent and the clothing and the photographic memory, he was amazing. And I saw him there as well. But in any case, so if you have a chance, you know, it's always that first, second weekend in June. You know, it's the parade and then the evening festivities. And it's even better now that water fire is linked up with it too. But in any case, so that these commissioners make a report, right? And so the first part of the report, the first 10% is just an introduction. Then the 7% of the report is assuring his majesty what a diligent job they did and how great they were. You know, so there's the padding on the back that you have to do. A quarter of the report is a narrative of the events where they tell the story of what happened. And then a fifth of the report is claiming that Lieutenant Dunningston was too zealous in carrying out his duties. So it's great that he was stopping smuggling and that's what he was asked to do. He was way too zealous. He needed to ratchet it down. So they're putting the blame on Dunningston for doing too good of a job. A fifth of the report, they go on and on claiming that the justices in Rhode Island's existing court system agree with them, right? So we're not finding anything radical or new or different. And then the last fifth of the report is discrediting Aaron Biggs to say, look, he's just a slave. He's not a, you know, he can't be trusted. His testimony's no good. Ultimately, Biggs had to join the Navy and never return to the colonies. It wasn't safe for him to stay in the new world. Because Admiral Montague had to personally come escort him to Colonial House and then escort him back to the beaver so that he would make it safely. He said he can't be in a local jail. He can't be escorted by local officials. It's not safe for him because he's able to name names. So that's your report that went over to His Majesty's government. And then what happened after that? Arthur Lee and Sam Adams start writing to each other. Arthur Lee is down in Virginia. Sam Adams is in Boston. He said, this is crazy. We don't know what's happening in the next colony. You know, what England's government did so effectively is they treated each colony very independently and they had an independent relationship with each colony. So it's between England and North Carolina. It's between England and Virginia. It's between England and Massachusetts. To give you an example of this, the regulators were burning down North Carolina in the 1760s. You know how people in Virginia found out that North Carolina was burning down? From the London newspapers, of course, right? So the news has to go from North Carolina to London, back to Virginia to find out that your next door neighbor's whole state is in complete chaos, right? And so they said, we need to follow what the Baptists do. They have these committees of correspondence. This is a religious activity where churches would write to each other and keep each other informed of what was going on. And so Arthur Lee and Sam Adams get this idea that we should write to each other and they form these committees of correspondence everywhere except for Pennsylvania. Now you think Pennsylvania, that was a hotbed of radical activity. It's just like Boston, right? Philadelphia, why didn't they have a committee of correspondence? You could blame it on Joseph Galloway. You could blame it on some of the imperialists in Pennsylvania, but nonetheless, all the other colonies had a committee of correspondence by 1774. Everybody's already always made a big deal about this. That the Gatsby Day parade, they make a big deal about it. William Staples made a big deal about it in the 19th century. We know a lot more about the committees of correspondence now than we did then. In the 1970s, leading up to the bicentennial, a huge amount of research was done on committees of correspondence. And we find out that these committees were not radicalized at all. You'll recognize some of the names on these committees. There's radical wigs on these committees. They were very afraid of being accused of treason. And so they played it very cool. They knew people were reading their mail. They just carried out very perfunctory business. These are not the radical committees that led to the First Continental Congress. My advisor, Richard Brown, showed in his work that he did in the 1970s how the radical committees came out of the Massachusetts towns and then ultimately to Boston. And so while we thought this was the Gatsby's legacy for many, many years, I argue in my book, it's actually not. And so my book's a little bit revisionist this way. I argue that the Gatsby's true legacy, the thing that radicalized the Gatsby affair and made it go from being a small local thing that was actually following a formula and then maybe deteriorated into a little bit of a legal activity, like shooting the commander and burning the vessel. And of course the British were much more upset about the burning of the vessel than shooting Dunningston. Like, oh, we have other lieutenants. We can get more lieutenants. Don't burn the ships, you know, right? So, you know, their attitude is a little shocking to us now. But nonetheless, here's your real legacy. The Sons of Liberty asked a little known Baptist minister in Boston to preach a Thanksgiving Day sermon on the first Sunday of December, 1772. So just like Tom Paine, John Allen had just come over from Britain. It was known for writing some pamphlets in Britain. He grew up and had his church in the Wilkes neighborhood in Britain. The John Wilkes, the famous parliamentarian who spoke out for the American cause. And Wilkes and Barry were perhaps the two most famous parliamentarians who spoke out on behalf of the American cause. And that's why we have Wilkesbury, Pennsylvania, right, because of Wilkes and Barry. So John Allen grew up in a Wilkes neighborhood, lots of sympathy for the American cause. He had a church on Petticoat Lane, small Baptist church. He was accused of forging a 50 pound note and he had to go to the old Bailey to defend himself. Then they took a handwriting sample from him and he was vindicated, but that destroyed his ministry. I mean, now your minister's gone to court being accused of being a forger. So he leaves for the new world and he comes here where the Sons of Liberty in Boston know something of his reputation and they're in between pastors. Their pastor had just retired and he actually recommended John Allen as he was retiring. He said, why don't you ask John Allen to fill in while you do a search for a permanent minister? So a second Baptist church on Thanksgiving Day, or on the Thanksgiving Day sermon, it's traditional among your reform types and your reform Baptist and your Presbyterians and your Puritans. The Thanksgiving Day sermon would be the one day of the year where it was appropriate to speak about the civil government. What's the proper biblical role of the civil government? You probably are gonna talk about Romans 13 or 2 Timothy, you're gonna talk about some passages where they talk about the limits of what the government should do and what your duties are as a citizen or as a subject to obey that government. So to dedicate a sermon to politics was not completely outside the pale. It wasn't beyond the pale here. So John Allen gives us an oration on the beauties of liberty or the essential rights of Americans. Sermons always had long titles delivered at Second Baptist Church in Boston. He mentions the Gaspia Fair seven times. It goes viral, right? He publishes this thing and it goes through seven publications, right? So when we look at the top 400 pre-independence pamphlets, so these are the 400 pamphlets that came out before July 2nd, 1776. Here are your top 12, John Allen's number six. He's in the top 1.5%. So he had to go through seven publications. What I did is I just, you can either multiply these two numbers or add them together. Either way, you get the same result. Here's the number of editions published in British America. Here's the number of cities and towns in British America where editions appeared. So he's got seven publications, went through four cities. That's 28, that ranks him number six. So he's being beaten by people like Tom Payne, John Dickinson, Charles Lee. He's in some pretty good company. Why have I never heard of this guy? Well, this is why we have historians, right? To find out what we missed on the first pass. I don't even know when John Allen died or where. He disappears again. He's a one hit wonder. He comes out of nowhere, wins the World Series, hits the Grand Slam out of the park and disappears. Complete one hit wonder. So you can see Neil and Davis, big publisher in Boston, published the first three editions. And then here's where he got himself into trouble. He expands it to include the rights and liberties of Africans. So he's expanding to look at the rights of African-Americans and of enslaved persons. And that's where he gets himself into trouble. He has to go over to a different publisher. Davis and Neil and Davis won't do it. Goes to a different publisher in Boston with Russell. Then he leaves Boston, comes down near me in New London, Connecticut, and takes the addendum out to get it published again. Then the addendum comes back when he goes to Hartford to Watson. And actually Green's printing studio, you can still see in New London what's left of it. And then ultimately it gets all the way down to Wilmington, Delaware. And then he stops publishing it. What's cool about this is we know that probably three quarters of men, 75% of men, 60% of women in New England were literate at the time. What happens to the 25% of men, 40% of women who can't read? John Allen's law students came back to his office one night and said, guess what's happening in all the pubs around here? And John Adams says, what's going on? He said, they're reading this to the people who can't read. And so you know that it had a much wider readership than what it's printing. See this doesn't tell us how many people are reading it. It's just telling us how much it got printed. So that's most of what I wanted to tell you because it's already 12.55 and I wanted to leave time for questions. And so, yes. You've been to St. John Institute for Health. Yes. Yes.