Sheldon Whitehouse Pokes Fun At Massachusetts' Boston Tea Party By Recounting Tale Of Gaspee Affair

3 months ago

During remarks on the Senate floor, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recounted the story of the Gaspee Affair in celebrate of its anniversary on June 9th.

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Transcript

00:00 The GASB was a revenue cutter of the Royal Navy that was operating in Rhode Island waters,

00:12 annoying and harassing the ship owners and the crews who were engaged in maritime trade.

00:23 And they got so fed up that one day a trading ship called the Hanna was working her way up Narragansett Bay,

00:40 and the GASB came along and instructed the Hanna that it should pull up

00:48 and allow itself to be inspected, boarded, and potentially seized by Her Majesty's government.

00:59 They were doing a lot of that, by the way, and it might have come back to bite them.

01:02 There was a ship called the Fortune, which was owned by a Rhode Islander, was seized, taken up to Boston, sold.

01:12 And at the time, one of the owners was not all that involved in the activities that led to the revolution,

01:23 but he got a little bit motivated when his boat got seized and its cargo seized,

01:28 and all of his goods taken and shipped back to the value ship, back to the king.

01:35 He was Nathaniel Green. He ended up becoming Washington's aide de camp.

01:42 He ended up running the Southern Campaign for George Washington,

01:45 and the British general who was trying to manage the American Revolution wrote back to his wife,

01:52 "That damn Green is more dangerous than Washington."

01:56 So it can be provoking to have your ship seized.

02:01 Anyway, there's the Hannah sailing up the bay. Here comes the Gaspi in hot pursuit.

02:08 The Hannah has a wily captain who knows the waters quite well,

02:12 and sails the Hannah over shallows where a river comes into the bay and leaves a sandy trail along the bottom.

02:21 And so the Hannah shoots over the shallows, and along comes the rather bigger, more lumbering Gaspi

02:29 and it grinds into the sandbar, and it's stuck.

02:35 And the tide is falling, so it's going to be there for a while.

02:40 So up goes the Hannah to Providence, reports on how they tricked the Gaspi into grounding itself on the sandbar,

02:52 and that night, drums are beat on the streets of Providence, refreshments are served,

03:00 and a gang of worthy Rhode Islanders decide to go down and fix the Gaspi for once and for all.

03:08 And six or seven longboats rode down that night under cover of darkness with muffled oars,

03:14 and they approached the Gaspi, they told its captain to surrender or they would board it and sack it.

03:22 Captain Duddingston said he was not going to do that.

03:25 There was an exchange of gunfire, and the captain of the ship, whose actual rank was lieutenant,

03:31 Lieutenant Duddingston, was shot in that exchange.

03:35 He survived his wounds, he was taken ashore by the Rhode Islanders,

03:38 provided medical care, and ended up retiring back to his native Scotland all well.

03:44 But that moment was probably the first blood drawn in the conflict that ultimately became the American Revolution.

03:52 So they did in fact take over the boat, they swarmed up the sides of it, they captured the crew,

03:57 they took them all ashore, and then they went back out and they lit the boat on fire.

04:04 And here's a rendition of what the Gaspi looked like burning, stuck on the sandbar.

04:09 And of course when the fire got to the powder magazine, boom, it went off like a bomb.

04:17 And we're still trying to find pieces of the Gaspi there, but it got blown to such smithereens

04:22 that nobody has yet been able to find anything, despite some fairly diligent efforts.

04:29 And we love the Gaspi in Rhode Island.

04:34 Here's a new license plate commemorating Gaspi days, showing the Gaspi all on fire, getting ready to blow up.

04:44 And here's what's interesting about it.

04:47 I did an interview with the Washington Post, and I'd ask unanimous consent to have that interview appended at the end of my remarks here.

04:55 Without objection.

04:57 And this is from that article.

05:02 Pretty much everybody here, I suspect all of the pages who are here on the floor,

05:07 know exactly what the Boston Tea Party is?

05:11 Massachusetts had seen to it over many, many years that everybody in America knows what the Boston Tea Party was?

05:18 Well, as the story relates, 18 months before colonists dumped tea in Boston Harbor,

05:25 Rhode Islanders attacked and destroyed a British Navy ship off the coast near Providence,

05:32 furious with what they saw as the Crown's overreach.

05:36 18 months before.

05:41 You know, in Rhode Island we sometimes have a little chip on our shoulder about being overlooked by our bigger northern neighbor,

05:50 our northern suburb, some might say.

05:54 But you know, when you actually blow up the damn boat, and that's lost to history,

06:05 but then up in Massachusetts, more than a year later, they push tea bags off the boat into the harbor,

06:11 and they get the credit for the great revolutionary activity?

06:16 I want to come to the floor and do my very best to make that correction to history.

06:23 And one of the things that's nice is that people are starting to write more and more about this.

06:28 And I'll close by referencing the burning of His Majesty's schooner, Gaspi,

06:36 a history of the events surrounding that incident by Stephen Park.

06:43 And then in Nick Bunker's book, An Empire on the Edge, he has an entire chapter inside,

06:52 the dark affair, the Gaspi incident, that describes what was done.

07:00 And our Secretary of State's office put together this presentation on the Gaspi affair,

07:10 and it was titled, "Gaspi, the Spark that Ignited the American Revolution."

07:18 So, I'm here to commend the Rhode Islanders who struck that spark,

07:25 18 months before those Massachusetts worthies drank their share of whatever they needed to do

07:32 to actually get on a boat and push tea bags into the harbor. Pretty brave.

07:37 Nothing against them doing that, but I mean seriously.

07:41 We captured the boat, we shot the captain, and then we blew the damn boat up.

07:46 I think that merits mention in American history. And with that, I yield the floor.

07:52 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Sheldon Whitehouse Pokes Fun At Massachusetts' Boston Tea Party By Recounting Tale Of Gaspee Affair

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