Historic Philadelphia

Roebuck, had captured a sloop and a pilot boat
in Delaware Bay the previous evening. Four
armed boats of the Pennsylvania Navy started
down the river, with hopes that Captain John
Barry, on the sixteen-gun Continental brig
Lexington recently built in Philadelphia, was
just off the coast. Delaware troops got into a
fire fight with British sailors on shore near
Indian River on April 7, Easter Sunday. The
war was coming closer to Philadelphia.
The Roebuck picked off small American ships
in the bay, while, at sea, Captain Barry’s vessel
captured the British sloop H.M.S. Edward and
brought it in to Egg Harbor, New Jersey. Its officers
were paroled to live in Germantown and its
twenty-one sailors in Philadelphia, reporting
daily to an appointed custodian.
An express, as hard-riding messengers were
called, arrived in the city at 3 p.m. on April 28
to report that the Roebuck had run aground
near the mouth of Brandywine Creek. The
thirteen armed galleys of the Pennsylvania
Navy left Philadelphia immediately, and the
ten-gun provincial warship Montgomery pulled
away from Plumstead’s Wharf at the foot of
Pine Street to head downstream. The Roebuck
avoided engagement. In May, H.M.S. Liverpool,
a twenty-eight-gun frigate, arrived in the river.
Raiding parties from the warships, shooting
cattle for beef, skirmished with American
troops in Jersey. The Pennsylvania armed boats
and the Continental Navy schooner Wasp
battled the Roebuck and Liverpool
inconclusively near Wilmington from 2 p.m.
until dark on May 8. Spectators lined both
shores during the battle.
Congress appointed a committee on June
11 to draft a Declaration of Independence.
Tom Jefferson got busy in his rented rooms at
Jacob Graff’s new brick house at Seventh and
✧
Left: Major Francois Fleury, a French
military engineer, mapped the artillery
action during the siege of Fort Mifflin in
1777, elegantly labeling the fort’s site, Mud
Island, as “Isle de Mude,” and adjoining
Hog Island as “Isle de Hog.”
COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
Below: Fort Mifflin today is a tourist site. Its
walls were rebuilt twenty years after they
were flattened by the British bombardment
of 1777; they enclose eighteenth and
nineteenth century buildings. The fort was a
prison in the Civil War, an anti-aircraft
emplacement in World War II, and was an
active military installation from the
Revolution to the Korean War.
COURTESY OF BARBARA TORODE.
CHAPTER II
37