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4 The Sons of Neptune John Blatchford told a fantastic story. He had signed aboard the Continental ship Hancock as a fifteen-year-old cabin boy in June 1777. He returned to his home on Cape Ann as a grown man sometime after the Treaty of Paris of 1783. In between he had served under six flags and had traveled half way around the world. During the American Revolution Blatchford paid a heavy price for his fighting for the revolutionary cause, sacrificing his freedom for years at a time. He also learned an important lesson: as a poor sailor buffeted about by capricious winds, sometimes it was best to accept one’s fate, adjust one’s loyalty, and work simply to survive. This was not a lesson Blatchford learned easily. The Hancock turned out to be an unlucky ship. Despite sleek lines and great speed, she was captured off Nova Scotia on July 8, 1777. The British took the crew to Halifax as prisoners. At the time the British treated the American captives as pirates and traitors. Blatchford failed in an effort at escape, and then, like many young sailors taken by the British, he was put aboard one of His Majesty’s ships. Blatchford bristled in his berth, repeatedly attempting to run away. Although his motive remains unclear—he could have been an ardent young patriot, or he could just have rejected the severity of British service—he landed in a Halifax jail charged with murdering a soldier. Sent to England for trial, Blatchford was somehow acquitted.1 His freedom still eluded him. Along with more than eighty other Americans he was shipped on a vessel bound for the East Indies. By this time Blatchford had begun to learn the importance of survival. When the captain of the ship told him that if he behaved well and did his duty as a sailor, he would receive “as good usage as any one on board,” Blatchford felt encouraged. He admitted that “I now found my destiny was fixed— that whatever I could do, would not in the least alter my situation, and therefore was determined to do the best I could, and make myself contented 98 • REVOLUTION as my unfortunate situation would admit.”2 He arrived in Sumatra in June 1780 only to find that he was condemned to serve as a soldier for five years. He sought in vain to continue to work as a sailor. Again, we cannot be sure of his motivation. Perhaps he believed that as a sailor he at least had some chance of escape when the vessel returned to Europe. Perhaps the thought of being stationed in Sumatra for five years was too much to bear for this now experienced seaman. Regardless, he and two other young New Englanders embarked on a dangerous course of resistance. Bolstering each other’s spirits, the three men resolved to refuse to learn soldiering. The drill sergeant beat them daily, and finally they were put on short rations and were made to work in the “pepper gardens” under arduous conditions in the blistering heat all day. The three men then attempted an escape, killing a sepoy—a native guard— during their recapture. All three were sentenced to death. The British executed only the oldest boy, giving Blatchford and the other boy eight hundred lashes each. Just as the two were completing their convalescence in the hospital they again sought to escape. This time they succeeded and wandered the wilderness for more than a month, at which point Blatchford’s companion died. Blatchford continued for several more weeks, living off the country, in a state of near delirium. He even confronted a tiger at one point. Finally, he stumbled across a half-naked native girl, who he somehow persuaded to bring him to a nearby Dutch outpost. The odyssey, however, was far from over. The Dutch took him to Sumatra ’s capital, Batavia. From there he signed aboard a Spanish ship heading for Spain. Near the Cape of Good Hope they ran into British cruisers.The Spanish ship fought the British off, but the damaged vessel was compelled to stop in Brazil.There the ship was condemned and Blatchford signed aboard a Portuguese vessel. He got to St. Helena, where he was stranded. If once he agreed to be a British sailor and not a soldier, now he knew he could not afford such scruples. He willingly served in the British garrison of this mid-Atlantic island. There...

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