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ChaPtEr six Getting Out CaPtain glovEr While Lieutenants Parry and Liddon were busy with the prize crews preparing the Eagle and the Young Anaconda, which were anchored in the harbor, they saw a dory being rowed out from shore showing a white flag. The man putting his back to the oars was none other than Captain Jeremiah Glover, a person who would become one of the key figures of this saga. Glover owned a small sloop with which he made his living on the sea. He and his wife lived in the village and he would have been just as surprised and alarmed as anyone to wake up finding the British in his harbor. So as dawn broke he made his way down to the waterfront to see if anything had happened to his sloop, which he had tied alongside one of the newly built privateers in the harbor. As Glover arrived, British officers and seamen already occupied the schooner, and they were busy preparing to get underway. This was the vessel Coote refers to as the Eagle. Glover stood there with a small group of his neighbors, observing the spectacle taking place in the harbor. What should he do? What he did, and where that led him is quite an amazing story, all the more so because we have it in his own words: While the enemy were burning and destroying vessels, at and near Pettipauge Point, I was induced by the advice of my neighbors and friends, to take a white flag and go aboard of my small sloop to endeavor to prevail with the commander not to have her burnt. When I came alongside of my sloop which was lashed to the cutter built schooner that was in possession of the enemy, the commander demanded of me what I wanted or wished? I told him that the sloop was my property—that I was a poor man, and that I had no other means of supporting myself and family, but by what I could earn in that vessel; and that I hoped and trusted that he had feelings for the poor and unfortunate, and that he would restore me to my vessel. His answer was “Well, old man, if you behave well, perhaps we shall let you have her. Soon after I was on-board, I was solicited to pilot the schooner down the river. I told them I was no pilot.” The officer, in all likelihood, Lieutenant Liddon, wasn’t going along with it. Captain Glover was obviously a man who made his living with his boat and Getting Out { 73 would have known this river like the back of his hand. The officer insisted that Glover pilot them out. Even if the British already had a traitor, Torpedo Jack for instance, providence had just delivered an experienced Connecticut River captain right to their doorstep. Getting six rowboats up the river was one thing, but getting two large sailing vessels back out was another matter altogether. Still, Glover refused and told them he would rather abandon his vessel and asked that he be allowed to return to shore. The officer had had enough and ordered him to come aboard the schooner where he was taken prisoner.This was just the beginning of Jeremiah Glover’s trulyextraordinary adventure. When it was over, several days later, he went straight to a local magistrate and swore out an affidavit giving a detailed account of his experience and had it published in several papers, just in case anyone wondered what he was doing with the British all that time. This affidavit now provides us with an American witness, a local sea captain on-board with the British during their escape. As historians, we couldn’t ask for more. But can we trust his story? Was he the innocent man he claimed to be? If Glover was telling the truth, we have an American in the river with the British and we can compare his account with Captain Coote’s. Glover could fill in some important gaps without British bias. On the other hand, if Glover turned out to be the traitor, or at least another traitor, his entire account is unreliable—a cover story for his guilty role in the destruction of twenty-seven American ships. He may not have been the one who guided the British up the river, but did he in fact agree to pilot the British down the river in order to save his sloop and...

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