p3  I.

The Master of the Barbadoes

That Edward Denny should select John Barry to command his newly-purchased schooner was no surprise in Philadelphia shipping circles. Merchants, other than Denny, had looked with approval upon the tall young Irishman. They liked his straightforward manner, his keen mind, his deference without obsequiousness to their more mature judgment. They respected his abilities as a seaman; abilities warmly attested by every skipper with whom he had shipped as mate. Within the half-dozen years the port had known him, he had acquired an enviable reputation and numerous friends. Numbered among these latter were some of the leading shipowners and shippers, and practically the entire fraternity of masters and mates, who sailed the seas in vessels of Philadelphia register.

Seafaring men generally were agreed that John Barry was a lad with a future. Yet it remained for the aged merchant, Denny, making initial venture as a shipowner, to give him first chance to shift his gear from a mate's cubby-hole to a master's cabin. Other owners, while in accord upon Barry's qualifications, were willing someone else should make the experiment and take the risk. Perhaps, too, the inherent prejudice against those of the Catholic Faith was a factor. Religious intolerance in Pennsylvania was less pronounced, however, than in other colonies. Throughout his later career Barry suffered at no time from it, which would imply a personality power­ful enough to overcome the bigotry of the age.

Whatever Denny's creed or whatever prompted his decision, we are never likely to know, for the old merchant moves, a shadowy and elusive figure, through this stage of John Barry's life. From his correspondents in Great Britain and the British West Indies, he had satisfied himself, no doubt, that there were  p4 no earlier blemishes to offset Barry's unimpeachable conduct in Philadelphia between 1760 and 1766. Perhaps, in making such inquiries, the merchant learned the young man's antecedents. If so, it is a pity the information was not preserved. Had it been, much which is now obscure and contradictory could be made clear. The fact remains, however, that, resultant from his knowledge, Denny entrusted his only vessel to the twenty‑one-year‑old Irishman in the fall of the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and sixty‑six, and of the sixth of the reign of King George III.

* * *

In 1745 — chiefly famous in the British Isles as the year of the Young Pretender — an humble and respectable couple named Barry, in County Wexford, Ireland, rejoiced in the birth of a son, who was christened John. The father was a farmer, tilling a few acres held precariously by lease, there being a strict law against Catholic owner­ship of property; the mother, an attractive young woman, whose maiden name had been Kelly. As she viewed her lusty-lunged offspring, perhaps she exulted a bit over her sister Margaret. They had been brought to bed at about the same time, but Margaret had presented her husband, Mark Keefe, with a daughter.

Aside from natural pride in a son there was little over which the Barrys could rejoice. Ireland had long fallen on evil days and no family, in County Wexford or elsewhere on the Emerald Isle, had yet recovered entirely from the dread famine of 1738. It was a country with an unhappy past and a helpless present — a prostrate land ground beneath English monopolists and a penal code that permitted a Roman Catholic barely the means to eke out a miserable existence.

Into such circumstances was born not only John, but a whole brood of Barrys. The exact number of children of this prolific pair is not known. There were Patrick, Thomas, Jane, Margaret, Eleanor and, maybe, others. Nor were the Barry parents more fecund than their neighbors. History records that the hapless Irish peasants, unable to rise above a starvation level, "multiplied on their potato plots with perfect recklessness."

Tradition has it that John Barry was born at Ballysampson, a tiny hamlet in Tacumshin Parish in the extreme southern part  p5 of County Wexford. If so, the family moved shortly afterwards into Rosslare Parish, lying south and east of Wexford harbor. In Rosslare young Barry spent his childhood days, and in Rosslare Churchyard repose the remains of those members of his family who ended their lives in Ireland.

Of Barry's boyhood days in Rosslare, we have no record. We are told that at an early age "he manifested a strong inclination to follow the sea." A likely desire that, for any youngster who could lie in the sand along the shore and watch the coasters drifting in a calm day in South Bay, or could journey with his parents to Wexford and stare round-eyed at the tall-masted ships in the land-locked harbor. That his father should encourage his ambition is quite likely. The elder Barry knew Ireland offered no opportunities. In this respect, he was like thousands of other Catholic sires, who had God‑sped their sons to more favored lands. A half million Irish lads are said to have emigrated in the first half of the Eighteenth Century, most of them to seek their fortunes in foreign armies. To stay at home meant privation and starvation on a tiny leasehold at an exorbitant rental, or risking the halter in wool smuggling — the only other means of livelihood.

Somehow, through the efforts of his father and his uncle, Nicholas Barry, at Wexford, young John shipped, at about the age of ten, as cabin boy on a merchantman, carrying with him hatred of the oppressors and recollections of the misery and want of his childhood years, which stayed with him through his life. As a result of these painful memories, his purse was ever open to the pleas of poverty-stricken kindred from the island of his birth. His charity, in fact, extended to many whose plaintive appeals for alms presented no greater claim to recognition than an Irish postmark.

Ambition drove this Irish lad from the day he boarded the merchantman in Wexford harbor. In his youthful dreams, he was destined to become a shipmaster, and this aspiration spurred him ever forward. In the years that ensued came much disillusionment, plenty of hard knocks, tough years, indeed, from cabin boy to ordinary, from ordinary to able seaman, and from an A B to a mate's rating. Always, despite discouragements, he persisted. To hand, reef and steer were not enough. These were mere stepping-stones to a sound, practical, self-acquired education;  p6 to the study and comprehension of navigation, to a vast familiarity with every type of merchant vessel afloat, from tiny sloop to lumbering Indiamen.

Occasionally, in his early years at sea, there were brief visits to Rosslare — a few hours snatched with his family when his ship was docked at Wexford. Patrick had followed his example, and entered the merchant marine, but the others were at home to greet him and remind him painfully that conditions in Ireland continued unchanged. Then his visits ended abruptly, for in 1760, having shipped on a westward-bound merchantman, he sailed up the Delaware to Philadelphia and found the land of his desire.

Of the next half-dozen years, spent chiefly in the West-India trade, we have but scant information. It was during this period he obtained his mate's rating and, by diligent application to his profession, began to attract the interest of Philadelphia shippers and shipowners. Once we catch a glimpse of him through the medium of a letter penned in the summer of 1764 by a Basseterre merchant and sent by "this opportunity of Mr Barry going to Dominique," to a correspondent in the latter island. Giving an insight into the trust imposed in the bearer, the writer requests "you'l send the Amount of my Bill on Dublin after deducting my note to you for 10 Jos by him, either in Cash or a Bill. . . . Please send my Sword by Mr Barry." Aside from this incident, there is an Apocryphal story of Barry serving as mate on the vessel that brought Charles Carroll of Carrollton from London to Maryland, also in 1764.

Thus we come finally to the time when he attained his majority and the command of a ship in the fall of 1766. He has left no record of his elation when Edward Denny gave him the coveted opportunity to be a shipmaster. In the light of his subsequent life, however, knowing how to his death bed and even afterwards, through his will, he supported his unfortunate kinfolk in Ireland, we can surmise his feelings. In supposition, based on what he did later, Barry's thoughts must have turned at once to his home.

What pride his parents could take now in his advancement, and, with a master's pay, he could do better by them. They were getting along in years and their path was no rosy one. He would have to write to Patrick, too, and tell of his good fortune.  p7 It had been long since their ways had crossed, but Patrick was a broth of a brother and would get his ship in time. Too bad that Thomas had no bent for the sea. Even so, he might encourage the lad to come to America where his talents would fit well in some merchant's counting-house.

Jane was married, he had heard, and had gone with her husband to the Carolinas, so the old folks and his two younger sisters were the ones to be pitied and provided for. No doubt both girls would be marrying ere long. Margaret had written shyly about an Irish lad named Howlin, and Eleanor was in love, he knew, with Thomas Hayes, whom he remembered as a boyhood companion. Both were farmer lads, good steady young men, who would provide within the narrow opportunities Old Erin afforded in those benighted days. Perhaps the Church bells at Rosslare already had rung out his sisters' nuptials. Letters traveled so slowly and he was not always prompt in answering. Anyway, as long as he could earn a livelihood from the sea, the parents who bore him should never want.

* * *

John Barry and Edward Denny registered the new schooner at the Custom House on September 29, 1766. She was a plantation-built craft, having been launched at Liverpool, Nova Scotia, the previous winter, and first registered at Halifax in the same province, on January 24. She had been called the Pitt, and, as the Pitt, had arrived in the port of Philadelphia earlier in September. The new owner and his young master had a better designation for her, as the register shows. Because she was intended solely for the Barbadoes trade, they endowed her with the name of the island of her destination, and described her as "a Square Stern'd Vessel of the Burthen of 60 Tons or thereabouts."

Sixty tons, in the light of modern sailing vessels, seems but an insignificant size. Actually, for the colonial era, the Barbadoes was an unusually large schooner. In the five years, from 1762 to 1766, of the one hundred odd schooners registered at Philadelphia, only three exceeded sixty tons and two others equaled that figure. The average of all schooners in the five years was but twenty-five tons. Hence, John Barry had no occasion to apologize for the size of his first command.

 p8  From the plans of another schooner of the same period and approximately the same burden, we can visualize the Barbadoes. Her deck length was •about fifty-five feet; her breadth •seventeen; her depth in hold, •about eight. Aft in the cabin, where John Barry, with his •six feet and one inch of height, lived, ate and studied his navigation, the head room was •about five and one‑half feet with plenty of deck beams on which to bump his pate. Just forward of his "great cabin," the man slept in a cubby barren of all comfort. In the bows, in a combination galley and forecastle •some ten feet long, lived the five seamen, bodies, bunks and gear crammed into a space more than half-filled with the heels of the foremast and bowsprit and the open brick fireplace where all cooking was done. A black, unlighted cavern, this forecastle, always smoky and foul with odor of bilge water, wet clothes, rancid fat and unwashed bodies.

Aloft towered stout spars — a mainmast •some fifty odd feet above the deck, and a slightly shorter foremast — on which were spread broad sheets of sail cloth. Altogether a tidy craft, the Barbadoes, with a hold of surprising capacity for the cargoes she would carry.

These cargoes need some words of explanation. Through the years, John Barry had learned that escape from County Wexford had not meant freedom from British monopolists. The same forces which were throttling Ireland in the interest of English trade and manufacture were power­ful in the American provinces. Their tactics so far had been less brutal than in the unfortunate land of his birth, and he had found this newer land more virile in its resistance to any form of oppression, as witness the last turbulent eighteen months of opposition to the Stamp Tax. But if the thirteen colonies had been victors over Parliament for the moment on the matter of taxation, they had not succeeded in lessening the British control of American trade and restrictions upon colonial home manufacture. Dominating commerce was the "Act of 6th George 3d," prohibiting exports to other than England or English possessions, and requiring bond, of double the value of the cargo, that no goods landed in the British West Indies should find their way to any place in Europe except Great Britain.

Hence, for the schooner Barbadoes, the cargo was automatically  p9 limited to the natural products of Pennsylvania and New Jersey — grain, lumber, meat and some pig and bar iron. Furthermore, the cockets, which today we call manifests, came under careful scrutiny of the Customs' officers to make sure there was no surreptitious exportation of prohibited manufactures. How limited were the major items of export is demonstrated by the official account of goods shipped from Philadelphia for the year preceding Barry's advent as a shipmaster. Grains — wheat, flour, bread, Indian corn, tobacco and flax seed — totalled 32,000 tons, or 65 per cent of all goods exported. Lumber — boards and scantlings, staves, headings, shingles and hoops — added another 10,000 tons, or twenty per cent. New vessels, built for non‑colonial owners, ran 5,400 tons, or about ten per cent. Bar and pig iron amounted to 1,700 tons, or three per cent, and meat and meat products — beef, pork, lard, butter, soap and candles — accounted for 660 tons, or one and one‑half per cent. The remaining half per cent represented a few odds and ends — beer, starch, beeswax, furs and skins.

One of Barry's cockets gives a good example of what was stored in the hold of the schooner during the first few days of October, 1766. It lists 4,200 staves, 2313 headings, 4,850 shingles, eighty bundles of hoops, twenty-four chairs and twenty-five bars of iron. The cargo was valued at fifty pounds "good and lawful money of Great Britain," and it was to be landed at Barbadoes and no place else. Both Barry and Denny guaranteed delivery as prescribed with a hundred pound surety and their names signed to a document which held them "firmly bound unto our Sovereign Lord George the Third, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France and Ireland, King Defender of the Faith, and so forth."

What with delays in outfitting the vessel, shipping hands and taking on cargo, it was about October 20 when the Barbadoes cleared from Philadelphia. Until she sailed, Barry had been able to mingle at least as an equal with the famous shipmasters of the port. In those three weeks he began the close acquaintance­ships, which, as the years rolled along, made him one of the best known and best liked skippers in the West India trade. That, however, lay in the future.

For the present, as the Barbadoes dropped down the Delaware, John Barry was more concerned in meriting the trust  p10 imposed in him by Edward Denny by making an expeditious passage to his destination. We can picture him beside the pilot at the quarter-deck rail, as the schooner negotiated the channel. He was tall and well-knit of frame. Grayish brown eyes, with a hint of humor and understanding in their depths, stared out steadily beneath dark eyebrows, and, if one looked closer, a flesh-colored mole was visible at the point where the right eyebrow met the upper curve of the nose. Features were clear cut and skin dark from a life of exposure to salt wind and salt sea. He wore his own black hair, cut long in the fashion of the day, and his voice was quick and decisive. From the beginning of his career as a master, Barry was a man of prompt decision, with an air about him which inspired immediate confidence in the hearts of his subordinates.

And so, discharging the pilot at Cape May, the newest skipper from the port of Philadelphia took the Barbadoes to sea.

* * *

More than a score of masters from Philadelphia were then engaged in the Barbadoes trade. Some, like Barry, plied back and forth with considerable regularity. Others made the island a point of call on West India voyages embra­cing several ports. Given favorable winds and fair weather, it took about three weeks each way, the length of the round trip being dependent upon the time required at Bridgetown, the island's principal harbor, to discharge cargo and receive rum, molasses and sugar in return. The course was generally east south east from the Delaware capes to the vicinity of Bermuda and then south by east. Examine a map and you will note that Barbadoes is east of the Windward Islands — the eastward outpost, as it were, of the broad arc of the Lesser Antilles, which curves from Puerto Rico to the South American coast. Sailing vessels rounded the island to windward and entered Carlisle bay on the south coast to drop anchor in Bridgetown harbor.

Of John Barry's first voyage to Barbadoes we have no details. Sometime in November he arrived there. Two other vessels, which had cleared Philadelphia shortly before him, were in the harbor — the brigs Hannah, Henry Stiles, master, and Patty, Peter Long, master. We can assume that, landing at the Stepping Stones wharf, Barry first sought out Henry Talkington,  p11 the island merchant to whom he was consigned. With Talkington he arranged for a return cargo, but for one of the Carolinas, not for Philadelphia. Denny and he had agreed upon that before he sailed. The aged Philadelphia merchant did not wish to imperil his new schooner in the hazards of a winter rounding of Cape Hatteras.

Before he could clear, however, Barry and his hands, along with Stiles, Long and masters and crews from other ports had an opportunity to render real service to the inhabitants of Bridgetown. Two evenings after Christmas of 1766, fire broke out in a store to the windward side of the little city. Favored by a strong breeze, it swept through the frame structures — stores, warehouses, lumber yards and homes. Despite a disastrous conflagration the preceding May, Bridgetown had not equipped itself with adequate fire-fighting machines. But for the crew of the vessels in port, the flames would have destroyed the entire city. Working in well-organized bands, under their various masters, the seamen did yeoman duty. "To the hardy Sailors the Preservation of many houses is owing, who, by their Industry and Activity, did considerable Service in the late Fire," was the tribute paid them. But more than fifty buildings were burned, so that "words faintly convey an idea of the distresses of the inhabitants."

After that Barry sailed for the Carolinas, returned to Barbadoes in the spring with naval stores — pitch, tar, and turpentine — and cleared finally for home in June, 1767. About July 10 he brought the Barbadoes up the Delaware with her cargo of rum, sugar and molasses. The editor of the Pennsylvania Gazette sought him out for ship nurse — word of any vessels spoken during his voyage. As Barry's first appearance in the news columns, the editor's paragraph is of interest.

 p12  By such fragments in those days were owners, shippers and wives given meagre advice of the safety of the men "who went down to the sea in shape."

* * *

Romance entered John Barry's life in the mid‑summer of 1767. Between July 20 and about August 11, when he cleared again for Barbadoes, the tall Irishman pledged his troth to a young damsel from the Emerald Isle. Her name was Mary Clary, age twenty‑two, and that is all we know about her. How he met her; where he met her; these are matters concealed behind the curtain of intervening years. All that appears is a name on a marriage license and this slender thread yields no clues as to the wooing or the mating. That the nuptials were arranged before he sailed in August is apparent only from the fact that they were married but a few days after he returned from his second voyage to Barbadoes. To reach his bride-to‑be, Barry, on October 15, 1767, sailed success­fully through forty-eight hours of the worst storm reported in years on the north Atlantic coast. By the Custom House return, the schooner came into port about October 26. By the register of the Provincial Secretary's office, John and Mary obtained their license to wed on October 31.

In the South Ward of the city of Philadelphia, where Barry had provided suitable accommodations, the young couple began a brief period of domestic felicity. Less than a month and the bridegroom was off on his third voyage, departing November 28 with the usual cargo for Barbadoes. From then on Mary Barry learned that the lot of a seaman's wife consisted of sad farewells, long and worrisome separations and ecstatic reunions. Barry was absent on his third voyage for more than five months, word coming to her in the interval of his safe arrival at Bridgetown on January 23, 1768. He returned in May.

By Custom House entries, we can trace him as he plied back and forth for Edward Denny in the little schooner. The young skipper was operating upon a schedule timed almost to the requirements of present day navigation. He cleared Philadelphia on May 30; entered inward on August 18; cleared again on August 25, and returned about October 31. Fifteen days later and he was again off to sea, arriving at Barbadoes late in December,  p13 having accomplished the remarkable accomplishment of entering that port from Philadelphia four times in a single year — January, June, September and December.

During his absence in the winter of 1768‑69, Barry was elected a member of the Charitable Captains of Ships Club. Formed in 1765, it embraced all the leading shipmasters of the port of Philadelphia. In 1770, the organization officially incorporated as the Society for the Relief of the Poor, Aged and Infirm Masters of Ships, and their Widows and Children. As such it exists today. To be invited into this select group was an honor the young master was glad to accept, and his interest in its benevolent work never waned thereafter.

Meanwhile he had been building up an ever broader circle of close friends among the shipmasters of the port. Numbered among them were many who would play important roles in the great struggle for independence, and some with whom his own fortune would be cast in the years to come. There were, for example, among his companions, five future captains in the Continental navy — Lambert Wickes, Gustavus Conyngham, Thomas Albertson, Thomas Read and John Green — and two who would have considerable to do with manning and equipping that navy — John Nixon and Nathaniel Falconer. Among the others were men who would become famous as captains of privateers or letters of marque — Thomas Truxtun, Stephen Decatur, George Geddes and George Ord — and not a few who would be branded as notorious Tories.

In 1769, however, these seafaring folk dreamed not at all of the titanic struggle which still lay a half-dozen years ahead. They were engrossed with ships and trade and all the gossip of the ports from Halifax to Trinidad, with, perhaps, some political discussions of the law the English Parliament had passed in 1767, providing for taxes on such imports into America as glass, paper and tea. Sea lawyers among them predicted that no such law could ever be enforced, and Barry, no doubt, agreed with them. The spirit of the colonies had entered his soul, and childhood experiences had fitted him admirably to be a rebel against Parliamentary oppression. When, in 1770, all duties were abolished except on tea, the predictions seemed to be verified, and he joined in the general rejoi­cing.

* * *

 p14  Through 1769 and 1770, John Barry and his schooner continued in the Barbadoes trade. To Mary Barry it was almost "hello, my dear, good bye." Their home in the South Ward never housed her husband for longer than a month at a time. Around May 9, 1769, he completed his sixth voyage, and, before the end of the month, he was away. Summer voyages were seldom as long as in other seasons, and, sure enough, less than a week after she read, in the Pennsylvania Gazette of August 17, that he had arrived at Barbadoes, he was back again. "And yesterday," recorded the Pennsylvania Chronicle on August 21, "arrived the schooner Barbadoes, Barry, from Barbadoes." When he sailed, two weeks later, he left her with the knowledge of a lonesome winter ahead. Denny again wanted him to avoid passing Hatteras in December and directed a short voyage from Barbadoes to the Carolinas. She could not expect to see him again until June, nor did she, although there was satisfaction in learning, during February, that "Captain Yarborough, arrived at New York from Newbern, on the 10th of January, off Ocracoke bar, spoke the Schooner Barbadoes Captain Barry, from Barbadoes, bound to North Carolina."

One more trip that summer, clearing Philadelphia about July 15 and returning around September 22, and John Barry's career on the Barbadoes neared an end. Just what happened we do not know. Aged Edward Denny disappears from the record as a Philadelphia merchant and shipowner. Maybe he retired; maybe he went to Carolina; maybe, to Barbadoes; maybe, home to Great Britain. For Barry there remained one more voyage in the schooner — to deliver her to Barbadoes. A partial log of this final voyage is preserved, the earliest record of Barry's life in his own handwriting. This journal is barren of exciting experiences, save for some stormy weather enroute. Yet it has some choice vernacular and fancy spelling, which makes the effort to puzzle the faded pages well worthwhile.

The Barbadoes cleared Philadelphia on October 11, 1770, and Barry's entries begin twelve days later, when not far northwest of Bermuda.

"Strong Gales and Cloudy wr," was his first remark on October 23. "At 9 A.M. Close Reeft fore top Sail at 10 A.M. Duble Reeft fore sail & M. S. [mainsail], and Took the Bonnet of[f] the Jib." The weather continued rough and, at two o'clock  p15 the next morning, she "pitched her Bowsprit in and Carreyed away the flying Jib Boom and washed away Some of the Jib." After that the gale moderated and, on October 25, he mentions mending the flying jib and fixing a new jib boom. At noon he inscribed in the log book:

And, twenty-four hours later, with a note of surprise, added:

Dark cloudy weather, "Attended with abundance of Rain," ushered in October 27, and he noted the next day so large a sea that, by four o'clock in the afternoon, he "handed All Sails But the fore Sail Duble Reeft it and sitt it Shipt Much Water." It was too overcast for observations, but that troubled John Barry not in the least. He was a master-hand at dead reckoning. That night the storm lifted.

Remarks thereafter are brief. On October 29, he "saw a Sloop Standing to the Eastward as well as from the North ward," a remarkable accomplishment, indeed, until we realize he was talking about two sloops. Next day, "Saw a Schooner Standing to the Southward — Employd Drawing & Knoting Yarn — All Sails Sitt." October 31 he discovered the fore topmast sprung, so "Made a New fid hole in it and Reeft it. All sails Sitt. At Midnight saw a Schooner Standg to y Northd." All sails were "Sitt" on November 1, and, again, on November 2, when he "Spoke a Sloop from Rhoad Isld Bound to Dominica."

Nothing of moment, aside from weather conditions which were generally good, was entered thereafter. On November 9, when but a few days out of Bridgetown, he noted the "People Employd Scraping the Quarter Deck." Evidently he desired everything to be shipshape when he relinquished command. Next day the journal ended, and, on November 11, Barry sailed into Carlisle Bay to deliver the Barbadoes to new owners and conclude a full four years as her master.

In his first command he had made nine and one‑half round trips between Philadelphia and the island, and two side voyages from Barbadoes to the Carolinas and return, with nary a serious mishap of any sort — a record any shipmaster might point to with pride.

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