The Page 99 Test: Eric Jay Dolin's "Rebels at Sea"

Friday, June 3, 2022

Eric Jay Dolin's "Rebels at Sea"

Eric Jay Dolin is the author of Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to the new book and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rebels at Sea lands the reader right smack in the middle of a very large section--in fact, an entire chapter-- that describes how Benjamin Franklin, as part of a diplomatic mission that included Silas Deane and Arthur Lee, used American privateers as a means of getting France to form an alliance with the United States against Great Britain. The basic idea was that by successfully encouraging France to both clandestinely and, sometimes rather openly, to allow American privateers to use and launch from French ports on the continent and in the Caribbean, Franklin and his peers ramped up the historic animosity between the two ancient European rivals to a fever pitch.

The critical turning point in the Revolution was the defeat of British general John Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga, but privateering, while not causing a sharp turn in American fortunes on its own, helped create the situation in which a great American victory could prove decisive in bringing France into the conflict. With respect to American privateering in the Caribbean, historian Alan G. Jamieson presents a persuasive argument. The activities of those privateers “were not a major cause of the war between Britain and France in 1778, but it is clear that they played a part in sharpening the enmity between the two nations, as well as striking at the British merchant community in an area where it was particularly sensitive, the West India trade.”

A similar case can be made for the importance of American privateering out of France. Taken as a whole, America’s privateering success was, as historian Sam Willis has written, “part of a broader narrative of American successes in 1776 and 1777. Together, [all of these successes] demonstrated on an international stage that the Americans were committed to their revolution and that the British were vulnerable, and they heightened the tension between Britain and her traditional European enemies. In short, they created the opportunity for foreign intervention.”

Unfortunately, the text on page 99 only hints at this larger and most fascinating story, by talking about the subterfuges France used to allow American privateers to dispose of their prizes in French ports even though that violated treaties France had with Great Britain, and, incidentally, made the British furious. Here is that text:
That led to some creative solutions, including privateers selling their prizes far away from French ports to Frenchmen who, in turn, brought the prizes in as their own vessels. Other times, privateers would remain offshore, where they would disguise their prize as something other than a British merchantman. A skeleton crew would then sail the prize into Dunkirk (Dunkerque) or other French ports where it would be sold, whereupon the crew would return to its privateer, flush with cash. American privateers also made liberal use of the “distress” clause in the treaty, claiming that their prizes were leaking, for instance, allowing the French to let them in. Once in port, the prize could quickly and quietly be sold. As one nineteenth- century historian observed, “Distress, of course, became a chronic condition of the American privateers in European waters.”
So, I think page 99 would give the reader a poor idea of the entire book. Sorry, Ford Madox Ford, in this case, your observation fails to be of any value in capturing the "quality of the whole."