Denis Fahey remembers the son of a Dubliner who led the first naval battle between the American colonists and the British navy on June 12, 1775.
In June 1775, Machias, a recently established township on the river of that name in the south-eastern corner of Maine, then part of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, had a population of 80 families and 100 single men, all good Protestants according to the terms of its charter.
They made a living mainly by felling and processing the pine trees that grew in abundance in the locality. Several times yearly, a commercial agent Ichabod Jones transported the lumber by boat to Boston and returned with supplies purchased on their behalf.
One of the more prominent residents was Maurice O’Brien, the owner of the principal sawmill, the Dublin, as he named it, and reputed to be an ardent dissenter, a Baptist and a sturdy patriot.
O’Brien was born in Dublin in 1715 and emigrated to America after getting into unspecified difficulties with the authorities. He claimed lineal descent from Brian Boru and always carried a ‘portrait’ of the Irish king. He and his wife Mary had six sons and three daughters.
On April 19th, the battles of Lexington and Concord Bridge marked the opening of the American Revolutionary War and, according to a story circulating in the 1830s, the residents erected a Liberty Pole, a tall pine, shorn of its limbs and its foliage, to demonstrate their solidarity with their fellow colonists.
True or not, the isolated community were almost all supporters of the Provincial Congress, the de facto, if illegal, government of most of the colony.
On the morning of June 2nd, when Jones arrived with two boats laden with flour and grain, they noticed that he was accompanied by an armed schooner, the Margaretta. Its purpose was clear. The authorities had anticipated that the residents might have to be coerced to provide timber to build barracks for the army under siege in Boston. Any doubt would have been extinguished by the sight of the Liberty pole from the bridge of the ship.
Initially, the residents agreed to load the boats with lumber once their supplies were landed but at a meeting on Sunday morning, June 11th, the men of the area decided to seize the warship while the crew were attending the afternoon service in the church.
A boarding party, including O’Brien’s sons, Jeremiah and his five brothers, was then selected and armed with muskets and pitchforks but before they reached the ship the pastor’s servant who was looking out of the church window saw them and raised the alarm. The crew rushed to the ship and took it down the river.
On Monday, the men seized one of the supply boats, the Unity, and sailed it towards the Margaretta which was now in Macias Bay. O’Brien, who had been selected as their leader, called on James Moore the commander to surrender to America.
Continue reading in this week’s Ireland’s Own
