Redefining Freedom Center

He carried Benjamin Franklin safely across a hostile ocean to France, then turned his little warship loose on the British in their own home waters, becoming one of the first Americans ever to bring the war to Britain's doorstep. His name was Lambert Wickes, and almost no one remembers the man who made so much of it possible, or how he died. Wickes was a Maryland sea captain, a skilled and daring mariner who took a commission in the brand-new Continental Navy and command of the sloop-of-war Reprisal. In the autumn of 1776 he was handed one of the most important cargoes of the Revolution: Benjamin Franklin himself, bound for France on the mission to win the French alliance. Getting Franklin there alive, across an Atlantic prowled by the Royal Navy, was no small thing, because capture meant the loss of America's greatest diplomat and the hanging of a signer of the Declaration. Wickes got him there. Along the way, just to make a point, he snapped up two British ships. The Reprisal became the first vessel of the American navy ever to reach European waters. But Wickes was not content to be a ferry. Once in France, he did something audacious that no American had really done before: he took the war to Britain's own coastline. Sailing out of French ports, Wickes cruised the English Channel, the Irish Sea, and the waters around Britain and Ireland, hunting British merchant shipping right in the enemy's backyard. He captured ship after ship. At one point he led a small squadron on a bold cruise clear around Ireland, and between his voyages he and his fellow captains seized more than twenty vessels and threw British commerce into a panic. The effect was far bigger than the number of prizes. British merchants were stunned that American raiders were operating in their home waters. Insurance rates for British shipping shot up. There was outrage in London that the rebels could strike so close to home. And it created a delicate diplomatic storm, because France was not yet openly at war and had to pretend it was not sheltering these American raiders in its ports, even as Franklin quietly used the chaos Wickes created to pressure France toward the alliance. Wickes was, in effect, doing the military side of Franklin's diplomacy, proving that America could hurt Britain anywhere. His end was tragic. In the autumn of 1777, with the diplomatic heat too high to keep raiding from France, Wickes was ordered to bring the Reprisal home. On the return voyage, off the banks of Newfoundland, the ship was caught in a violent storm and went down. Lambert Wickes drowned with nearly his entire crew, only a single man, the cook, was said to have survived. He was lost at sea, far from home, one more brave man the war simply swallowed. Benjamin Franklin, who owed his own safe arrival in France to Wickes, mourned him as a gallant officer and a very worthy man. Remember Lambert Wickes. He delivered the diplomat who would win the alliance, then sailed into the heart of enemy waters to show the world that America could fight anywhere, and in the end he gave his life to the cold Atlantic in the service of the cause. The famous names reached France and changed history. Wickes is the forgotten captain who got one of them there, and paid the price.