Terror in Whitehaven, 1778

Attack on Whitehaven
painting by Col. Charles Waterhouse

In the 1770's the town of Whitehaven was one of England's busiest seaports. Located near the shores of the Irish Sea, it looked out upon the Solway Firth that comprised the westernmost boundary between England and Scotland. Because Whitehaven was near where John Paul Jones was born and raised in the Scottish Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, it was where Jones decided to launch his one-ship invasion of England. Although this raid was strongly opposed by most of his officer corps, especially by First Lieutenant Thomas Simpson, it was sanctioned by a host of American dignitaries, including America's emissary in Paris, Benjamin Franklin.

John Paul Jones monument
in Whitehaven

Just after midnight on April 23, 1778, Jones ordered two ship's boats lowered away from the weather deck of the Continental sloop of war Ranger. Thirty sailors and Marines clambered down into the boats. Jones objectives: to first spike the guns of the English fort protecting the entrance to the harbor and the firth, and then to set fire to the three hundred or so vessels nested together at anchor in the harbor -- most of them either coastal merchantmen or coal transports. If the fires spread to the town, so much the better. Jones had no military objectives. Whitehaven held no strategic importance to him or to anyone else. It was simply a town that Jones had sailed in and out of many times in his boyhood, and it was here that he proposed to strike fear and panic among the citizens of Whitehaven – and by extension, among the entire British nation.

Despite a prolonged row ashore caused by shifting winds and a strong ebb tide, Jones realized his first objective. During the first inklings of dawn, he and his captain of Marines, Lt. Wallingford, entered the lightly garrisoned fort and spiked its cannon, temporarily disabling them. Jones, however, failed to realize his second objective, in part because the lanterns in both boats ran out of fuel sufficient to light a conflagration, and in part because a member of his raiding party, an Irishman, slipped away as dawn approached and ran along a harbor street of Whitehaven shouting out a Paul Revere-style warning. Only a single vessel, the collier Thompson, was set aflame, and the domino effect of one burning mast collapsing onto another mast did not materialize. Meanwhile, a fire alarm was sounded, Whitehaven's fire-fighting equipment was mobilized, and large numbers of townsfolk came running to the quays dressed in nightclothes and brandishing family weapons. Jones was forced to retreat to his two boats and back to Ranger, which he did without incident under the silence of the fort's spiked cannon.

We Americans do not like to think of ourselves as perpetrating any overt act of terrorism at any time in our history. But the raid on Whitehaven was one such act. As stated above, it had no military objective, other than perhaps to draw ships of the Royal Navy away from the Channel in pursuit of Ranger. Its primary purpose was to spread panic among British citizenry and it succeeded in doing just that. Britons were not accustomed to having their country invaded, even by a single ship, and few people living long the coast could rest easily at night knowing that ship was prowling offshore, ready, willing and able to strike again. As Midshipman Richard Cutler responds to Captain Jones in Ranger's after cabin when asked for his opinion of the proposed raid in A Matter of Honor, "It's a bold plan, Captain, because it does not rely on success. American Marines landing on British soil will have its effect, no matter the outcome." As it turned out, he was right.