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Bland had been right "LIBERTY and PROPERTY are like those precious Vessels whose soundness is destroyed by the least flaw and whose use is lost by the smallest hole." Virginia was already prepared for intercolonial action. In June 1772 the British ship, Gaspee, ran aground while on customs duty in Narragansett Sound.
It was not in the temper of the English people, and still less like the king, to withdraw offensive acts in the face of such daring resistance. The failure to secure the prosecution of the destroyers of the "Gaspee" caused the British government to distrust American courts as well as American juries.
The disdained farmers showed that the descendants of the men who had fought with beasts and with Indians after the manner of Endicott and Standish had not degenerated in the course of a few generations. Over the Atlantic came news which made the Boston Massacre, the burning of the "Gaspee," and the Boston Tea-party, seem trivial and insignificant events.
Misfortunes like the Boston Massacre, disorders like the burning of the "Gaspee," naturally increased the anti-colonial exasperation of the English King and of ministers like North and Hillsborough. North thought whatever the King wished him to think. Hillsborough still believed that the Americans were only to be listened to when they came with halters around their necks.
Et ab eo pergendo versus orientem per maris oris littorales ejusdem fluvii de Canada ad fluvium, stationem navium, portum, aut littus communiter nomine de Gathepe vel Gaspee notum et appellatum."
He lived with one man-servant in a Georgian homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on the steep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather a cousin of that celebrated privateersman, Captain Whipple, who burnt His Majesty's armed schooner Gaspee in 1772 had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the independence of the Rhode Island Colony.
For two years after the withdrawal of troops from Boston there was a good deal of disturbance in different parts of the country; quarrels between governors and their assemblies were kept up with increasing bitterness; in North Carolina there was an insurrection against the governor which was suppressed only after a bloody battle near the Cape Fear river; in Rhode Island the revenue schooner Gaspee was seized and burned, and when an order came from the ministry requiring the offenders to be sent to England for trial, the chief-justice of Rhode Island, Stephen Hopkins, refused to obey the order.
The bad news of the Boston Massacre was followed to England by the bad news of the business of the "Gaspee." The "Gaspee" was an English warship employed to enforce the Revenue Acts along the Rhode Island coast.
At Rhode Island, his majesty's schooner Gaspee, commanded by Lieutenant Duddingstone, was attacked in the night by 200 armed men in eight boats, who, notwithstanding the defence made by her commander, seized the vessel, when he and several of his people were wounded, and the rebels taking out the crew, set her on fire.
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