USS Providence (1775)
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| History | |
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| Name: |
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| Builder: | John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island |
| Cost: | $1250 |
| Launched: | 1775 |
| Acquired: | By Rhode Island, 15 June 1775 |
| Commissioned: | Into Continental Navy, 3 December 1775 |
| Fate: | Destroyed by her crew, 14 August 1779 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type: | Sloop |
| Length: | ~65 feet |
| Beam: | 20 feet |
| Sail plan: | jib, flying jib, staysail, square sail, and fore-and-aft mainsail |
| Complement: | 6 officers, 22 seamen, 26 Marines |
| Armament: | 12 × 4-pounder guns and 14 × railside swivel guns |
| Service record | |
| Commanders: |
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| Operations: | |
USS Providence was a sloop in the Continental Navy, originally chartered by the Rhode Island General Assembly as Katy. The ship took part in a number of campaigns during the first half of The American Revolutionary War before being destroyed by her own crew in 1779 to prevent her falling into the hands of the British after the failed Penobscot Expedition.
From early 1775, British men-of-war searched Rhode Island shipping, especially the frigate Rose, annoying the colony's merchants who had become wealthy through smuggling. On 13 June, Deputy Governor Nicholas Cooke wrote the frigate's Captain James Wallace demanding restoration of several ships which Rose had captured. Two days later, the Rhode Island General Assembly ordered the committee of safety to fit out two ships to defend the colony's shipping, and appointed a committee of three to obtain the vessels. That day, the committee chartered the sloop Katy from John Brown of Providence and the sloop Washington at the same time. The General Assembly appointed Abraham Whipple as commander of Katy, the larger ship, and made him commodore of the tiny fleet. (Whipple had won fame in the burning of British armed schooner Gaspee in 1772.) Before sunset that day, Whipple captured a tender to HMS Rose. Katy cruised in Narragansett Bay through the summer protecting coastal shipping.
Gunpowder was an essential commodity, scarce in the Continental Army throughout the Revolutionary War and desperately low during the first year of the struggle for independence. Late in the summer of 1775, the shortage in Washington's army besieging Boston became so severe that he was unable to use his artillery, and his riflemen would have been unable to repel an attack had the British taken the offensive.
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Wikipedia