What happened
The plan was good and it was specific. On the afternoon of 1 March the squadron anchored in 12 fathoms off the southwest side of the island. The next day the Marines were issued muskets, ammunition, and broadswords, then moved out of their own ships into two captured sloops and the Providence.
Those three small vessels would sail into the harbor at dawn with the Marines hidden below deck. Once they "got in Close to the Fort," the order read, "they were then to land Instantly & take possession before the Island could be Alarmed." The rest of the fleet would stay out of sight of land until the last possible moment.
At first light on Sunday 3 March the plan came apart in about a minute. Instead of the three small vessels going in alone, the whole fleet sailed on and appeared "a little to the windward of the Bar" as dawn broke. Surprise was gone.
The island woke up. The governor ordered a three-gun alarm, and two of the three gun carriages collapsed when they fired. Drummers beat the long roll for the militia, and fewer than thirty men reported, most of them without serviceable weapons.
Commodore Hopkins now had a decision and no good options. The winds had pushed the fleet closer in than intended, so pressing into the harbor would put his ships under the fort's guns. He tacked east and anchored six miles away in Hanover Sound.
The landing was rebuilt on the spot. Hopkins first proposed sailing around the west end and attacking the town from the rear, then abandoned it when he learned there was no anchorage and no road. On the pilots' information, a naval lieutenant named John Paul Jones suggested Hanover Sound, took a pilot to the fore-topmast-head, and conned the fleet in.
The new plan sent the Marines at the back door. Nicholas' 234 Marines were augmented by 50 sailors under Second Lieutenant Thomas Weaver of the Cabot, "who was well acquainted with the area," and they would land on the eastern shore and take Fort Montagu.
A short time after noon they splashed ashore at "the Creek," two miles east of Fort Montagu, covered by the schooner Wasp. By two o'clock every Marine and seaman was ashore and formed in marching ranks. Nearby was a village of free Black residents who at first took the Americans for Spaniards and were alarmed.
The defense collapsed ahead of them. The governor sent out two small detachments, both of which retreated without firing, then rode to Fort Montagu himself, ordered its guns spiked except three fired toward the advancing column, and left.
Nicholas heard those three guns and stopped. Thinking the fort still held, he halted the column and consulted his officers on "what was best to be done," then sent Lieutenant John Trevett forward under a flag of truce. Trevett met the enemy's officer coming the other way and learned the fort was empty.
Then Nicholas made the decision the entry is really about. With the fort in his hands and the town a mile off, he stopped for the night. "I thought it necessary to stay all night, and refresh my men, who were fatigued, being on board the small vessels, not having a convenience either to sleep or cook in."
At dawn on the 4th he woke the men before daybreak, covered the mile to the edge of town, and took Fort Nassau without "firing a single shot." Inside were 40 cannon, mounted and loaded with round, langridge and canister for a fight nobody had. The British colors came down and the Grand Flag of the United Colonies went up.
What is less known
The expedition lost what it came for while the Marines slept, and the official history does not put that on Nicholas. During that night the governor's council voted 14 to 10 that Fort Nassau was indefensible and shipped 162 barrels of gunpowder out of the harbor to St Augustine.
The blame is assigned, by name, elsewhere. The escape "can be attributed directly to Commodore Hopkins' failure to close the main entrance to Nassau harbor," and John Paul Jones later wrote it "was foreseen, and might have been prevented, by sending the two brigantines to be off the Bar."
There is a second thing the record will not let a reader keep. The forts were not weak on paper. Fort Montagu mounted seventeen 12- and 18-pounders and Fort Nassau forty-six, and what beat them was a governor who had been warned twice, called no council, and inspected no arms.
The warnings were specific and they were early. An officer of the King's land service arrived on 25 February with word of a squadron assembling at the Delaware Capes and bound "against this island," and a whaling captain came in on 1 March having sighted the fleet himself. Both times the governor told the man to keep it quiet.
The reading
A plan is a set of assumptions with a schedule attached. What it costs to find that out is the surprise you were counting on, spent before anyone is ashore.
Nicholas lost his surprise, his beach, and his approach march before he had landed a man, and the thing he had left was the part nobody rehearses: 234 people who would do what he said next. What he did was take the fort, then stop, then say why in a sentence any Marine would understand. His men had been packed in small boats with nowhere to sleep or cook.
The cost of that decision is on the same page as the decision. A commander who rests fatigued men gives up the night, and the night is when the powder left.
Nicholas chose the men in front of him over the objective on the map. The historian who records the loss puts it on the officer who kept his brigs in the wrong anchorage, not on the one who let his people sleep.
I have made the smaller version of this call, and so has anyone who has run a drill weekend that slipped. You can push tired Marines through one more evolution and get it, or you can stop and lose the window.
What made Nicholas' call defensible was not that it was kind. It was that he could name the condition his people were actually in, out loud, in writing, on the day.
That is the part worth stealing. Not the halt, which may or may not have been right, but the fact that the reason was written down plainly enough that it still needs no defense.
Notice what he did not write. He did not claim the fort was unsafe to leave, or that the town was defended, or anything else that would have made the halt sound like a tactical judgment rather than a decision about people. He wrote that his men had nowhere to sleep or cook.
The question
You will have one evolution this week where the schedule says press on and the Marines in front of you are past useful. Before it arrives, what condition would make you stop, and which Marine gets to tell you it has been met?
Sources
- Smith, Charles R. Marines in the Revolution: A History of the Continental Marines in the American Revolution, 1775-1783. History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1975. Chapter III, "The New Providence Raid." Read at archive.org
- A Chronology of the United States Marine Corps, 1775-1934, Volume I. Historical Branch, G-3 Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1965. Entry for 3 March 1776. Read at archive.org
Corrections
None.