One Stephen Earle asserted

What happened

Start with what is not in dispute. The Rhode Island committee approved Silas Devol as captain of Marines for the Providence on 20 June 1776, selected Seth Chapin of Mendon, Massachusetts as second lieutenant two days later, and filled the first lieutenancy with Avery Parker on 26 June.

Those commissions had a price attached. A captain of Marines was to enlist forty "good men," a first lieutenant thirty-three, and a second lieutenant twenty-seven, and each officer had to meet his quota before he was allowed to accept his commission.

The sequence of what happened next comes from Earle.

In his affidavit he says he served about six months aboard as a sergeant, and then "the Second Lieutenant of Marines was broke and this deponent advanced to the place of the Second Lieutenant, the name of said 2d Lieut was Seth Chapin."

He says he then served as second lieutenant about four months, "at which time Avery Parker, the first Lieutenant of Marines on board said Frigate was broke and this deponent was then advanced to the first Lieutenant of Marines."

He says that four months after that, the captain of Marines, Silas Devoll, was appointed second lieutenant of the frigate, "whereupon he this deponent was advanced to the Captaincy of Marines in which capacity he this deponent served until the month of April 1778."

Read as Earle tells it, three advancements happen inside about eight months, and he then holds the captaincy for roughly seven more.

Now read how the historian handles it. In the biographical appendix, Smith writes that "Earle asserted that Lieutenant Chapin was 'broke' about December 1776." Asserted, not established.

Note also that the date has moved. In the deposition Smith supplies "January 1777" in square brackets, as an editor filling a gap; in his own appendix he writes about December 1776. Both are in the same book, and this entry uses January because that is the date attached to the quoted testimony.

Then Smith supplies the problem. "However, another source credits Second Lieutenant Chapin with having been a member of the court martial of Navy Lieutenant Richard Marvin on board frigate Providence, off Field's Point in the Providence River on 3 April 1777."

A man who has been broke does not sit on a court-martial four months later.

Smith does not resolve it so much as step around it. "Nevertheless, Chapin did leave the Marine service. He was appointed a first lieutenant on 19 July 1777 in Captain James Webb's Company, Colonel Henry Sherburne's Battalion of Rhode Island troops."

The same caution runs through the other entries. Parker was broke "circa April or May 1777," in brackets, inside a quotation from the affidavit. Devol's entry describes "Stephen Earle, reputedly a first lieutenant of Marines in Providence at this time."

Reputedly. That is the Corps's own historian, writing about a man whose rank at that moment rests on the man's own word.

The wider situation is documented independently and is not in doubt. The frigate Providence, Captain Abraham Whipple, was still under orders in early 1778 to escape her long confinement in the Providence River, and after a prolonged period of inactivity she had neither enough officers nor enough men to run the British blockade.

The Navy Board of the Eastern Department directed that new officers be appointed and that additional money, over and above what Congress allowed, be offered to every man entered on board. The narrative states that the original Marine officers appointed at her launching had, by early 1778, resigned.

Whipple's first task was to locate replacements. By early March he had selected a man he thought well qualified for the position of captain of Marines "to replace Stephen Earl who had temporarly assumed the post."

The man was William Jones, a former captain in the Rhode Island Regiment, recommended to the Navy Board at Boston: "He is a man well acquainted with the service having been in it most of the War, and has great interest in raising a Compy. of Marines."

The sources disagree about when the Providence next fought. The chronology puts Marines in her action against the British frigate Lark in Narragansett Bay on 30 April 1778; Smith has her making sail on the night of 1 May and meeting the Lark lying in wait as she entered the bay. Either way it is the same fight, and it falls within days of the end of Earle's own service in her as the affidavit gives it.

What is less known

The word Smith uses for what Earle did in the captaincy is "temporarly assumed the post," and the word he uses for Earle himself is "reputedly."

Both are careful, and both are doing the same job. They record what one man said about his own service without certifying it.

The affidavit is dated 21 April 1818. Whatever else it is, it is a claim for money made four decades after the work, and it is the only account of the sequence of advancements.

That does not make it false, and it is not all Smith has. That Earle held the captaincy is recorded in Smith's own voice, on the strength of a letter from John Deshon to the Navy Board of the Eastern Department dated 9 March 1778, which is contemporary correspondence rather than the pension file. What rests on Earle alone is the order of the steps and the reason for each.

It does mean the confident version of this story, two officers broken and a sergeant carrying the detachment, is one man's word with a documented complication sitting next to it in the same book.

The reading

Most of what is known about you at work is one person's account, and often it is yours.

The cost of taking that seriously is that it makes your own memory suspect, including the parts you are most sure of. Earle was not lying about being aboard, and he was probably not lying about doing the job. He was reconstructing an eight-month sequence forty years on, for money, and one detail in it does not survive contact with another record.

I have written my own account of things and found later that I had a month wrong, or a name, or the order events happened in. Nobody caught it because nobody else had written anything down either.

That is the ordinary condition of a Reserve unit. Very little of what a section actually does gets recorded by anyone except the person who did it, and if they are the only witness, then their account is the record whether or not it is accurate.

The practical version is not to write more. It is to make sure at least two people can attest to anything that matters, while it is cheap to arrange.

What I owe a Marine doing an unbilleted job is not just recognition at the end. It is a contemporaneous line, somewhere another person can see it, that says what they are doing and when they started, so that the account of their work is not left resting on their own recollection under oath forty years later.

The Corps's historian treated Earle fairly: printed him at length, credited him, and flagged what could not be confirmed.

That is the best outcome available once the only witness left is the man himself. It is a worse outcome than a line in a log written by somebody else in 1777, and the difference between those two is entirely a matter of what his leadership did or did not bother to record at the time.

The question

How much of what your section did last quarter exists in writing anywhere except in your own head? Before Friday, take the one thing only you can attest to, write it down with the date, and give it to the Marine who will still be there when you are not.

Sources

1. 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 IV, "Uncombined Operations, April-December 1776," the 1776 appointments and recruiting quotas; Chapter VII, "Across the Atlantic, 1777-1778," section "To Sea at Last," the deposition of Sergeant of Marines Stephen Earle; and Appendix J, "Biographies of Continental Marine Officers," the entries for Chapin, Parker and Devol. Read at archive.org
2. 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 30 April 1778, the frigate Providence against HMS Lark in Narragansett Bay. Read at archive.org

Corrections

None.