Until a replacement could be found

What happened

The crew had objected to the fight, and the record gives their reason.

The plan was to enter Belfast Lough a second time and attack the Drake "in plain day." The crew thought the project "by no means right, because it involved honor more than self-interest, their only motive." Spurred on by the ship's two naval lieutenants, they took the occasion to mutiny.

The mutiny was not talked down. Lieutenant Meijer happened on the plan in time and warned Captain John Paul Jones, "who, when Master Cullam rushed him as a signal for the mutiny to begin, put a pistol to his head and quashed the plot."

What changed the crew's minds was not the pistol. It was a small success, and the record is specific about it.

A strange vessel had been sighted entering the lough close to Kilroot Point, and the Drake's captain, uncertain of her identity, ordered a boat sent to investigate. Jones "kept his now-quieted crew below decks, his guns masked, and the sloop's stern toward the approaching boat."

The gig drew alongside, the British lieutenant in charge came on board, and "he was immediately informed that he and his crew were now prisoners."

"This trifling success had such an exhilarating effect on my crew," Jones later wrote, "that they no longer objected to giving battle."

Only then, "taking the boat in tow," did Jones decide "to draw the Drake into the channel where he would have more room to maneuver." The Drake worked slowly out of Carrickfergus Bay against an unfavorable wind and flood tide, and after she weathered Kilroot Point, Jones allowed her to approach within hailing distance.

The Ranger placed herself directly across the Drake's bow and fired a broadside of grape that swept along the enemy's deck. "The action was warm, close, and obstinate," Jones reported; "it lasted an hour and four minutes."

Then the enemy called for quarters, her captain and four others dead, her lieutenant and nineteen others wounded, and her rigging cut to pieces.

The Ranger's dead were Samuel Wallingford, who received a musket ball in the head, and two seamen. Five were wounded.

The sentence this entry exists for comes straight after the casualty list. "Sergeant of Marines John Ricker was immediately given charge of the ship's Marine detachment until a replacement could be found."

Charles R. Smith's official history tells it a second time, in an appendix sketch of the man who filled Wallingford's vacancy. Smith's preface credits the officer sketches to Richard A. Long, and Long's wording is plainer: following the engagement and the death of Wallingford, "sergeant of Marines John Ricker took temporary command of Ranger's Marines."

The day after the battle, 25 April, both crews repaired damage. Before noon a large brigantine from Whitehaven, bound for Norway, sailed so close to the Drake that Jones was obliged to take her. That evening a solemn service was held on deck and Wallingford's body was committed to the deep.

The Ranger and her prize reached Brest on 8 May. On 26 May the Continental Navy Agent at Nantes, Jonathan Williams, wrote to Jones recommending William Morris to fill the vacancy left by Wallingford's death, and enclosed a letter from Morris.

Smith's chapter quotes Morris himself: "my intentions are intirely to Serve my Country and wish to enter into the Servise with no other View." Long's sketch quotes the enclosed letter in fragments, with Morris expressing his appreciation that Jones considered him "worthy of being Lieut, of the Merrines" and saying he would "proceed to Breast as sone as posoble."

Smith's chapter has Morris appointed lieutenant of Marines "upon his arrival at Brest in June." Long's sketch has him joining the Ranger at Brest in July 1778. Neither gives a day.

The chronology of the Corps places the action between the Ranger and the Drake "off the coast of England," where Smith has the Drake coming out of Carrickfergus Bay. For 25 April it records the capture of the British brig Patience; Smith has an unnamed brigantine from Whitehaven taken that day, and neither source says the two are the same vessel. This entry follows Smith, who narrates the action at length.

What is less known

The word "immediately" is doing a great deal of work, and it rests on one telling.

Of the book's two tellings of the succession, only Smith's chapter uses the word, in a sentence footnoted to Ricker's own pension file. Long's sketch does not use it and says only that Ricker took temporary command.

Neither telling says who gave him the detachment, or that he was the senior Marine aboard, or that any arrangement existed beforehand. The entry cannot supply those and does not.

The obvious reading of "immediately" is that somebody had thought about this in advance. The record will not carry that weight.

What both tellings agree on is the shape: the Marine officer was dead, a sergeant had the Marines, and a replacement had to be found. The replacement Smith names was recommended by letter from the agent at Nantes.

Neither telling says where Morris was when he wrote. Neither says how he came to be available, either. Long offers a guess about that and marks it as one: Morris may have been a prisoner of the British in England who had escaped or been exchanged, and "was thus available at this opportune time."

The reading

Succession is not a moment, it is a stretch of time nobody planned for.

The cost of taking that seriously is that naming a successor stops being the end of the job. Naming someone takes a sentence. Supporting them for weeks in a billet they were never selected for takes attention you have not budgeted, from a position where you are also short one person.

Ricker was given charge of the Ranger's Marines until a replacement could be found. In Smith's chapter the replacement was appointed on his arrival at Brest in June; in Long's sketch he joined the Ranger in July. Whatever Ricker did with the detachment in the weeks after the battle is not in either account.

I have handed sections to people who were not ready and then gone quiet, which is the failure. The handover felt like the decision, so I treated the announcement as the work, and then I was surprised when things came apart later.

What I try to do now is put a date on the check-in at the same moment I name the person, out loud, in front of the same people who heard the appointment. Not a review, and not an inspection. A standing appointment where they get to say what they cannot do yet.

The other half of this entry is what changed the crew's mind. Smith records no argument that did it, and the pistol only stopped the plot. Jones gave them what he called a trifling success, and then they were willing.

That is worth being careful with. It is not a recommendation to manufacture wins, which Marines see through immediately. It is an observation that people who have just refused something hard will often take it on after they have done something small that worked.

The order matters and it is usually the reverse of what a leader wants to do. The instinct is to explain first. In this record, what moved the crew was a thing done, not a thing said.

The question

Which Marine in your section is holding a job they were not selected for? Before Friday, put a standing date in the calendar where their only task is to tell you what they still cannot do, and tell them that is what the meeting is for.

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 VII, "Across the Atlantic, 1777-1778," section "Drake Captured and Wallingford Lost," pp. 143-144; Appendix A, notes to Chapter VII, p. 305; and Appendix J, "Biographies of Continental Marine Officers," the biographical sketch of William Morris by Richard A. Long (credited in the author's preface), p. 456. 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. Entries for 24 and 25 April 1778. Read at archive.org

Corrections

None.