Mount Hope Bay raids

Rhode Island

A British ship named after the general who ordered the raid ran aground, then got shot to pieces by the townspeople it came to attack.

militaryhistorical

On the last night of May in 1778, a hundred British soldiers set out from Aquidneck Island in flat-bottomed boats, escorted by warships. One of those warships was a galley called the Pigot, named for the British commander at Newport. It never made it. The Pigot ran aground passing through Bristol Ferry while the rest of the force sailed on up the Taunton River. The soldiers landed the next morning in lower Freetown, the part that later became Fall River. Forty local militiamen mustered against them. The British fired grapeshot from a small cannon and pushed the defenders uphill toward a bridge. There, about twenty-five men set up behind a stone wall on the far side. For roughly ninety minutes they held it. The British tried again and again to take the bridge and never did. They burned a house, a grist mill, a sawmill, nine boats, and fifteen thousand feet of planking, then went back to their boats with the militia firing after them.

This is the first of 3 parts. The rest runs about 3 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The Pigot ran aground while passing through Bristol Ferry, but the rest sailed up the Taunton River, and landed near the mouth of the Quequechan River in lower Freetown on the morning of Sunday, May 31.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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