Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: This is the podcast about art, decorative arts, and antiques, the stories behind them, and what they can reveal to us about ourselves and the people who came before us.
Speaker: And I'm back this week in Philadelphia for another episode in partnership with the Independent Seaport Museum.
Speaker: Last week, we talked about a breakthrough discovery around a fascinating folk art watercolor.
Speaker: If you haven't heard that episode yet, it's worth going back to listen.
Speaker: But this week, we're exploring another tantalizing object from the ISM's collection.
Speaker: This one is a book of signals for warships from the American Revolution.
Speaker: And if last week's episode wasn't enough to get you into the buccaneering spirit, I think this one will have you talking like a pirate, or maybe like an officer of the Royal Navy.
Speaker: And joining me once again with his excellent pirate voice is Peter Siebert, ISM president and CEO.
Speaker: Hi, Peter.
Speaker: Arr, welcome aboard, maybe.
Speaker: You knew I had to do that.
Speaker: You had to get that one.
Speaker: You knew it.
Speaker: You couldn't.
Speaker: You teed that one up beautifully.
Speaker: So, Peter, I've already subjected you to the rapid fire question.
Speaker: I won't make you do that again this week, although I really did enjoy that yar.
Speaker: But, okay, maybe instead you could tell me a little about how you came to the ISM and what it's been like to work here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So no, thank you and welcome back.
Speaker: This time I had three Fasnots and a big thing of sauerkraut to prepare me for as opposed to the cheesesteaks last week.
Speaker: So I'm ready to go.
Speaker: Brilliant.
Speaker: And welcome to Philadelphia and to the Seaport Museum for sure.
Speaker: So this institution is a very special institution.
Speaker: I've worked in museums
Speaker: all over the United States.
Speaker: I mean, I tell my kids they aren't army brats, they're history brats because both of them were born in Pennsylvania, but then went from there to Maryland, to Taos, New Mexico, to Williamsburg, Virginia, to Cody, Wyoming, to here.
Speaker: So they've gone back and forth, have probably seen more of the heartland than they ever really want to admit.
Speaker: I think this side of lots of corn just sends them, gives them willies.
Speaker: And, you know, I, this institution I was aware of from many, many years ago, and I found it to be a very special one insofar as that there are a million museums here in Philadelphia.
Speaker: In fact, I was talking to our state senator at lunch of all places, and he was telling me that his district here has more museums than probably any other,
Speaker: you know, state senatorial district in the United States.
Speaker: There's just dozens and dozens and dozens of them in Philadelphia.
Speaker: And they focus on a whole host of topics, but there's really, this one stands alone in the sense that we talk about the story of the Delaware River and its estuary.
Speaker: So the Schuylkill and all the little creeks and streams and so on and so forth, and all the cities and the people who grew up around it.
Speaker: So the story of Philadelphia really is of a port city.
Speaker: And the story of Camden is of a port city and Trenton and Wilmington.
Speaker: Those are all part and parcel of that story.
Speaker: And today, I think, sadly, my biggest challenge is that people view the Delaware River as pretty much a barrier between themselves and getting to the beach.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: You know, and it costs five dollars to get across the bridge as opposed to seeing the Delaware River as this amazing piece of geography.
Speaker: It's the biggest piece of geography in the region, you know, and it affects everything from state boundaries to, you know,
Speaker: you know, the flow of ideas and the flow of goods and the flow of people in and out.
Speaker: And it's people coming from overseas, but it's also, you know, Johnny Coltrane, the great jazz musician coming up here from the south as part of the great migration to work on the ships in the shipyard and then going off and making incredible jazz.
Speaker: So I got the cool part of a story that touches everything as opposed to the revolution or Betsy Ross or the Mennonites.
Speaker: we can touch all of that.
Speaker: And that's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, and it's, you know, another interesting thing about ISM is it's not that old of an institution.
Speaker: We think of a lot of these museums dating back to the late 19th, early 20th century, you know, when the great philanthropists were endowing these great institutions.
Speaker: And there are, of course, advantages to having an ancient history like that.
Speaker: But there are also advantages, I would think, to having a bit of a fresher history, not necessarily being weighed down with
Speaker: with 200 years worth or 150 years worth of collections and of legacy.
Speaker: Is that an important part of the identity of the museum as well?
Speaker: Absolutely it is.
Speaker: I mean, we were born in 1960, so it's five years older than I am.
Speaker: So it's dang young, I'll say that really loud.
Speaker: But that sense that it is an institution that,
Speaker: wasn't as, you know, yes, it wasn't established in the great period of collecting in the early 20th century.
Speaker: It was started in the 60s.
Speaker: It was built like most great museums are by collectors, you know, and there were DuPonts and Wanamakers and a host of Bittles and other family members who started this institution.
Speaker: But it's also enabled us to sort of evolve, I think, in many respects,
Speaker: over time in a much more nimble way than perhaps some of our older cousins or older siblings have been able to.
Speaker: And when we were founded, we were maritime of the world.
Speaker: We collected everything.
Speaker: We had a Jacques Cousteau collection where we collected anything maritime.
Speaker: And the problem with that is, short of the Met building an encyclopedia collection, it really doesn't work very well because nobody knows what you have.
Speaker: I mean, who would have known that we had a Jacques Cousteau collection in Philadelphia?
Speaker: And that collection we've sent on to an institution to take better care of it than we have.
Speaker: But because we aren't super old, we've been able to sort of hone ourselves down and really refine what we do.
Speaker: And we're in a period right now
Speaker: where our archivist, our curator, and myself, we're really aggressively building the collection.
Speaker: And unlike colleagues who sort of talk about a postmodern world of collecting where they don't collect anymore, they just deal with what they have.
Speaker: And I understand that, you know, if you have 150 high boys, what are you gonna do?
Speaker: Here, we still have a lot to collect and we're still being pretty aggressive about it and being able to showcase things like the watercolor from last week.
Speaker: We're able to showcase things that are brand new to the collection and at the same time finding things in our holdings that may have never been seen before and using that to trigger us to chase after other things.
Speaker: And we have one such thing to talk about imminently.
Speaker: We'll be right back in just a moment with Peter Siebert and the Independent Seaport Museum.
Speaker: If you'd like to see images of today's curious object, as always, those are online at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: If you want to get in touch, which I would really enjoy, you can reach me at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: We have some really fun episodes coming up, but your suggestions are one of my favorite ways to come up with new episodes.
Speaker: So if there's a curious object you've encountered or a type of object or a period or a maker that fascinates you and that you'd like to learn something more about,
Speaker: shoot me a message.
Speaker: And meanwhile, of course, don't forget those Apple podcasts or Spotify ratings and reviews that are such a great and easy way to support curious objects.
Speaker: All right, let's get to today's curious objects.
Speaker: So listeners,
Speaker: I want you to imagine a huge fleet with dozens of ships and thousands of sailors trying to navigate in sync and take advantage of the winds and the currents and outmaneuver their enemies.
Speaker: How did these ships manage to communicate and to coordinate?
Speaker: Well, they had to use signals in the form of flags or lights.
Speaker: And it was kind of like a giant military version of charades.
Speaker: but the Royal Navy's signals weren't working very well.
Speaker: So Peter, what was the problem?
Speaker: Well, the challenge with signals is that everybody has to be on the same page.
Speaker: And therein lies the challenge.
Speaker: If you're communicating what the signals are to be and they're done verbally, it's a fairly limited amount of communication that you have to have.
Speaker: And this is complicated, as you noted.
Speaker: I mean, you've got numerous ships.
Speaker: in waters that you aren't familiar with.
Speaker: And in this case, what we'll be talking about is the Delaware River, where you've got sandbars, you've got islands, you've got shoals, you've got deep water, shallow water, and you've got a possible hostile force out there.
Speaker: And you need to communicate incredibly clearly with each ship.
Speaker: And when you read about maritime engagements in the 18th century and then the 19th century in the age of sail, early into the steam period, there's more sort of mistakes made because of communication that cost a battle than frankly, almost anything else.
Speaker: It's that need for communication that is so critical.
Speaker: And if you can't do it, if the smoke of the battle or the lack of wind unfurling a flag or just not even being within hailing distance, you're in trouble.
Speaker: And if the other fleet can do so, then you're really in trouble.
Speaker: And so the stakes are very, very high.
Speaker: And I think before we can really start to understand this curious object, which we're going to describe in just a minute, we need to talk about Admiral Richard Howe.
Speaker: And he's pretty famous as far as admirals go.
Speaker: But if you don't know him already, you might know his brother, General William Howe, who also fought in the Revolutionary War.
Speaker: And now I don't know about you and your siblings, but if I were an admiral and my brother were a general, I think that would be one hell of a rivalry.
Speaker: I mean, just think about the Army, Navy football game.
Speaker: But, you know, putting that aside, Admiral Howe, he was a fascinating figure in this period.
Speaker: And he was tasked with fighting the revolutionaries in the colonies and blockading the coastline.
Speaker: And all of that, despite the fact that in some ways he was actually sympathetic to the colonists' cause.
Speaker: So, Peter, what was the Admiral's political situation at the onset of the Revolutionary War?
Speaker: Well, the Howe brothers, both of them, I mean, like many of their generation, had a far more ambivalent
Speaker: view towards the colonies, that this was not, you know, Admiral Howe wins numerous battles against, you know, the hated French and everybody else, but this was, you know, to quote the title of a wonderful book, this was the Cousins War.
Speaker: We weren't fighting some foreign enemy, we were fighting our cousins.
Speaker: And the Howe brothers very much were far more sort of standing on that straddling, that fence than others were.
Speaker: And they were also, I think you hit it right on the head, they were ambitious, both of them were, and they were competitive to each other.
Speaker: And they were willing to take risks
Speaker: knowing the great glory stood at the other end of the pipeline.
Speaker: And both of them were willing to do so, and obviously using their men, whether they're in the fleet or whether they're on land, using them to further their own political aim.
Speaker: And it's interesting, Admiral Howe, because his own challenges here ultimately in the colonies cause him problems back home in England, but he also still is, today, remembered far more for being a hero of battles against particularly the French than he is for being remembered for what happened here.
Speaker: And that's probably purposeful, A, because we were allies for the British, you know,
Speaker: for a long time after, and so shouldn't be remembered necessarily for being the bad guy in that regard.
Speaker: But also as well, because the revolution was not necessarily a war that cranked out a whole lot of successful British generals and admirals who went back to the UK and built their lives and careers on what they did here in North America.
Speaker: And I think that's the significant part.
Speaker: And in the case of the Howe brothers,
Speaker: If things would have been different, perhaps they would have been in a far better place at the end of it all.
Speaker: But it ends up that all that they tried to do ended up being for naught, except costing a lot of lives.
Speaker: military history buffs would argue maybe even costing the war in the north because they couldn't support what was going on in New York state.
Speaker: And when Burgoyne is defeated, Howe should have been there and he wasn't and the Navy should have been supporting it.
Speaker: They weren't.
Speaker: And so there's plenty of blame to go around.
Speaker: Well, fair enough.
Speaker: And so I realize I'm drawing this out because we haven't even talked about the object itself, but it really is a thing that demands a lot of context.
Speaker: And so just one more thing before we get into it.
Speaker: How good of an admiral was Admiral Howe?
Speaker: I mean, didn't he win some very impressive battles against fleets that were outnumbering him and that sort of thing?
Speaker: Yeah, I think he was.
Speaker: I think you have to remember that the battles that he wins are battles that are on the sea.
Speaker: You know, here he's laying siege in a river
Speaker: against a homegrown enemy who are on islands and it's a different scenario.
Speaker: And yes, he's successful, but it is not, it's not the kind of, you know,
Speaker: you know, mano y mano ship against ship kind of battle that will win you great glory and a... Pitched battles.
Speaker: Name being a Knight of the Order of the Bath or Knight of the Order of the Guard.
Speaker: That'll get you there.
Speaker: Fighting on the Delaware River is not necessarily going to do that.
Speaker: No, it's not.
Speaker: And I think that...
Speaker: You know, the Howells saw if they could have captured Philadelphia, and that's getting a little ahead of our story, but if they could have captured Philadelphia and captured the Continental Congress, the war could have been over and therein would have been there, you know,
Speaker: a seat in parliament and a couple of knighthoods and maybe a little bit of some title or two.
Speaker: And this would have been good.
Speaker: This would have been the path to glory.
Speaker: And in the end, they take off leaving everything they had captured, abandoning it all, leaving a lot of dead and leaving a population that was very happy to not be British.
Speaker: So we Americans actually have a lot to thank Admiral Howe for.
Speaker: So we talked about the communication difficulties between these ships on the sea.
Speaker: What was Howe's plan for fixing that?
Speaker: Well, so, Howe had envisioned, and this is what the nature of the object is, is he had a signal book that was both printed but then had manuscript, watercolor, flags.
Speaker: So, if you can imagine a book that's got printed signals, you know, steer this way, steer that way, get behind me, get in front of me.
Speaker: And I'm not using the nautical terms, I'm just putting it in sort of layman's parlance.
Speaker: and have this book and then be able to share that book with your captains, who in turn would then share the signals down to the captains of the smaller vessels and the commanders of the smaller vessels.
Speaker: In theory, you could then coordinate that when Hal ran up a certain sequence of flags,
Speaker: everybody steer to the right, we're going to engage here.
Speaker: This would enable that level of coordination.
Speaker: It still wasn't perfect.
Speaker: You had to be able to see the admiral's flags, you had to all sort of steer together and not necessarily cross each other, and that was a substantial risk, both of stealing the other guy's wind and also potentially getting rammed.
Speaker: But you had to have that ability, at least knowing, okay, we're going to steer to the right, and this is the order in which I want you to proceed.
Speaker: puts you in a better place to engage the Americans.
Speaker: And in this case, remembering this is sort of a guerrilla effort.
Speaker: This is not them coming up against an American fleet.
Speaker: There is an American fleet yet.
Speaker: So there's at least a theory for how we're going to fix this problem in the signal book was written.
Speaker: And so what do you actually see when you open this book up?
Speaker: So what you'll see is you'll see printed pages.
Speaker: So it is both manuscript and printed together.
Speaker: And it's not a very large book because you didn't need to complicate it by too many signals.
Speaker: This would cause a problem unto itself.
Speaker: But what you would see is just pages with
Speaker: lines that literally would have the instructions of what was to be done when you observed the flag.
Speaker: And then someone, probably someone on the ship makes the most sense, painted in the corner adjacent to that direction a watercolor image of what that flag was.
Speaker: So if it's a yellow flag with a red cross on it,
Speaker: When you see that flag, do this.
Speaker: And when you see that flag in combination with this flag, do this and do that.
Speaker: And so it sets you up for having some degree of instruction.
Speaker: But obviously this is a really
Speaker: important document.
Speaker: If everybody has the book, you know, copies of the book and everybody's following it, you're moving in tandem.
Speaker: And the British military as a whole was incredibly well-drilled.
Speaker: I mean, we, you know, we talk about, oh, the British are over-drilled, they're over-regimented, they're over this.
Speaker: That discipline was critical.
Speaker: in order to move people on a battlefield or ships at sea.
Speaker: And so the flags were really critical to maintaining that discipline with the idea that you didn't want to lose the battle and you didn't want to lose the ship or you didn't want to lose the men.
Speaker: I actually couldn't believe how detailed some of these signals are.
Speaker: I mean, this is not just the basic stuff like stop, go left, right, or I mean, port, starboard.
Speaker: Some of these signals are more like, well, actually, I can just quote one.
Speaker: So let's say you're looking out across the water at the Admiral's ship and you see a red flag.
Speaker: on the foretop masthead.
Speaker: And listeners are immediately going to recognize that I have no nautical experience whatsoever.
Speaker: But this is what I've read in the book.
Speaker: And there's a red pendant over it.
Speaker: And then you hear them fire two guns.
Speaker: Now, the message you're supposed to interpret, and I assume you probably know this by heart, but just for the sake of our listeners who haven't read the book yet, if this is the signal that you see, you're supposed to interpret it as, prepare to haul to the wind together on the starboard tack when in order of battle and the ships are to haul to the wind for with when the admiral fires a third gun.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Sheesh, I mean, Peter, were these signals really practical?
Speaker: Did sailors manage to learn these and use them in need of battle?
Speaker: They did, actually.
Speaker: They had to, and they were drilled on the signals.
Speaker: And the reason being that the British...
Speaker: maritime combat, as it were, engaging another ship was about bringing your guns to bear to produce a broadside against the opposing force.
Speaker: you then had to be in line to do that and you had to be prepared.
Speaker: And you couldn't, because you're at the mercy of the wind, you can't just go, I missed my turn, can we all stop and do this again?
Speaker: You can't do that.
Speaker: And so you have this ability, you have to have this ability to really line, getting the ships aligned, which is a very distinct,
Speaker: component, meaning you literally are spacing yourselves out in a line and that you're going to execute either a turn or you're going to steer into the wind or against the wind or with the wind in order to bring a broadside
Speaker: into the other side.
Speaker: And the idea with the broadside in a lot of cases was to literally rip the rigging down from the other ship because if his rigging and his masts were gone, his engine is gone fundamentally.
Speaker: He's dead in the water, in which case you can pretty much do what you need and he's stuck.
Speaker: And if he can't make repairs, then he's really stuck.
Speaker: So, and understand that these code books were not written for
Speaker: just going up the Delaware or just this particular battle.
Speaker: They were written for all possible scenarios.
Speaker: But that meant that on the ships, you had to have signalers and you had to have crew who were expert on understanding and reading those so they could pick it up and they could relay the message.
Speaker: And the captain had to know exactly what the hell it meant so that he was able to get his ship into position.
Speaker: Yeah, and to be able to do that in the heat of battle, I mean, you can understand why the drilling was so important.
Speaker: And in this case, in the Delaware River, which is not miles and miles wide, maybe about a mile wide, you've got, you know,
Speaker: and with shoals and islands and potentially these dratted Americans firing at you from the shore and from islands.
Speaker: And then there were obstacles that the Americans had put in the riverbed itself to impale the ships.
Speaker: So, you do need to have that sense of discipline because everything is working against you.
Speaker: And the wind may be working against you as well.
Speaker: Right, and so how did these signals actually turn out for how?
Speaker: And how did the operation in the Delaware River turn out for?
Speaker: So the plan was that they landed, I guess it was about 15,000 troops south of us down towards the,
Speaker: the Chesapeake Bay and they marched the north towards Philadelphia while another group came from the north.
Speaker: And the idea was that there would be a typical Pinscher movement coming in.
Speaker: And then, you know, Philadelphia, maritime port,
Speaker: maybe the second largest city in the British Empire, you gotta choke off that water.
Speaker: You've gotta prevent anything from getting in or getting out.
Speaker: That's critical to it all.
Speaker: And conversely, you wanna get up as close as you are to the city because if the city is under siege, bringing those ships up close to Philadelphia, you've got all those cannons that can then be brought to bear on the city.
Speaker: That didn't happen.
Speaker: But the idea being is, okay, we'll choke this off, we'll support the troops that have been landed to the south as they're heading north, and we will, if called upon, get in close and shell the city.
Speaker: At the same time, you had the Americans who didn't have a fleet.
Speaker: They were relying upon this being a big enough body of water they could slip in and out if they needed to.
Speaker: And at the same time,
Speaker: they defended the islands on the river.
Speaker: And that was their ability that if the British got close enough, they would find these islands with cannon on them and soldiers on them, and the British would have to deal with them.
Speaker: They couldn't just bypass them.
Speaker: because their own supply lines would be in danger every time they went past one of these American islands.
Speaker: And there were two islands very close to what is now the Philadelphia Airport, which is just south of the city, that fortifications were built on to prevent this.
Speaker: The one island had the capacity of something like 1,500 soldiers.
Speaker: We didn't have 1,500 soldiers.
Speaker: We had like 250.
Speaker: We put up a good fight, but ultimately, it was the Battle of Red Bank.
Speaker: They gave that up.
Speaker: Fort Mifflin, which was the one closest to where the airport is now, is then the other obstacle.
Speaker: And so the British want to come up and engage those islands.
Speaker: They want to land forces to deal with those islands.
Speaker: They also have to be careful of the water there.
Speaker: And as I say, the Americans had come up with this idea
Speaker: of sinking large logs with steel points attached to the end of them in the river.
Speaker: And these were sunk into the bottom of the river so that an unnoticing British ship could very easily
Speaker: ram themselves into this, at the very least, springing a nice leak.
Speaker: At the very worst, impaling themselves and getting stuck.
Speaker: And a stuck ship is like one without masks.
Speaker: It's just primed to be taken in one way or another.
Speaker: So, Howe is successful in what he does.
Speaker: He doesn't fail at it, but he's got to be exceedingly careful.
Speaker: And he's got to be able to move his ships very, very carefully up
Speaker: close to Philadelphia without running the risk of losing any.
Speaker: If you watch the
Speaker: BBC series Sharp.
Speaker: In Sharp, the big risk is don't lose the King's color.
Speaker: You don't want to lose the King's color from your ship either.
Speaker: You don't want to have to strike your colors on your ship.
Speaker: So he doesn't want to lose any ships.
Speaker: This is not the way you're going to get a knighthood real fast.
Speaker: You're not going to get a title.
Speaker: You're not going to get all the things that you would like when you start losing ships.
Speaker: And so that's where the code book is so critical to the story because it's the book that is issued to the captains.
Speaker: And it's the one that Howe goes, okay, this is the one, he and his team have figured out what these signs are and they know what they're gonna be communicating it out to the crew.
Speaker: Yeah, well, and so somehow in the midst of all of this high stakes conflict,
Speaker: Howe manages to produce this book and enough copies of this book to outfit all of his captains with them.
Speaker: And as you mentioned, they're printed, but there are also manuscript additions to them.
Speaker: There are hand-painted flags that are used as these reference points, kind of like the letters cut into the
Speaker: the pages of a dictionary so you can find the letter really quickly.
Speaker: It's just like that with these flags.
Speaker: There are also handwritten addendums throughout the book as they, I suppose, added more signals or modified the usage of different signals.
Speaker: Figured out what works and what doesn't work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this is not exactly a simple undertaking to produce a book like this.
Speaker: I think the books were printed probably, well, I'm sure they were printed in England.
Speaker: And they were probably produced en masse.
Speaker: And by themselves, they didn't mean anything until you added the watercolors of the signals.
Speaker: I think he is having those books done either in England or done on shipboard during the crossing or maybe in Boston when he was there.
Speaker: But the important thing is, is these are critical.
Speaker: If one of these falls into the wrong hands, this is like the Enigma code breakering in World War II.
Speaker: This lets everybody know what's happening.
Speaker: You know, see, he has to be incredibly careful when he issues those code books to his captains.
Speaker: He knows who gets them, and if one of his ships goes aground and it's captured by the Americans,
Speaker: he's done because they'll know, from there on end, they'll know what his signals are.
Speaker: And so when you go to the back of the one that's in our collection, it says August 1777 in the Delaware River near Chester, and that's Chester, what is now Chester, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.
Speaker: and given by me, Admiral Howe, to one of his captains, and I forget the captain's name, but it's actually the conveyance, it's not just him being a, like the Victorians were just writing a name in the book.
Speaker: This is actually saying, Captain, I'm giving you this book, this is the date of when you're getting it.
Speaker: It's like you're assuming responsibility for this because if this is lost,
Speaker: we're in trouble here because they will know what our signals are and they'll be able to anticipate our maneuvers.
Speaker: That's why when I saw this thing for the first time, my proverbial and literal jaw hit the floor because he's handing, one, doesn't take a lot of stretch of imagination to imagine how,
Speaker: dressed in his finery, ready for, to engage, handing this to his captains and saying, okay, you, you got this, you've got this, you've got this.
Speaker: Now take the boat back and, you know, in 20 minutes or whatever the time was, or longer than that, we're going to be moving, follow my, follow my lead, follow my signals.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: It was a period, too, up until the Civil War when you really had, well, even later than that in the maritime world, where...
Speaker: flag officers were in the heat of the battle.
Speaker: They weren't leading from the rear because you couldn't lead from the rear with them needing to see the signals.
Speaker: You can't just go, yeah, about two miles back of us as the Admiral, if you look back, you might see what his flight, you're not gonna do that.
Speaker: He's gotta be right there with you and engaging with you.
Speaker: So that's, again, I think when you put all that into context, it's really cool.
Speaker: What happened to how after the revolution?
Speaker: You said he was successful to a degree in his mission, but obviously the war didn't go his way.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I mean, you know, what happens is that the British had an attack going on up the Hudson Valley, and their idea was to basically, you know, they'd always wanted to try and cut New England off from the rest of the colonies, and that hadn't worked
Speaker: too, too well, but the idea was, well, let's cut at least New York and the Hudson Valley up into British Canada, up into Quebec and Ontario.
Speaker: Let's take that.
Speaker: That'll be a conduit that'll also try and cut the New England colonies.
Speaker: And so you have Burgoyne, who is the British officer who takes on the Americans, Battle of White Plains.
Speaker: How it was supposed to be there.
Speaker: He's busy down here,
Speaker: dealing with the Americans and being fairly successful, but he's still not where he kind of needed to be.
Speaker: And so Burgoyne is defeated and Howe is sent back
Speaker: General Howe is sent back to Boston, Admiral Howe is sent to Newport, because the fear is now as we're getting into fall, we've got to do, you know, we've got trouble here.
Speaker: We've got to protect what is ours and rather than being overextended out.
Speaker: And in some respects that kind of almost ends the, you know, the campaign in the North and pivots everything to then the South culminating at Yorktown.
Speaker: So it's a key moment.
Speaker: And Howe is sent back, both brothers are sent back to England and there is, there are a lot of cartoons and lampooning of the Howes portrayed as drunkards and all of this because- Were they drunkards?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I mean,
Speaker: You know, that's part of the phrase.
Speaker: That's such a floating standard by 18th century rules.
Speaker: You know, if everybody's got their ration of rum and the officers are all drinking port, I mean... I guess it's just a matter of degree.
Speaker: You said it best.
Speaker: That's exactly right.
Speaker: It is a matter of degree.
Speaker: And they go back.
Speaker: But, you know, Admiral Howell, within a year or two,
Speaker: as a very successful battle and then he prevails.
Speaker: And his star resumes its ascendancy.
Speaker: So the American boo-boo kind of can be forgotten.
Speaker: But I mean, I really do think the British,
Speaker: as a whole in many cases, it's not a great successful campaign for any of them.
Speaker: I mean, certainly, Cornwallis, you know, the world is turned upside down, literally and metaphorically for him at Yorktown.
Speaker: It is the Cousins War and they're fighting their cousins and this just doesn't always feel right and doesn't always work well.
Speaker: And I think that's the case with the Howes.
Speaker: They go on, you know, and you read the histories of them and the American Revolution is,
Speaker: a scant paragraph usually.
Speaker: They're just not that talked about.
Speaker: In general, Howe is talked about more because this is Valley Forge time with the Americans at Valley Forge and Howe and the city.
Speaker: There's a lot of American romanticism about that.
Speaker: The maritime part of it, not so much because there really isn't any, there isn't the same compelling narrative of Washington.
Speaker: kneeling in prayer and Valley Forge, eating shad to survive in the spring and all these great stories.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Well, so we'll just stipulate that the Admiral lives happily ever after.
Speaker: A little bit of port.
Speaker: What happened to the signal system?
Speaker: I mean, how much longer did that system survive in maritime usage?
Speaker: To my understanding, it lasts, you know, it still is current down to the present, although it's much more symbolic today.
Speaker: I mean, we've got radio communication, but in the museum's collection, we have the cruiser Olympia, which was Admiral Dewey's flagship at the Battle of Manila Bay.
Speaker: And flags were an important part of communication on that ship as well.
Speaker: And the same complaints, lots of cannon fire generating a lot of smoke.
Speaker: We can't see, you know,
Speaker: Communication really is the key to winning so many of these maritime battles.
Speaker: There's a story at Manila Bay where Dewey pulls the ship out and the story was, well, he pulled it out to have breakfast.
Speaker: Well, the problem was is they had just misjudged how much ammunition they needed and they needed to correct that out and it was a communication process.
Speaker: Those communication problems are evident throughout the 18th, 19th and into the 20th century.
Speaker: So the flag system still exists.
Speaker: It's no longer a code.
Speaker: Now ships run up signal flags for parades and so forth.
Speaker: They aren't used for communicating as they were, communicating secrets.
Speaker: So it's a neat little unique slice of life.
Speaker: And as I say, it always gives me the willies when I look at it and says, you know, August 1777 in the Delaware River.
Speaker: That's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah, right here.
Speaker: We're in the place.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, pretty much, you know, maybe two miles, three miles from where you and I are sitting right now is where this book...
Speaker: sort of made its entree into the world stage.
Speaker: And that's kind of cool.
Speaker: That's fantastic to think about.
Speaker: And what, you know, looking through it, what do you feel you are able to learn or to understand or to derive about the experience of sailing and naval combat in the period?
Speaker: I think there are two pieces to it for me.
Speaker: So there's obviously the understanding of how important these signals were, how important these code books were, because you had to be able to communicate and you had to do it in some degree of secrecy.
Speaker: That really speaks to the, I don't want to use this too strongly, but the art of war of how you position yourself.
Speaker: Beside that, if that isn't a topic that interests you, I think as a document that speaks to the story of the United States,
Speaker: It's pretty high.
Speaker: And I remember when we brought it forward and I posted a picture of it on my LinkedIn page.
Speaker: And my friend who was the director of the Museum of the Revolution was like, holy smokes, we got a look at that.
Speaker: And I've had more colleagues because it really does speak to a singular artifact of the
Speaker: You know, you can look at it, you know, there really aren't any ships that survive from that, to my knowledge.
Speaker: Maybe a listener knows of one, but I don't believe there are any ships that survive.
Speaker: You know, there might be uniforms, there might be the odd cannon, but here is an object that really speaks to that moment in our nation.
Speaker: And, you know, for one of a code, the battle was won.
Speaker: for want of a code, the battle could have been lost.
Speaker: And the battle was won, but the war was lost.
Speaker: And you know, there's not to put too much of that sort of sacredness about the object, but there is in this case, an object that really was there that very moment and played a decisive role
Speaker: in the forming of our country.
Speaker: That's kind of cool.
Speaker: How many copies of this book survive?
Speaker: And how did this one come to the ISM?
Speaker: So I don't know that we know exactly where it came from.
Speaker: Our founder, Wells Henderson, was a collector.
Speaker: He went to every auction that he could find and purchase things.
Speaker: And, you know, objects like that come into the collection.
Speaker: So we don't really have a provenance from its day to the present as to how it came into the collection.
Speaker: I haven't been able to identify another one like this that says on the Delaware near Chester.
Speaker: Does that mean there aren't others out there?
Speaker: There very well may be.
Speaker: None has ever turned up besides this one.
Speaker: And this one had been here in storage for a number of years.
Speaker: And literally, we were just reviewing the collections and flipped it over into the back.
Speaker: And that's when my jaw hit the floor when I saw that in Howe's hand.
Speaker: stating that, you know, here it was.
Speaker: I thought, this is something that really takes it to the next level.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Forget buried treasure.
Speaker: Sometimes it's right there in your own library.
Speaker: Well, it is.
Speaker: I mean, but I think every collector is that way.
Speaker: You know, it was Steve Martin who said one time that, you know, you live with a painting and it's like an onion every day and peels something off and reveals itself to you.
Speaker: Whether you collect historical materials or art materials or scientific, whatever,
Speaker: Living with it, studying it, thinking about it, going other places, it peels itself in front of you.
Speaker: And you can discover all sorts of amazing things.
Speaker: Well, Peter, thanks once again for talking with me and for sharing this really fascinating look at maritime history and at the history of America.
Speaker: Thanks for having me.
Speaker: Listeners, these curious objects and so many more are at the Independent Seaport Museum in Philadelphia.
Speaker: It's a fascinating place and I hope you'll pay it a visit.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support by Sarah Palata.
Speaker: Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.
