Talk:Mount Hope Bay raids

Battle of Freetown

At some point, someone changed the date to May 30th and noted that the date of May 25th was a mistake made by Deane; however, multiple sources give the date May 25th, including Joseph Durfee's account [1] in which he specifies that it was a Sunday. Can a citation be provided for May 30th? Otherwise, it should revert to May 25th. Sahasrahla (talk) 04:42, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

The date for the 30th is already cited; please read Dearden, whose treatment of these events is more thorough than that of 19th/early-20th century historians. I believe many sources (likely including Deane) defer to Durfee's account, which was written many years after the events and should (for that reason) not be assumed to be authoritative. In historical circles, it is a somewhat well-known problem with later reminiscences by Revolutionary War-era people that events are sometimes conflated or misremembered, leading to these sorts of problems. Magic♪piano 18:15, 4 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't readily have access to the Dearden book, but it seems that the date of the Battle of Freetown / Fall River was May 31st, 1778 (which was indeed apparently a Sunday), while the Pigot group had apparently embarked on the preceding evening (May 30). (May 25th, 1778 was, I gather, a Monday.) Supporting evidence for this date can be seen in Daniel M. Popek, "They '... fought bravely, but were unfortunate': The True Story of Rhode Island’s 'Black Regiment' and the Failure of Segregation in Rhode Island’s Continental Line, 1777-1783" (2015) [2] and, most tellingly, in an account by Pigot himself in a letter to Clinton dated May 31, 1778 (published in The Remembrancer, with link at the end of article), which reads in part, "To effect which, 100 men, of the 54th regiment, commanded by Major Eyre, embarked last night in flat-bottomed boats at Arnold's Point, having the Pigot galley and some armed boats for their protection and convoy : unfortunately the galley got a-ground in passing [a?] Bristol-ferry; but the boats proceeded, and arrived a little after daybreak at the proposed place for landing." (emphasis added). Incidentally, in the context of family history research, I am familiar with an 1836 deposition by a Sarah Boomer, widow of Martin Boomer (one of the Freetown minutemen), submitted as part of a pension application, which further supports that the battle was on a Sunday. It reads, in part, "The guard was organized again in the spring, early in the season; and in May, if I recollect right as to date, 1777[sic] on the Lord's day morning, the British landed at Fall River; and when the alarm guns were fired my husband, and his eldest son James Boomer, and Seth Church, all members of Captain Joseph Durfee's Company, and all living in our house, immediately went to Fall River, and were in the engagement with the enemy..." (emphasis added). I will update the article accordingly to clarify. --GregRM (talk) 18:15, 29 July 2017 (UTC)

PS...this has some further discussion on the issue of the date of the battle, including a possible explanation for why Joseph Durfee recollected May 25th as the date: [3] --GregRM (talk) 00:04, 30 July 2017 (UTC)