American Tempest by Harlow Giles Unger

Chapter 2
The Saints of Boston
    T hen, as now, war—or preparations for war—promised enormous riches for merchants large enough to supply the military needs of warring nations. War had been a virtual constant somewhere in the American colonial world since 1613—in New England, Canada, Ohio, along the Mississippi River, in the Floridas or West Indies, and along the South American coast. It had usually been a three-way affair between England, France, and Spain—with Indian tribes joining one side or the other, depending on which of the white forces seemed strongest and likeliest to serve Indian interests with guns, land, and liquor.
    Thomas Hancock had lived on Beacon Hill only a few months when British King George II declared war on Spain after British captain Robert Jenkins claimed that the Spanish had seized his ship eight years earlier and cut off his ear—and he displayed what looked like an ear to a committee of Parliament. In fact, the British had been raiding Spain’s forests in Central America and Florida for a decade, and Jenkins’s ear provided an excuse for England to seize the territories. In January 1740 James Edward Oglethorpe, founder of Georgia, invaded Florida, and Massachusetts Governor Jonathan Belcher organized an expedition to raid Spanish cities in the Caribbean. A thousand New Englanders, eager for plunder, signed up—a huge number for a city of only fifteen thousand—and Belcher, who hadbuilt a fortune as a merchant before securing the governorship, turned to his selectman-merchant friends to supply troops with beef, pork, clothing, tents, and other basics.
    Boston’s merchants found other ways to profit from the conflict by arming their own ships and obtaining government licenses, or “letters of marque,” to seize and plunder enemy merchant vessels on the high seas. Such letters of marque distinguished privateers from pirate vessels, in that they complemented their nation’s navies by attacking enemy cargo ships. As compensation, privateers kept the goods and ships they seized and sold them on the open market. Members of some of the colony’s most renowned families joined the treasure hunt, including Colonel Josiah Quincy and his brother Edmund, neighbors of lawyer John Adams in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts. The first Quincys had arrived in Boston in 1633 and could trace their family to the Baron de Quincy, one of the noblemen who forced King John to sign the Magna Carta. Josiah and Edmund moved to Boston and built just one privateer, but it returned from its first and only voyage with a Spanish vessel in tow containing a lifetime of riches—161 chests of silver, two chests of gold, and untold amounts of jewelry, silverware, and other valuables. 1 The Quincys never went to sea again.
    As Spain and England spilled their treasures into the ocean in the War of Jenkins’s Ear, much of it washed ashore onto Boston’s docks and into the pockets of the town’s great merchants. In March 1744 the French joined Spain and enlarged the conflict—and the profits of Boston’s merchants. A new royal governor in Massachusetts, William Shirley, believed that Boston’s safety depended on capturing the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. He organized the largest military expedition ever undertaken in the colonies—a fleet of about one hundred vessels—to carry four thousand New England militiamen and their British commanders to Canada. On the recommendation of his predecessor, he appointed Thomas Hancock to round up the ships and supply the entire expeditionary force with food, clothing, arms, ammunition, and all other materials for as long as the force remained in Canada. Although Britain ceded Louisbourg back to the French at the end of the conflict, the Louisbourg expedition earned Hancock almost £100,000 and made him Boston’s—and possibly America’s—richest man.

    Thomas