During my two month stay in Boston last spring, I made many car trips to historic New England locations looking for, among other things, interesting artifacts of early settlement lives. Historic tourism is a mainstay of coastal Massachussets, so it's no surprise that the quintessentially quaint village of Rockport makes a good show of preserving their seafaring heritage. I found this marker at Bearskin Neck, at the end of a charming shambles of lovely small shops in a location that couldn't be more tranquil. It's a sobering sign, in its description of desperate pluck:
"Old stone Fort
Site of fort erected by public subscription as a protection against British warships during the war of 1812, captured in a sneak attack and dismantled by frigate NYMPH. Ammunition gone, all nine seafencibles taken prisoner, the townsmen hurled rocks, using their stockings as slings."
Dismantled, indeed. For a little perspective, consider this glorious, looming armed monster sailing up to your porch, able to easily lay waste to any of the tiny buildings of your New England seaport town, including yours. It could sail up quietly with a light breeze, perhaps a bit of creaking sound in the wood, and just dare you to do anything about it. It probably wasn't much of a fight to take Old Stone Fort, all things considered. No matter how hard they tried, nine seafencibles in a small fort were no match for a British war ship bristling with 38 guns.
Frigates back then cost in excess of $300,000 apiece to build. The expenses then and now, for military high tech, are in figures I simply can't (pardon the reference) fathom. A billion. A trillion. A zillion. I walked down the hill from my apartment in Everett, Washington, and looked at the USS Abraham Lincoln, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, sitting there at the Navy base. Compared to the Nymph, it has fewer individual weapons on it, but they launch much bigger things with greater range, like airplanes and missiles. The Lincoln cost $3.5 billion to build.
It may be inappropriately glib, but I did have an impulse to go there with the modern-day low-tech equivalent of the Rockport, Massachusetts battle. Instead of stockings I had nylon panty hose. There were no rocks handy but on the counter there were leftover fruitcakes from the holidays. It's sort of difficult to get close to the USS Abraham Lincoln with pantyhose and fruitcake (and a really stupid story), much less twirl the home-spun weapon overhead and let fly at the massive hull that's really more of a wall.
After a fashion I did go to a park on a cliff overlooking the Lincoln, with my panty hose sling and the fruitcakes for some target practise. Nylon stretches more than wool and gets a little unwieldy (slings are better less elastic - biblical David's was leather, and the Rockport citizens's were likely wool. I did get some surprising distance with the fruitcake, which broke upon landing. Gulls circled the fruitcake pieces, waiting for me to leave.
It was a silly experiment, surely. But not so funny when I looked down at the Lincoln and visualized myself standing at the end of Bearskin Neck, stocking and rock in hand, fighting the feeling of futility that my goose was cooked, taking aim at the looming enemy in the water, and letting the rock fly anyway.
