Caught in the British snare, Rapid had little choice but to run. The events are best described in Sandford's own words: About l lAM a ship was perceived in chase; the schooner was already [close upon] a wind, and so continued; and at one P.M. they carried away the foregaff, which obliged them to take in the foresail; and they continued under mainsail jib and foretopsail. The wind blew heavy, with a rough cross sea, and at three P.M. the schooner upset; at 10 minutes past four the ship in chase came up, and her boats took this appearer and the other persons on board; she proved to be his Britannick [sic] Majesty's Ship Herald." Captain Clement Milward, commanding HMS Herald, confirmed Sandford's report in his log: Ar 11 :5 0 saw sail N. Made all sail in chase ... At 3PM saw the chase upset in squall, down jib and spanker. Tacked occasionally making up for the wreck ... At 4:40 out boats and sent them to assist some men on the wreck. At 5:20 boats returned and brought on board the owner, master and crew of the American schooner Rapid from New Orleans to Havana with flour. Before the upset, Sandford probably had some degree of confidence in the ability of his pilot schooner to outrun Herald. Pilot schooners were a uniquely American craft whose design was dictated by the twisting waterways and shifting winds of the Chesapeake Bay. The demand for speed gave the pilot schooner an advantage in carrying perishable cargo, but also made it the vessel of choice for privateers and merchants grown fearful of the harassment of the US cargo fleet after the ChesapeakeLeopard Affair of 1807. Pilot schooner hulls sat low in the water with raking stem and sternposts. Their straight keel sloped downward significantly from bow to stern, giving the design a deeper draft in the stern, which sacrificed cargo space but improved maneuverability. They possessed fairly shallow hulls with significant deadrise and long, fine runs that facilitated an easy flow of water from bow to stern. Norfolk pilot 26
schooners, such as Rapid, were built for blue water and generally had even more drag to the keel and a somewhat greater rake to the sternpost. Pilot schooners had a single, flush deck with no quarter deck and their masts raked sharply aft. The basic schooner sail plan included a large fore staysail, overlapping, gaff-rigged, loose-footed foresail, and a gaff-rigged and boomed mainsail. To these were added all styles of topsails, jibs, steering sails and bonnets depending on how the vessel was employed. While fast and agile, pilot schooners also demanded skilled crewmembers who were good judges of sail trim. Rapid's crew appeared to have had little time to learn to handle the ship before being put to the test. Although Elkins's and Sandford's future as privateers sank with their vessel, things could have ended worse for them. Instead of imprisoning the company, Captain Milward generously offered them parole and landed them back at the Balize under a flag of truce. Perhaps, with only a crew of eight, he believed their story that they were merely transporting flour. Nevertheless, the crew publicly expressed their gratitude in the press to their captors for "preserving their lives at the imminent loss of their own," noting that they were well-treated and were provided with dry clorhi~ and "humane and gentlemanly treatment." George Coggeshall, himself a privateer commander, wrote of the event in his History of the American Privateers and Letters-ofMarque: "I hope no civilized nation would have acted otherwise under similar circumstances." While the brief history of Rapid has all the elements of a ripping yarn, it remains to be seen how it relates to the Mardi Gras wreck, lying in 4,000 feet of water off the Louisiana coast. Al though largely circumstantial, all of the available evidence points favorably to this identification, with no obvious contradictions. In fact, it is the only historically documen red loss of a vessel that firs the evidence on the seafloor. The key evidence relates to the vessel's age, construction, complement of arms, and location. The artifact assemblage recovered by Texas A&M University indicates the wreck occurred sometime between 1808 and circa 1820. An eighr-reales Spanish coin, struck in 1808, is proof of the earliest possible year the vessel sank, or the terminus post
quern. How late the event could have happened is more difficult to determine and relies on what is known from the existing archaeological record-particularly ceramics. The undecorated utilitarian creamware from this site dates to the late 18th or early 19th century and was not manufactured beyond 1820. Ir also had an average lifespan of approximately 20 years. Based on this evidence, archaeologists at Texas concluded the sinking did not occur after 1820, providing a terminus anti quern. Rapid sank in 1813, squarely in the middle of this range. As for clues to what type of vessel the Mardi Gras wreck was and where it was constructed, hull timbers and a cylindrical piece Gf wood recovered from the stern provide the best possible physical evidence at this time. Based on the timber dimensions and orientation to the hull, the wood is likely a spar, perhaps from a medium-sized schooner of approximately 40 to 60 tons. Rapid had been registered as a 49-ton schooner. Both her petitions for Letters of Marque refer to her as a pilot schooner, a highly specific vessel whose standard rig included a gaff-rigged mainsail. Wood samples from the spar as well as the frames were a variety of southern yellow pine, commonly located in the Gulf Coast region and Southern Atlantic states. Rapid, according to historical records, was constructed in Norfolk, Virginia, well within the range of the identified wood species. Moreover, the size of the site on the seafloor measured between an anchor at the bow and a concretion at the stern was 48.5 feet, which, according to Texas A&M researchers, "corresponds well with the average length of schooners operating in the Gulf of Mexico (56 feet)." Rapids registered length corresponds well at just over 52 feet. A significant quantity of arms and ammunition was recovered from the Mardi Gras shipwreck site, which included a sixpounder "merchant" cannon, multiple ferrous artillery shot, more than 1,200 lead shot, and almost 60 gunflinrs. The majority of the cast iron round-shot (cannonballs) are for a six-pounder; however, fourteen 5-pounder, one 4-pounder and three three-pounder shot were also recovered. A large mass of cannon balls that had concreted together against a bulkhead could not be recovered or counted, but they
SEA HISTORY 142, SPRING 2013