By Larry Barszewski
As America celebrates its 250th birthday, Palm Beach County residents wanting to visit a Revolutionary War battle site need only get in a boat and head a few miles offshore.
A historic naval battle, the last of the Revolution, took place there, though technically after the fighting had already ended.
There are no GPS coordinates for the March 10, 1783, encounter between the victorious USS Alliance and the defeated HMS Sybil. Such technology was more than a bicentennial celebration away.
The battle for years has been described as having taken place off the coast of Cape Canaveral. There’s even a historical marker about the battle on nearby Merritt Island, where the battle is celebrated.
But a decade ago, when Cape Canaveral’s current staff historian went looking for additional information about the battle for an article she was writing, she found original navigational logs from the Alliance that showed the skirmish really took place between present-day West Palm Beach and Boca Raton.
“My article was not very well received by some of our local history organizations,” historian Molly Thomas now admits, but she says the logs and other ship entries don’t lie.
It appears the Cape Canaveral reference for the battle is a mix-up akin to the Revolutionary War misnomer of the Battle of Bunker Hill, which instead took place on Breed’s Hill. It turns out Cape Canaveral was one of the few easily identifiable coastal reference points for voyagers sailing between St. Augustine and the Florida Keys, Thomas said.
“Even for the most enthusiastic local historian to say that this location (more than 140 miles to the southeast) is ‘off the coast of Cape Canaveral,’ seems a bit of a stretch,” she wrote in her 2017 story in Brevard County’s Indian River Journal, which detailed her research.
Given her findings, some have given the fight an alternate name: the Battle of the Gulf Stream.
The USS Alliance. Image provided
The 14th (and 15th) colonies
Many people may not realize it, but Florida — then split between East Florida and West Florida — belonged to Great Britain during the Revolutionary War. The British got the two colonies from Spain in 1763 following the French and Indian War, and 20 years later — when the Revolutionary War ended — they went back to Spain.
Florida, despite its short history with Britain as its 14th and 15th colonies, was loyal to the crown and was enemy territory during the revolution. Many loyalists from the 13 original colonies made their way to Florida when the fighting started.
There wasn’t much here.
“Unlike the other British colonies in North America, East Florida literally had only one town,” St. Augustine, said historian Roger Clark Smith, who teaches at the University of Florida.
He further explained, “St. Augustine was mentioned in letters by George Washington as a military target and a military concern — Congress authorized invasions into East Florida five times, three of which pierced our borders.”
Janet DeVries Naughton, a local historian in Palm Beach County, echoed that in research she has done.
“East Florida’s capital city St. Augustine served as a base of British operation against the south,” Naughton wrote about Florida’s short history under British rule. “The settlement had a fortification that included a garrison and a single British infantry regiment. This regiment successfully blockaded most invading rebels; therefore, few notable or epic battles were lost or won in the territory.”
It’s not surprising that the land that is now Palm Beach County played no role in the war. If Florida was inhospitable to the revolutionaries and revolution taking place to the north, the coast between the current Boca Raton and Palm Beach inlets was just plain inhospitable to all.
Some native Americans eked out an existence here, and historians say Spanish fishers occasionally camped along the coast, but that was about it.
The Gulf Stream connection
The Gulf Stream, however, brought the war alongside our coast. Its currents provided a lifeline between Great Britain and its holdings in the West Indies, with the Gulf Stream’s closest point to shore off the coast of present-day Palm Beach County.
Historians say those product-laden ships heading back to Britain from the West Indies were targets of marauding privateers — basically American pirates authorized by the government during the revolution to attack British ships and seize their goods.
The coast, though part of loyal Florida, would provide no comfort to British crews forced to abandon ship. Reaching shore would just put them amid unfriendly natives in a miserably hot and mosquito-infested landscape, overgrown with saw palmetto and mangroves.
The final battle
The term Gulf Stream barely existed when the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia in July 1776 to sign the Declaration of Independence.
In fact, one of those Founding Fathers was the first to chart a map of the Gulf Stream only a few years earlier. Benjamin Franklin (of course!) managed the accomplishment when he wasn’t busy inventing the lightning rod, bifocal glasses or — yes, he did this, too — an improved urinary catheter.
In 1783, with a peace treaty having been negotiated, the seas were still not safe — and news of the armistice traveled slowly. Two American ships, the Alliance and the Duc De Lauzun, were transporting 72,000 Spanish silver dollars from Havana to Philadelphia needed to pay Continental Army troops that March.
The Sybil and two other British ships came on the scene, with the Sybil chasing after the slow-moving and smaller Duc De Lauzun, which at one point threw its cannons overboard that were weighing it down so it could increase its speed. The Alliance, under the command of Capt. John Barry, reversed course to come to the aid of the Duc De Lauzun and face the Sybil broadside. Barry would later be appointed by President George Washington as the first commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, awarded the rank of commodore.
The 28-gun frigate Sybil was badly damaged in the fight with the 36-gun frigate Alliance and limped away after the battle that lasted less than an hour.
Thomas was able to track the sea battle thanks to logs available online through Villanova University.
“Every day, at noon, the Alliance crew would log their coordinates,” Thomas said. “That’s how you know where they were each day at noon and how fast they were going.”
In a different age, she mused, the fight could have been known as the Battle of Boca Raton.
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