16. Long Island Sound was teeming with privateers despite the presence of the Royal Navy at New York
Supply ships dispatched to America to support the British army found the waters of Long Island Sound crawling with privateers. The ships came out of ports such as New London, Fairhaven, Lyme, Niantic, and others. For the British ships trying to blockade the area, it was like playing a game of whack-a-mole. Often the privateers took ships as prizes and other times their cargoes were looted and the ships burned, the smoke visible from British warships and supply vessels at their anchorages. In September 1778 British commander Henry Clinton decided his army would do what the Royal Navy had not.
Clinton dispatched Major General Charles Grey on a raid against the communities of New Bedford, Fairhaven, and Martha’s Vineyard. It was a punitive mission, to chastise the towns for their support of the privateering raids on British shipping. The British burned ships at anchor, docks, private homes and businesses, and churches. It was the first of numerous raids against the American seacoast towns which had frustrated the British navy over the course of the war, and which grew more brutal as the war in the north continued as a stalemate, with the British in New York and the Americans keeping an eye on them from the Hudson Highlands.