wordrogue.com

My most frequent commenter, Jan, has suggested I talk about “my pirate” in one of my next blog posts.  I suppose now is a good time to start.

William Bowles was born in the British colony of Maryland in the 1760s.  Several members of his father’s family were involved in the bookselling business back in London, and William grew up reading and quoting the classics, in literature, drama, science; but he was especially fond of the great political philosophers of the Enlightenment – Voltaire, Rousseau and Locke – whose writings gave impetus to the American and French revolutions.

But unlike many of his educated contemporaries in the American colonies, his immersion in revolutionary ideas did not lead to his joining the cause. His father was a staunch Loyalist, a fierce defender of the Mother Country and the King.  The influence of the father’s politics on the son would take on an extreme expression in the years to come.

Just as influential to young William as the books his father supplied him were the stories told by some of his neighbors in the town of Frederick – dramatic tales of bloodthirsty Indians and French scoundrels.  William was born only a year after the end of the Seven Years’ War, a conflict between Britain and France which was referred to in the colonies as the French and Indian War.

It is said that William’s father was tarred and feathered for his loyalty to the old regime.  If you’ve ever seen the miniseries John Adams, based on the biography by David McCullough, you know that tarring and feathering is no laughing matter.  Soon after this incident, William’s family moved out of Frederick to a farm on the western Maryland frontier. Bitter over the treatment of his family by the upstart rebels, William, age 14, presented himself for service to His Majesty at the great city of Philadelphia, a recent British acquisition.

While Washington and his armies endured some of the harshest winter weather in Pennsylvania history, General Howe’s Philadelphia troops enjoyed the best the city had to offer.  Bowles and his cohorts discovered that the young Marylander had a flair for the dramatic.  He became a star of the stage, excelling especially in the role of the hero.  His artistry extended also to visual media.  In later years he would paint portraits to supplement his acting income.

In 1778 Bowles first saw the Caribbean Sea, as part of a flotilla of British regulars sent to Jamaica to await further orders from the Crown.  By December Ensign Bowles and his troop of Maryland Loyalists were in Pensacola, the capital of West Florida and an important way-station in the growing deerskin trade with the southern Indians.

The troops were sent to Pensacola to defend the small garrison from a Spanish attack from the west.  Although Spain had not yet entered the war being waged between Britain and her wayward colonies, she did control the mouth of the Mississippi, arguably the greatest prize in any struggle over territory in this part of the world. During the hot summer of 1779, as a great number of Bowles’s companions lay sick and dying from yellow fever and malaria, Spain and Great Britain were each devising secret plans to attack the other on the Gulf Coast.  The British needed Louisiana in order to control transportation on the great river; Spain wanted to take Florida back from the British, who had won it in a treaty negotiation at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763.

It was also in 1779 that William Augustus Bowles lost patience with a superior officer, was stripped of his commission without a court martial for insubordination, befriended a passing Indian pack train, and disappeared into the wild interior to become a Creek warrior.

The rest of his short career is even more bizarre.  The whole “pirate” thing is especially controversial to those of us on the Gulf Coast.  But that’ll have to wait till the next post.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 12th, 2010 at 12:22 am and is filed under William Augustus Bowles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.