Existing comment:
Barney's Cheseapeake Flotilla
1813-1814
The resources of the Navy Department were so thinly stretched that neither men nor ships could be spared for the defense of Chesapeake Bay. When the British fleet appeared in early 1813, they met little resistance. Privateer Captain Joshua Barney proposed that the Navy appoint him to command an independent flotilla of barges and other shallow-draft vessels to harass British amphibious operations. By the spring of 1814, the US Chesapeake Flotilla amounted to some 26 barges and gunboats, manned by 900 men. Leaving half his force to defend Baltimore, Barney made the Patuxent River his base of operations. Most of his skirmishes with the British took place at the mouth of that river and in one of its tributaries, St. Leonard's Creek. |