More than a year before the Boston Tea Party, Rhode Island merchants rowed out in the dead of night, shot a Royal Navy commander, and burned HMS Gaspee to the waterline. This deep dive unpacks the largely forgotten Gaspee affair and the economic powder keg of 1760s and 1770s Rhode Island, where an economy built on smuggling and the triangular trade collided with Britain’s new enforcement of the Navigation Acts.

We follow Lieutenant William Duddingston’s heavy-handed patrols, the grounding of the Gaspee off Warwick, the organized raid of 18 longboats led by figures like Abraham Whipple and John Brown, and the royal commission threatening treason trials in London. That threat helped spur the committees of correspondence, while modern historians highlight the raiders’ ties to the rum and slave trade behind today’s celebratory Gaspee Days.

• How Duddingston sent the seized sloop Fortune to Boston, bypassing Rhode Island courts
• The Hannah luring the Gaspee onto a sandbar at what is now Gaspee Point
• Raiders dressing Duddingston’s wound and reading the ship’s papers before burning it
• Governor Joseph Wanton discrediting witness Aaron Briggs and stalling the royal inquiry
• How the extradition threat led Virginia to create an intercolonial committee of correspondence