The cool weather and cloudy skies over Memorial Day weekend did not prevent a commemorative event of Meig’s Raid on Sag Harbor (May 24th, 1777). Reenactors brought camp accoutrements, muskets, and the scarlet redcoats that were ubiquitous across the island from August 1776-late 1783.
While the American patriots never recaptured any part of Long Island during the long British military occupation from 1776-83, there were numerous swift, spirited raids across its rambling length.
The sheltered coves and inlets of the north shore provided the British with a great launchpad to raid rebel nests across the Long Island Sound, often with schooners and whaleboats. William Tryon, the vengeful last royal governor of New York turned general, led two thousand redcoats and loyalists over twenty miles up the Connecticut coast to reduce Danbury, and its stockpiled Continental Army depot, to ash.
After the searing conflagration of Danbury, where Tryon only spared a handful of buildings, the raiding party was ambushed in and around Ridgefield. Connecticut natives David Wooster and Benedict Arnold pelted the British all the way back to Westport, where they finally reached the safety of the fleet’s artillery.
The task of retaliation was placed in the capable hands of Jonathan Meigs, an intrepid Connecticut colonel. With just over two hundred men, the crew assembled in whaleboats and reconnoitered the north fork, quickly catching intelligence that most of the British forces in the far east of Long Island had been ordered closer to New York. Meigs’ men portaged the boats to the middle of the fork, marching like turtles beneath their hoisted whaleboats until they could flip them over, and row across to the south fork.
Meig’s men entered the town after midnight, where they quickly overran the fort (now the cemetery at the Old Whaler’s Church), captured British officers at the Howell Tavern, and set fire to ships docked at the wharf. While the ships were still burning to the waterline, Meigs led his men, with some 90 prisoners, back across the sound in the dark silence.
The whaleboat war on the coast would continue, but never again would the British penetrate the Connecticut interior.
