A British squadron of 10 frigates and smaller ships established a presence at the mouth of the Penobscot River and built an earthwork fort on land. The Continental force sent to remove the British comprised two squadrons of 19 warships and 25 support ships in total, a force of 1,000 colonial marines, and a 100-man artillery unit commanded by the famous Paul Revere. The Continental force not only outnumbered the British squadron in ships, but also had a great advantage in the number of guns.
 
The three-week battle ended in an ignominious Patriot defeat, as the naval squadrons failed to support the ground troops struggling to take the British fort. Commodore Dudley Saltonstall was harshly criticized after the battle for his timidity and reluctance to attack the British ships, and was dismissed for incompetence after a court marshal. (Some historians defend Saltonstall and claim that the inability to coordinate between naval and ground forces was a fault on both sides.) Either way, the British managed to hold their positions until they received reinforcements to turn the tide of battle. The entire Patriot naval force was scuttled, destroyed or captured, forcing the survivors to retreat on foot with minimal supplies and arms. Paul Revere was accused of disobedience and cowardice, and was dismissed from his militia position; he later cleared his name.

State navies
Several of the Patriot states had their own state navies in addition to the Continental Navy. These varied in size from a single ship (New Hampshire) to dozens (Pennsylvania), with vessels ranging from single-gun row galleys to frigates, and were often restricted to local defense.
                                        
Shipbuilding for Virginia was originally scattered over the state, but was eventually consolidated at two locations. One of these, Gosport Shipyard, was originally a British facility and destroyed during the war. Once rebuilt, it eventually became Norfolk Naval Shipyard, the oldest and largest industrial facility of the U.S. Navy. While the Virginia Navy was large, it was also chronically undermanned and under-armed, and most of it was destroyed or captured in April 1781 by British forces under the command of the turncoat Benedict Arnold (who just five years earlier was still the hero of the hour for the Continental side during the action on Lake Champlain described in the first part of our article).

On the night of September 7, 1776, Sergeant Ezra Lee attempted to approach the British 64-gun ship of the line HMS Eagle and attach the mine to it. The attempt failed when he couldn’t stab the mine’s anchor point into the hull, possibly due to the ship’s new copper sheathing or an iron plate connected to the rudder hinge. A later attack on another ship also failed, and the Turtle was eventually lost when the sloop carrying her was sunk by British gunfire. Bushnell later reported recovering the submarine, but its further fate is unknown.
 
The problem with privateers
The states, just like Congress, also issued letters of marque to civilian captains, authorizing them to act as privateers, preying on British shipping. Most states with a navy also set up admiralty courts to oversee the division of captured ships and plunder brought in by privateers. Congress alone issued 1,697 letters of marque; the total number including letters issued by states and American agents in Europe and the Caribbean was over 2,000. Over 2,000 British ships are estimated to have been taken by privateers, driving up British marine insurance rates to unprecedented levels and prompting British merchants to appeal to the Crown for an end to hostilities in 1781. The threat of privateer raids (and French, Spanish and Dutch invasions) kept the coastal populations of England in fear.

Privateering was a welcome addition to the Continental arsenal, but it also backfired in an unforeseen manner. Plunder taken by Continental and state navy ships were used for the war effort, while successful privateers could keep much of what they took. This allowed the latter to offer their crews far higher wages than the navies, which led to a manpower shortage and forced several navy ships to sit in harbor as they didn’t have enough men to operate.
 
Shuttering the Navy
Approximately 65 ships served in the Continental Navy at one time or another, some of them captured from the British. Thanks to the overwhelming superiority of the Royal Navy, only 11 of these vessels saw the end of the war (at least under a Continental flag; some were captured by the British). Nevertheless, the first navy of the United States managed to stay in the fight until France openly allied with the Patriots, bringing its own massive naval power into play. It was the actions of the French Navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake (also called Battle of the Capes) that prevented the Royal Navy from either reinforcing or evacuating Lord Cornwallis’s beleaguered forces at Yorktown in September 1781. Once Cornwallis was forced to surrender the next month, the War of Independence was practically already won.

The last ship of the Continental Navy, and the firer of the last shots of the war, was the frigate Alliance, which participated in John Paul Jones’s (John Paul Jones – Part I) (Part - II) famous European expedition in 1779. After serving through the rest of the war, she was sold on August 1, 1785, leaving the Continental Navy without any ships. The newly born United States of America was strapped for money and more concerned with internal economic development than naval power, and the Continental Navy was dissolved.
 
Rebirth
The lack of a navy left the merchant shipping of the young United States at the mercy of the Barbary corsairs, groups of Muslim pirates and privateers operating out of North Africa. Beyond seizing ships, the Barbary corsairs also raided coastal villages and towns in Europe for loot and slaves, mainly in the Mediterranean, but also in the British Isles, and even as far as Iceland.
 
British treaties with North African states had previously protected American merchant shipping, but those treaties no longer applied once the United States won its independence. The U.S. established peace treaties with the Barbary states to reduce this danger – in fact, the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship of 1786 is the United States’ oldest non-broken friendship treaty to this day. These treaties, however, included steep tributes to be paid by America to the Barbary states: the annual tribute paid to Algiers alone made up 20% of the U.S. federal government’s expenditures.

America was understandably bristling at having to pay off foreign states for security. The only armed U.S. naval presence for most of the 1790s was the Revenue-Marine (later United States Revenue Cutter Service), one of the predecessor organizations of the Coast Guard. The United States was struggling financially after winning its independence, and tried to raise money issuing heavy tariffs on international trade. The tariffs, in turn, caused an upswing in smuggling as merchants were anxious to avoid the extra costs.
 
The original mission of the Revenue-Marine’s fast, small and medium-sized cutters was to combat these smuggling operations, but circumstances forced them to take on military duties. The cutters, however, were far too few and lightly armed to protect American merchant ships from piracy. Seeing the necessity of a permanent navy, Congress passed the Naval Act of 1794, which established the U.S. Navy and ordered the construction of its first six frigates, including the USS Constitution, proud Old Ironsides, the oldest commissioned warship still afloat today.