Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution

Eric Jay Dolin

May 2022 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Eric Jason Martin

About this audiobook

The heroic story of the founding of the US Navy during the Revolution has been told many times, yet largely missing from maritime histories of America's first war is the ragtag fleet of private vessels that truly revealed the new nation's character-above all, its ambition and entrepreneurial ethos. In Rebels at Sea, Eric Jay Dolin corrects that significant omission, and contends that privateers, as they were called, were in fact critical to the American victory. Privateers were privately owned vessels that were granted permission by the new government to seize British merchantmen and men of war. As Dolin stirringly demonstrates, at a time when the young Continental Navy numbered no more than about sixty vessels, privateers rushed to fill the gaps. Nearly 2,000 set sail over the course of the war, with tens of thousands of Americans serving on them and capturing some 1,800 British ships. Some Americans viewed these men as cynical opportunists whose only aim was loot. Yet Dolin shows that privateersmen were as patriotic as their fellow Americans, and moreover that they greatly contributed to the war's success: diverting critical British resources to protecting their shipping, providing much-needed supplies at home, and bolstering the new nation's confidence that it might actually defeat the most powerful military force in the world.

About the author

Eric Jay Dolin is the bestselling, award-winning author of fourteen books, including A Furious Sky, Leviathan, and Black Flags, Blue Waters. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, where he received his PhD in environmental policy, Dolin lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.

Eric Jason Martin is a producer, director, and voice performer based in Los Angeles. He is the AudioFile Earphones and Audie Award-winning narrator of over 200 audiobooks, including works by Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Karin Slaughter, and Lee Child.