The Research Desk · Behind Black Powder on Bunker Hill
Seven weeks after Bunker Hill, George Washington got the worst news of his young command. In early August 1775 he learned that his army outside Boston had about 36 barrels of gunpowder, not the 300 he’d been told. That came to roughly nine cartridges a man, against British regulars who carried sixty. Washington kept the number secret and begged every colony for more.
Help was already coming, from an island 700 miles out in the Atlantic. Bermuda lived on American food, and Congress had voted to cut off trade with loyal colonies that September. But the ban made an exception for ships that brought munitions. That July a Bermudian merchant, Colonel Henry Tucker, went to Philadelphia and, with Benjamin Franklin, worked out a trade: powder for food.
Bermuda had powder. For decades, ships calling at the island had paid a fee in coin or gunpowder, and the store sat in a lightly guarded magazine on the hill above St. George’s.
On the night of August 14, 1775, local men and sailors from the Virginia sloop Lady Catharine got in through the roof, forced the doors, and carried the kegs down to Tobacco Bay, where boats ferried them out. Governor George James Bruere, whose daughter was married to one of Tucker’s sons, woke to an empty magazine and sails on the horizon. He reported about a hundred barrels gone. A Royal Navy captain put it at 126 kegs. Bruere offered a reward. No one claimed it, and no one was ever convicted.
Where the powder went is still debated. Some accounts send it to Charleston, others to Philadelphia. Either way, it went into the patriot supply.
The twist: Washington knew nothing of the raid. In September he wrote his own appeal to the people of Bermuda and sent it with Rhode Island’s armed sloop Katy. She arrived too late. The magazine was already empty.
Why it’s in my filesBlack Powder on Bunker Hill lives inside that shortage. In 1775, a keg of powder was worth stealing, and stealing it is how Caleb Cannon first makes his name.
- Hugh T. Harrington, “The Bermuda Powder Raids of 1775,” Journal of the American Revolution (2014)
- “Ammunition Crisis at the Siege of Boston in 1775,” AmericanRevolution.org
- J. L. Bell, “Misinformation, Disinformation, and Gen. Washington’s Gunpowder Supply,” Journal of the American Revolution (2014)
- “The Raid on Bermuda That Saved the American Revolution,” Smithsonian magazine
