Excerpt from The Noank's Log: A Privateer of the Revolution The latter half of the year 1776 and the whole of the year 1777 have been vaguely and erroneously described as the dark hour of the war for American independence. It is true that our armies, hastily gathered and im perfectly equipped, had been outnumbered and defeated in several important engagements. Beyond that purely military fact there was no real darkness. Upon the sea the success of the Americans had been phenomenal. Before the end of the year 1777, the commerce of Great Britain had suffered losses which dis mayed her merchants. As early as the 6th of February, 1778, Mr. Woodbridge, alderman of London, testified at the bar of the House of Lords that the number of British ships taken by American cruisers already reached the startling number of seven hundred and. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.