The British stripped Suffolk County bare for seven years, and almost nobody remembers the men who fought back on the water.
After the Battle of Long Island in late August 1776, George Washington’s forces collapsed and retreated, leaving Nassau and Suffolk Counties under British occupation for the remainder of the Revolutionary War. British fortifications ran the length of the South Shore, from Fort Greene in Brooklyn all the way east to Sag Harbor. Supply ships worked the coastline at night, hauling timber and whatever else the British could take from local communities back to command centers in New York City. The Continental Congress had a militia problem and almost no navy. So it turned to a solution as old as maritime conflict itself.
Professional pirates. Licensed ones.
The Continental Congress issued 1,700 Letters of Marque during the Revolution, authorizing privateers to attack British shipping along the East Coast. Those operations captured 600 British ships. In New York and New England, the letters came from one of three men: John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress; Jonathan Trumbull, Governor of Connecticut; or George Clinton, Governor of New York. Suffolk County produced its share of these fighters, and one small South Shore hamlet sat at the center of the action.
Blue Point, a hamlet in the Town of Islip along the Great South Bay, was an active privateering hub that history has largely ignored. Its strategic position made it dangerous to British shipping. The hamlet sits directly across the bay from what is now Point O’ Woods on Fire Island, which in the 18th century was the location of the main Fire Island inlet before it filled in. British supply ships used signal fires, called beacons, to navigate that inlet at night and move west along the shipping lane toward the city.
Warren McDowell, author of “Blue Point Through the War Years,” described the operation to Great South Bay News. “The British would ship timber, or whatever they could pilfer, to send to their New York City headquarters,” McDowell said. “Blue Point is directly across from the current-day Point O’ Woods, which used to be the Fire Island inlet before it filled in. The British shipped their goods through the inlet at night, using the light from the beacons to enter the shipping lane.”
The privateers who hunted those ships operated in small, nimble craft. McDowell said most Blue Point privateers came from the Hamptons or Connecticut and used either whaleboats with cannons mounted on each end or periaugers, shallow-draft flat-bottom vessels equipped with swivel guns. A successful raid paid the crew 50 percent of everything taken, including the captured ships themselves, which were sailed to New London and auctioned off. The Long Island Press account of this period draws on McDowell’s research and contemporary British dispatches to reconstruct what happened on the bay.
Two of the more effective operators were Captain Ebenezer Dayton and Israel Deming. Both attacked British vessels in the dark, before ships could reach the light of the beacons and the relative safety of the inlet.
Dayton’s story is worth sitting with. Born in Coram, Suffolk County, on March 17, 1744, he worked as a merchant and peddler before the war. He enlisted in the Suffolk County militia, and after the Battle of Long Island he was among the many residents who crossed to Connecticut rather than live under occupation. In 1778, Dayton received his Letter of Marque from Governor Trumbull. Armed with a schooner named the Suffolk, he began nightly patrols of the Great South Bay near Blue Point. According to British dispatches sent from Long Island to New York City, between May 20, 1778, and December 5, 1778, Dayton commanded as many as 45 men across multiple whaleboat operations targeting British supply ships moving through the bay.
That’s a serious military footprint for a former peddler from Coram.
The American Battlefield Trust’s Revolutionary War resources document how the naval and maritime dimensions of the conflict have consistently received less attention than the land campaigns. That’s a pattern McDowell’s research challenges directly. The Great South Bay wasn’t a sideshow. It was an active supply corridor, and the men who raided it night after night forced the British to commit resources and attention to a theater they hadn’t fully anticipated.
Seven years of occupation left Suffolk County depleted. The privateers didn’t liberate the island, and they couldn’t stop the British from holding it. What they did was make the supply line expensive, unpredictable, and dangerous, which in a long war of attrition matters more than any single engagement. The National Archives holds records of Letters of Marque that could surface more names like Dayton’s, men who fought the occupation from the water while the land battles took all the credit.