The Penobscot Expedition of 1779 ended in dismal failure with the entire American fleet, the largest ever assembled in the American Revolution, being destroyed and the army walking back to Boston embarrassed and humiliated. All fiascos need a scapegoat, and the Penobscot Expedition was no exception.

On August 13, 1779, the Americans in Penobscot Bay were trapped by a British fleet under Sir George Collier. Between midnight and 5 a.m., 750 Massachusetts militiamen and all their supplies were loaded back onto twenty-five transport ships and moved north towards the Penobscot River, hoping to make their escape. Inconceivably, the entire American fleet, all 44 ships, would be gone the next day, without any shots being fired by either side.

The Penobscot Expedition stalled soon after the fighting started due to a squabble between the army commander, General Solomon Lovell, and his naval counterpart, Commodore Dudley Saltonstall. Showing a reluctance to engage the enemy that bordered on cowardice, Saltonstall was an obstacle that Lovell could not overcome. Without the support of Saltonstall’s guns, Lovell refused to risk a frontal assault on Fort George. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Americans, they were now in a race against time as a British fleet under Sir George Collier was sailing north from New York to relieve the British garrison in Penobscot Bay.

The Penobscot Expedition that sailed from Boston Harbor consisted of 1,400 men loaded onto 25 transport vessels and defended by 19 warships, the largest fleet ever assembled by the Americans during the war. It approached Penobscot Bay on July 25, 1779, six weeks after the British had arrived and began construction on Fort George. Despite their best efforts, the fort was unfinished and remained only a five-foot-tall earthen rampart. Early on July 28, the Americans stormed ashore and, following a determined assault, the Massachusetts militiamen reached the edge of the woods at the top of the plateau, a few hundred yards from the fort.

The greatest naval disaster in our nation’s history until Pearl Harbor was a largely forgotten episode that took place on the remote coast of Maine in the summer of 1779. That year, Lord George Germaine, the British Secretary of State for the American colonies, decided to establish a northern foothold on the coastline between Boston and Halifax to better suppress smuggling that was rampant in New England.