Tom Dalsaso, Jr.

He walked out of a British prison dressed as a British naval officer in a uniform he'd had secretly tailored behind bars, and then, back in the war, he beat a more powerful enemy warship by shouting a false order his own crew knew to ignore. His name was Joshua Barney, and he was one of the boldest and most ingenious American sailors of the entire Revolution. Barney was a Baltimore boy with no education and no connections who went to sea young and threw himself into the naval war the instant it came. He fought in action after action, and the sea war being what it was, he was captured more than once. Eventually the British shipped him across the Atlantic and locked him up in the notorious Old Mill Prison in Plymouth, England, a cold, hungry place where captured American sailors were left to rot, far from any hope of exchange. Barney refused to rot. From inside the prison, he hatched one of the great escapes of the war. He arranged, somehow, to have a British naval officer's uniform secretly made for him by a tailor. He played a long game, even faking an injury to lull the guards and lower their suspicion. And then, with the help of fellow prisoners and a sympathetic guard, he simply put on the uniform of the enemy and walked out the gate as if he belonged there, a British officer going about his business. He slipped out of England entirely, made his way to France, and from there got himself back home to America and straight back into the fight. The British had caged him, and he had strolled out wearing their own coat. But his masterpiece came on the water, in April 1782, in Delaware Bay. Barney was given command of the Hyder Ally, a converted merchant ship with a modest sixteen guns, and sent to protect American shipping. There he ran into the British sloop-of-war General Monk, a real warship, better armed and more powerful, exactly the kind of fight a ship like the Hyder Ally was supposed to avoid. Barney took it on anyway, and he won it with a trick. As the two ships closed and maneuvered, Barney shouted a helm order loud enough for the enemy to hear, deliberately commanding his ship to turn one way. But he had worked out a secret arrangement with his helmsman in advance: the man was to do the exact opposite of whatever Barney shouted. The British, hearing the order, anticipated the turn and adjusted to counter it, and instead Barney's ship went the other way entirely. The maneuver caught the General Monk completely wrong-footed, and the Hyder Ally surged into a position to rake her from bow to stern, pouring devastating fire down the length of the enemy deck. In about half an hour, the more powerful British warship was beaten into surrender. It was one of the cleverest and most celebrated American naval victories of the whole war. Joshua Barney fought on for the rest of his life, serving at sea in later wars and even commanding a stubborn stand on land against the British decades later, earning the respect of friend and enemy alike. But remember him for the Revolution, for the man who would not stay a prisoner and would not lose a fight he was supposed to lose. He escaped an empire's prison in the empire's own uniform, and he conquered a stronger ship with a single shouted lie. Nerve and cunning were his real weapons, and he had more of both than almost anyone afloat.