What Portsmouth Built

People come to Portsmouth for the houses — the Moffatt-Ladd House, the John Paul Jones House — and those are worth seeing. But what made Portsmouth matter in the Revolution was its shipyards. New Hampshire had no iron production, no significant gunpowder mills. What it had was timber and the skilled labor to turn timber into ships. When Congress authorized the original thirteen Continental frigates in December 1775, the Raleigh went to Portsmouth because Portsmouth could deliver — launched within six months. When the Navy needed a fast ocean sloop in 1777, Portsmouth produced the Ranger under Continental Navy agent John Langdon.

The Whitehaven raid is told as a John Paul Jones story, which it partly is. But it is also a Portsmouth story — about what happens when a ship built by New Hampshire craftsmen is put under the command of someone willing to carry the war to England's coast. The craftsmen who built the Ranger never made the history books. Jones did. But the ship was the necessary condition for everything that followed.