The Black Snake off the Jersey Shore

By 1780 the New Jersey coast had become a war of small boats. Loyalist refugees raided out of Sandy Hook and Staten Island in whaleboats and barges, burning salt works and carrying off cattle and prisoners; Patriot militia answered in kind. The armed gunboat Black Snake, commanded by Captain Joshua Huddy of Monmouth County, was one of the boats that hunted them through the bays behind the barrier islands.

A boat like this carried a small cannon in the bow, a dozen men at the oars and a sail for open water. It could be beached, hidden in a creek and back on the bay before a British cruiser knew it was there.

Huddy was captured at Toms River in 1782 and hanged by Loyalists that April. The boat's war outlived him by only a few months.

The gunboat cuts across the picture from right to left, low in the water and moving fast — eight men pulling in unison, a small cannon in the bow, the name BLACK SNAKE lettered on the hull. Huddy stands in the stern with the tiller and the flag. The bay is flat gold under a sky of piled cloud, the sun just up over the marsh. Far off, a square-rigged ship marks the horizon. Every line in the painting runs toward the direction the boat is going.