This book details the efforts of the Continental Congress to harass the British province of West Florida with Marine raids down the Mississippi River and naval operations. Oliver Pollock, Congress' agent at New Orleans, outfitted and commissioned the captured USS Morris and after she was sunk by a hurricane he borrowed the schooner Caindre from the Spanish, outfitted her and sent her under Captain William Pickles with the surviving crew of the Morris into Lake Pontchartrain where Pickles captured the much heavier armed British warship HMSWest Florida in a bloody single ship action. The strengths of the vessels and the details of the battle is told here for the first time. Following the battle Pollock took the West Florida into American service as the USS West Florida. The USS West Florida under Pickles assisted the Spanish in the siege and capture of Mobile in 1780. This book recites for the first time the details of those actions and the activities of the USS West Florida and Captain Pickles. Also covered is the British and Spanish naval activity in West Florida up to the siege of Pensacola and thereby fills a void in the Revolutionary War history of the northern Gulf Coast.
About the Author: Sid Schell is a retired maritime lawyer living in Mobile, Alabama. He is the author of Fort Powell and the Civil War Western approaches to Mobile Bay 1861 - 1865. For more than 40 years he has been building research files on Mobile and Southwest Alabama. He has published articles on the Civil War submarines and secret weapons tested at mobile and on the Civil War forts at Oven and Choctaw Bluffs in Clark County, Alabama. A scuba diver, he has located and surveyed numerous Civil War vessels including the CSS Huntsville, CSS Tuscaloosa and the CSS Gaines. Sidney served as a member of the Board of Directors of the History Museum of Mobile since the early 1980s with five terms as chairman. In 1985 he was Appointed Adjunct Research Associate with the Department of Sociology/Anthropology with the University of South Alabama. He has served on the CSS Alabama Commission, as chairman of the Tecumseh commission and at one time chaired the Underwater Resources Committee for the Alabama Historic Commission. Sidney is also an artist and ship model builder and is well underway with the writing of his next book, The History of the Confederate Naval Squadron at Mobile 1861 - 1865.