The Gaspee 6: A Revolutionary War Craft Beer Walking Tour (& podcast)

Stand here for a moment and let the quiet settle around you. Try to imagine this shoreline without the parked cars or the paved road behind you. Picture it as it was on the night of June 9, 1772. The tide was low. The sky was a dark sheet of cloud with thin silver edges where moonlight tried and failed to break through. The river smelled of salt and mud and early summer weed. Pawtuxet Village breathed slowly.

The rumor reached the village first in fragments. A fisherman’s boy ran down the street shouting that a British schooner had run aground near Namquid Point. Another villager insisted it was the Gaspee, the same vessel that had terrorized merchants for months, boarding ships without cause, confiscating goods in the name of the Crown, and humiliating Rhode Islanders in their own waters. People drifted toward the river in small clusters, drawn by the same instinct. When something powerful stumbles, even the quietest village feels it.

You can imagine them gathering here along the bank. Men with arms folded. Women whispering to one another. Children standing on tiptoe to see across the dark water. There are no cheers, no taunts, no riots. Only a deep and private satisfaction that fate has finally tipped its hand. The Gaspee is stuck. Not anchored. Not patrolling. Stuck.

Look out across the river now. In the distance, there would have been the faint outline of the Gaspee at rest on a shoal. A tilted shape against the water. A lantern glowing weakly on her deck. Voices carried softly across the bay, though the words were impossible to make out. The villagers watched and waited, not knowing that something larger was already in motion.

Because while Pawtuxet watched from the shoreline, another story was unfolding miles north in Providence. Men were gathering in taverns and alleys with a plan that had no guarantee of success and every possibility of death. One of them, a mariner named Joseph Bucklin, would later be identified by witnesses. But on this night he was only a figure in the dark, gripping the oarlocks of a longboat as it slid out from Fenner’s Wharf.

Let us step into his mind for a moment.

The water around his boat is black and cold. The only sounds are the quiet pull of oars and the occasional creak of hull against tide. Ahead of him, the Gaspee sits helpless in the shallows. The British crew is unaware of what approaches. Bucklin feels the weight of what he is about to do. This is not bravado. This is not drunken chaos. This is a decision. A deliberate strike against a ship that has pushed Rhode Islanders too far.

The longboats close in. From where you are standing now, you can imagine the faintest ripples of their movement traveling down the bay. Bucklin raises his musket. The British lieutenant, William Dudingston, appears at the rail to issue a warning. Bucklin exhales once, steady and sure, and fires. The moment the shot cracks across the water, history pivots. Dudingston collapses and the raiders climb up the side of the Gaspee shouting for the crew to surrender.

The fight is brief. Outnumbered and wounded, the British crew is forced into the longboats. Bucklin and the others search the schooner for supplies, scatter what they cannot use, and make their way to the powder room. In minutes, a line of black powder snakes across the deck. A torch is lowered to it. A hiss begins.

Now return to this shoreline. Imagine you are a villager standing exactly where you are now. First you see nothing. Then the horizon glows faintly orange. The glow grows larger, brighter, pulsing against the low clouds. Someone near you gasps. Someone else whispers a prayer. The Gaspee is burning. Flames leap higher than the masts, turning the water into a mirror of molten gold. The explosion comes a moment later, rolling over the river like a drumbeat. A shock of heat seems to reach even here.

People stare in stunned silence. No one knows who did it. No one dares speculate aloud. But everyone understands that whatever happened out on that water is the kind of moment that makes empires nervous.

Take a sip of your beer and look out at the river. In the darkness and in the firelight, a new idea was born. That ordinary people could choose to resist. And in choosing, they could change the world.

Stand here and listen to the water sliding beneath the bridge. It moves without hurry, curling around the pilings, whispering against the rocks and reeds. In daylight, the Pawtuxet River feels gentle, almost tame, but in the years leading up to the Revolution, this waterway was a thread of quiet resistance. Before Rhode Islanders declared liberty with words, they practiced it with their actions. Smuggling was not rebellion. It was survival.

Close your eyes for a moment and step back into a moonlit night in the 1760s. The bridge overhead is wooden. The boards creak under your boots. The river is a thin silver ribbon reflecting a half-moon that keeps darting behind clouds. Somewhere upstream, a dog barks once and falls silent. Everything else is still.

A soft splash breaks the quiet. A small skiff glides into view beneath you. The oarsman moves with practiced slowness, dipping each paddle into the water so gently that the ripples barely spread. His skiff sits low, heavy with barrels that carry rum or tea or maybe molasses for a distillery up the road. The British Crown insists these goods be taxed, inspected and controlled. The people of Pawtuxet insist otherwise.

Watch him in your mind. He is not young, not old, but seasoned. Salt crusts his sleeves. A knife on his belt reflects a sliver of moon. His eyes keep shifting toward the river mouth where a British cutter waits like a steel trap. But he has an advantage. He knows this river as if it were a part of his own body.

The skiff passes under the bridge. You hear his breath as he exhales through his nose. He adjusts the weight of the barrels so they do not shift. The current tugs at the boat, urging it toward the deeper channel where the British might spot him. He resists with a small push of his paddle and slips instead into a narrow, winding branch of the river that strangers would overlook. A place where the water becomes too shallow for cutters or patrol boats to follow.

Now picture the officers on that cutter. Their boots are polished. Their uniforms are heavy wool that traps heat even in the cool night air. One leans over the side of the deck, scanning the water for suspicious movement. He hears something he cannot place. A faint click of wood on wood. But he sees nothing but reeds that sway in small arcs and the ripple of a fish breaking the surface. He mutters about the stubbornness of Rhode Islanders. He mutters about the local children who signal danger with laundry on lines. He mutters that the river is helping them, as if the landscape itself has taken sides.

He is not entirely wrong.

The smugglers work in a rhythm that mirrors the river. They use fog and tide like tools. They hide goods beneath thick tarps that smell of fish and rope. They unload barrels behind barns before dawn and sometimes leave decoys in the water to mislead British patrols. They do not see these acts as treason. They see them as fairness.

Return now to the skiff. The oarsman slows his strokes as he reaches the line of cattails near the bank. A child appears in the shadows, no older than ten. She carries no lantern, only a small hand signal. A slow lift of the arm meaning safe. He nods once. She vanishes into the dark as if swallowed by the village itself.

He slips past the reeds and disappears into the marsh channel. The British cutter waits for a boat that will never appear. By the time they give up, the contraband will already be stored beneath someone’s floorboards or transferred to a horse-drawn cart that drifts down a dirt road toward Providence.

Standing on this bridge now, you can feel the cleverness, the daring and the quiet rebellion that defined this place long before any formal fight for independence. Take a sip of your beer and let the river speak. It has always carried more than water.

Walk a little farther into the neighborhood and pause among these old houses. The wooden siding, the uneven window panes, the brick chimneys that lean just slightly to one side. These structures have survived storms, heat, war and time itself. They have seen generations come and go, each leaving an imprint so faint you must squint to feel it. In this quiet cluster of homes lived the world of eighteenth-century Pawtuxet, a village caught between routine life and the rising tension of a nation not yet born.

No record names a specific Pawtuxet house as the private meeting place of Gaspee raiders, but we know what the British investigators did after the burning. They came here. They questioned people door to door. They demanded to know who had helped, who had sheltered, who had spoken too freely. And they found nothing because no one offered anything.

Let us step into one of these homes as it might have been on the night after the Gaspee burned. Imagine a narrow staircase worn smooth in the center. Imagine a fireplace that spits with sap as a log crackles apart. The smell of bread lingers in the kitchen. A mother stands at the window, lifting the curtain just enough to see two British officers walk from door to door. Her heart beats hard enough that she wonders if the men outside can hear it.

Her husband sits at the table with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped. He was not on the water last night, but he knows men who might have been. Men from Providence. Men from Warwick. Men who share the same anger at the Gaspee and the same willingness to act when the Crown refuses to hear them. He knows he will not betray them.

Upstairs, a child lies wide awake and listens. Children always listen. She hears the muffled sound of boots approaching the door. Her father stands. Her mother tenses. There is a knock. Three short raps. Her father opens the door with a careful nod.

The officers ask their questions. Did he see lights in the water. Did he hear any boats passing down the bay. Did he know anyone who disappeared during the night. He answers politely but with nothing of use. He speaks of chores and fishing nets and the usual rhythms of a coastal village. The officers sense his composure and they hate it. They cannot intimidate a man who is not afraid of them.

When they leave, the mother exhales for the first time in minutes. The father closes the door and leans his forehead against the wood.

Across the village, other homes share similar moments. Villagers hold their secrets tightly, not because they enjoy defying the Crown but because loyalty to their neighbors is stronger than fear of authority. Even those who had no part in the raid refuse to assist the investigation. It becomes a quiet pact, unspoken but absolute.

Standing here now, surrounded by these colonial houses, you can feel the echoes of that solidarity. Walls have memories. Floors remember footsteps. Fireplaces remember voices that spoke low out of caution, not cowardice. Pawtuxet did not set the Gaspee alight, but Pawtuxet helped ensure that those who did could not be easily found.

Take a sip of your beer and imagine the candlelight behind these windows. Ordinary people. Extraordinary resolve.

Look out over the water. Today the cove is calm and orderly with white masts lined neatly in rows and docks reaching out like fingers toward the river. But if you peel away the decades of development, you find a landscape that once felt far wilder. Thick reeds. Mud so soft it swallowed footprints whole. Shallow passages that shifted with storms. An ideal place for things to appear and disappear without explanation.

In the years before open rebellion, coastal coves like this one were the backstage corridors of Rhode Island trade. Some of that trade was legal. Some of it was purposely harder to trace. British officers patrolled the bay with rigid discipline, but their discipline was no match for the flexibility of a determined coastal community.

Picture a night here before the shoreline was shaped into a marina. Fog drifts low, brushing the tops of the cattails. The moonlight flickers between clouds. A narrow skiff appears almost out of nowhere, moving so close to the reeds that the branches scrape the gunwale. Inside are two men. One wears a knit cap pulled low over his ears. The other keeps glancing behind them, scanning for the faint silhouette of a British rowboat.

Under a tarp that smells of fish and pine shavings are crates filled with tea or textiles or small casks of molasses. Their goal is simple. Move these goods from this hidden cove to a discreet storage place before sunrise. They are not heroes or villains. They are workers caught in an economic system that has grown too heavy, too restrictive, too unfair.

Suddenly the younger man at the bow stiffens. He sees the flicker of torchlight near the mouth of the cove. British soldiers are approaching by water. There is no time to row, no time to panic. They pull the skiff into a stand of reeds so thick the boat grinds almost to a halt. The older man throws branches across the tarp. Both men drop flat and hold their breath.

Listen closely. You can almost hear the British voices as they drift nearer. They complain about the cold. They complain about their orders. One mutters that this entire bay feels cursed with trickery. Their oars slice through the black water. The torchlight passes so close that it paints thin gold lines on the reeds. Then the rowboat fades into the night, still searching for smugglers who are already within arm’s reach and perfectly still.

The two men in the skiff wait until the voices disappear. One begins laughing quietly. The other swats him on the arm to silence him but ends up laughing too. It is the kind of laugh that comes from fear melting into relief, the kind that knows they will have to do this again in a few nights. The cove has protected them once more.

Now look around you. Imagine the shoreline without docks or lights. Imagine the uneven mud flats stretching toward Warwick. Imagine the reeds swaying in a slow rhythmic pulse that hides movement beneath its surface. Pawtuxet Cove was not a battlefield, but it was part of the invisible network that kept local commerce alive and kept British officers constantly outwitted.

Take a sip of your beer and let that playfulness bloom on your tongue. This village has always known how to move quietly

Stand here in the open space of the park. Listen to the breeze moving through the leaves. Today the park feels peaceful, a place for picnics and weekend walks, but during the unrest of the 1770s, public greens like this carried a different weight. They were places where people waited. Places where fear and hope lived inside the same crowd.

Imagine this space two hundred fifty years ago. The grass is shorter, patchier. The trees are fewer. Homes nearby burn light through their windows. The village is tense. A rumor has spread that British ships have been seen moving along the coast. No one knows their destination. No one knows whether they come to investigate the Gaspee, intimidate local villages or simply make an example of anyone who dares test the authority of the Crown.

Families begin to gather here in the dark. Some carry lanterns that cast small circles of trembling light. Some hold blankets or baskets as if expecting to wait a long time. Children cling to their parents. Teenagers try to hide their nerves. The older men in the village trade bits of news and speculation in hushed voices.

Picture a mother kneeling to wrap her arms around two frightened children. She speaks softly, telling them that they will be safe so long as they stay together. Nearby, a fisherman checks the flint on his musket and wonders whether he will be called to join a militia patrol. A young man listens to the distant sounds of the river and tries to distinguish the creak of a boat from the whistle of wind. He feels both fear and an odd kind of pride. His village may be small, but it is not helpless.

A group of local men forms near the center of the park. One speaks with a steady voice, trying to calm the crowd. He says that British ships are unpredictable, but so are Rhode Islanders. He reminds them that the village has weathered storms before and will weather this one too. He tells them to look after one another. That reassurance spreads through the crowd like warmth.

Now shift your focus toward the far edge of the park. A young boy, maybe seven or eight, takes his father’s hand. He looks up with wide eyes and asks if the British are coming to hurt them. His father kneels and places a hand on the boy’s shoulder. He tells him that even if the soldiers come, they are not alone. They are a community. They stand for one another. The boy nods. He does not fully understand, but he believes his father. That belief is its own kind of strength.

As the night deepens, the villagers remain in the park. They talk. They watch the horizon. They comfort each other. No battle arrives. No soldiers descend. But the act of gathering itself matters. It is a reminder that fear is manageable when shared. It is a reminder that resilience often begins with simple presence.

Take a sip of your beer and let that sense of unity settle inside you. This park has held more than laughter and sunlight. It has held a village preparing itself for an uncertain world.

Walk toward the boathouse and feel the boards creak beneath your feet. Now imagine the same place in the eighteenth century. The building is different, older, the wood darker from years of weather. The smell of sawdust and salt hangs heavy in the air. This was not just a place to store boats. It was a workplace, a heartbeat of the maritime community.

Step into the scene. Shipwrights stand over long beams of oak and pine, measuring with careful eyes and striking with mallets that sound like distant thunder. Their shirts cling to their backs. Their hands are thick with calluses and small cuts. They speak little because the work requires rhythm more than conversation.

This boathouse represents the kind of labor that shaped Rhode Island’s identity. Before engines and fiberglass, the ocean belonged to those who understood wood. Shipbuilders constructed the vessels that carried merchants, fishermen and families up and down the bay. They crafted skiffs light enough to travel shallow waters and sturdy boats that could withstand rough seas. Without their labor, the economy of Pawtuxet would collapse.

Now imagine a morning shortly after the Gaspee burned. British officers arrive in the village to question anyone connected to boats. They step into the boathouse, their polished boots clicking against the floorboards. Their expressions are sharp with suspicion. They believe that someone here must have helped the attackers. They believe there must be tools, wood scraps or unfinished boats that will reveal the truth.

A shipwright stands by his workbench. He is older, with gray streaks in his beard and broad shoulders that sag slightly from years of lifting heavy timber. The officers demand to know who has been building boats capable of traveling quickly in the night. They demand to know whether he assisted the rebels. The man listens quietly, wiping resin from his hands with a cloth that once belonged to his father.

One of the officers points at an unfinished skiff and says they may confiscate it if they suspect it was meant for rebellious purposes. The shipwright looks at the skiff, then at the officer. In a calm voice he replies that the officer is welcome to take it once he finishes building it. Until then, it belongs to no one. The officer blinks. He was expecting fear. He was expecting compliance. Instead he is met with the steady gaze of a man who understands the weight of his own labor and refuses to let it be dismissed.

The officers leave with nothing. The shipwright returns to his work. He smooths the edge of the plank with a long stroke and exhales slowly. Outside, children run past. Someone calls out a greeting. The world continues, shaped by hands that rarely appear in history books but hold history together all the same.

Take your final sip of beer and offer a quiet toast to the craftsmen whose skill supported a community facing uncertainty. They did not carry muskets or fire cannons, but their work built the vessels that carried Rhode Island into its future.