The customs service has a violent history in Britain’s North American colonies in the eighteenth century.
The Treasury in London has done little to correct known problems, and Britain itself has been at war during much of this period and is not in a strategic position to risk antagonizing its overseas colonies.
Several successive ministries have implemented reforms following Britain’s victory in the Seven Years' War in an attempt to achieve more effective administrative control and to raise more revenue in the colonies.
The Admiralty has purchased six Marblehead sloops and schooners and given them Anglicized French names based on their recent acquisitions in Canada.
St John, St Lawrence, Chaleur, Hope, Magdalen, and Gaspee had had their French accents removed, and subsequent nineteenth and twentieth-century authors will use the English spellings.
The revenue is necessary, Parliament believes, to bolster military and naval defensive positions along the borders of their far-flung empire, and to pay the crushing debt incurred in the war—which the British believe had been fought on behalf of those colonies.
Among these reforms was the deputizing of the Royal Navy's Sea Officers to help enforce customs laws in colonial ports.
In 1764, Rhode Islanders had attacked HMS St John, and in 1768 they had burned the customs ship HMS Liberty on Goat Island in Newport harbor.
In early 1772, Lieutenant William Dudingston sails HMS Gaspee into Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay to enforce customs collection and mandatory inspection of cargo.
Rhode Island had gained a reputation for smuggling and trading with the French during the previous war.
Dudingston arrives in Rhode Island in February and meets with Governor Joseph Wanton, but he does not find the governor to be overly helpful.
Soon after he begins patrolling Narragansett Bay, Gaspee stops and inspects the sloop Fortune on February 17 and seizes twelve hogsheads of undeclared rum.
Dudingston sends Fortune and the seized rum to Boston, believing that any seized items left in a Rhode Island port will be reclaimed by colonists.
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