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标题：Britain’s Green Water Navy in the Revolutionary Chesapeake: Long-Range Asymmetric Warfare in the Littoral
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作者：C. Thomas Long
期刊名称：International Journal of Naval History
电子版ISSN：1932-6556
出版年度：2009
卷号：8
期号：2
出版社：International Journal of Naval History
摘要：In the pre-dawn hours twenty armed sailors left their forty-eight foot boat, moving silently into the darkness. The men quickly covered about three miles into the interior of the hostile province. They entered a supposedly secure facility and seized fifteen containers of explosives before the enemy was even aware of their presence. This "special operation" could have been the SEALs' effort to prevent the destruction of Iraq's vital oil infrastructure at Umm Qasr on 20 March 2003. Or it could have been the opening phase of Operation Jackstay in Vietnam's Rung Sat Special Zone on 26 March 1966. But it wasn't. It was a surprise raid on the colonial magazine in Williamsburg – the opening engagement of the Revolutionary War in the southern Chesapeake theater. The War for American Independence began in Virginia eight days before word of the fighting at Lexington and Concord even reached the Old Dominion. At three o'clock in the morning of 21 April 1775, seamen from His Majesty's Schooner Magdalen, moored abreast Burwell's ferry on the James River, went into the center of Williamsburg to remove the patriots' gunpowder from the colonial magazine.1The men were acting on the orders of John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore and the last royal governor of Virginia. An angry crowd of white citizens assembled upon hearing of the governor's preemptive strike against the colonial militia. They protested that the powder belonged to the colony and insisted upon its return because of rumors of nearby slave unrest.2The seizure of the powder was just the first volley in a long, difficult campaign