Day: February 12, 2026

Historian Ed Hynes described the “Whale Boat Wars” on Long Island Sound as a brutal, often-overlooked civil war between Patriot and Loyalist neighbors, fueled by Connecticut-based privateering using fast, silent whale boats that devastated British shipping and helped pressure King George III toward peace. He illustrated the conflict’s human and tactical dimensions through raids, kidnappings, scorched-earth attacks on coastal towns, sophisticated operations like the Middlesex Meeting House raid, and notorious incidents such as the Sag Harbor raid and Benedict Arnold’s massacre at Fort Griswold. Hynes emphasized the staggering toll of imprisonment—where more men died in British prisons than in battle—and showed how, even after Yorktown, violence on the Sound escalated into personal vendettas, ultimately driving many Loyalist raiders into exile in Nova Scotia.