George Washington needed a navy. He had no ships, no sailors worth mentioning, no tradition of naval warfare to draw on, and a British fleet that controlled every coastline that mattered. What he had, through a fortunate coincidence of biography, was a sea captain from County Wexford.
John Barry was born in 1745 at Tacumshane, a small townland on the southern coast of Wexford. He went to sea as a boy, moved to Philadelphia in his teens, and by his late twenties was one of the most successful merchant captains trading between the American colonies and the Caribbean. He was thirty years old when the revolution began, and he offered everything he had — his experience, his ships, his connections — to the Continental cause.
In April 1776, commanding the brig Lexington, Barry captured the British tender Edward in the first ship-to-ship naval engagement won by an American vessel flying the Continental flag. It was not a large action by the standards of naval warfare. It was the beginning of something.
Barry spent the war fighting, losing ships, building new ones, fighting again. He survived. After the revolution, when the new American republic decided it needed a proper navy, Barry was appointed senior officer of the United States Navy — Commodore, the highest rank then in existence. He is credited, more than any other individual, with creating the institutional foundations of what became one of the most powerful naval forces in human history.
He died in Philadelphia in 1803, an American of thirty-five years standing, an Irishman for life.
