Nicholas Biddle had sailed to the Arctic with Horatio Nelson. He had joined the Continental Navy as one of its first five captains. He had once returned from a cruise off the Newfoundland Banks so loaded with captured British prizes that only five of his own sailors remained aboard to steer his flagship, the rest scattered across the seized vessels. On the evening of March 7, 1778, off the eastern coast of Barbados, Biddle's luck ran out in the most catastrophic way the eighteenth-century sea could deliver. His frigate, USS Randolph, exploded.
Biddle had clear orders from John Rutledge: break the British blockade of Charleston, South Carolina, where a fleet of merchant ships sat trapped in harbor. The thirty-six-gun Randolph would lead the mission, accompanied by four armed vessels -- the General Moultrie, the Notre Dame, the Fair American, and the Polly. On February 14, the small American squadron sailed out to meet the British off Charleston, but the enemy was nowhere in sight. Rather than waste the sortie, Biddle turned south toward the West Indies to raid British commerce. The cruise started well. On February 16, the fleet burned a dismasted British ship that a privateer had already crippled. On March 4, the Polly captured a small schooner, adding it to the squadron as a tender. Biddle was doing what he did best -- disrupting British shipping with audacity and speed.
At about 5:30 in the evening on March 7, sailing off Barbados's eastern shore, American lookouts spotted a large vessel to windward. Biddle recognized the silhouette of a warship and made a decision that defined his character: rather than flee with his convoy, he ordered most of his ships to continue on while he stayed behind with the Randolph and the eighteen-gun General Moultrie to engage. The approaching ship was HMS Yarmouth, a sixty-four-gun ship of the line under Captain Nicholas Vincent -- nearly twice the Randolph's firepower. Biddle knew the odds. He engaged anyway, buying time for the merchant vessels to scatter. Hours of maneuvering followed as the ships jockeyed for position in the fading tropical light.
At approximately nine o'clock, under cover of darkness, the Americans raised their colors and opened with a broadside. The Yarmouth answered. For the first twelve to fifteen minutes, according to Captain Hall of the Notre Dame, the Americans had the better of the exchange. Biddle's gunners struck the Yarmouth's bowsprit and brought down her topmasts, debris crashing onto the poop deck and tangling in the rigging. Five British sailors were killed and twelve wounded. The Randolph and General Moultrie remained largely undamaged. Then Biddle was hit. The wound may have come from friendly fire -- the General Moultrie, maneuvering in the dark, accidentally struck the Randolph. Wounded, Biddle refused to leave the deck. And then, without warning, a spark found the Randolph's powder magazine. The explosion destroyed the frigate instantly. Three hundred and eleven men died in seconds. It would remain the costliest single-engagement naval loss in American history until the sinking of USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
The Yarmouth, damaged and suddenly alone on a dark sea littered with wreckage, attempted to pursue the remaining American ships. She could not. Her shattered rigging gave the smaller vessels the speed to scatter in different directions and vanish into the Caribbean night. Five days later, on March 12, the Yarmouth stumbled across four men clinging to floating debris. They had survived the explosion and five days adrift in the open Atlantic by sucking rainwater from a soaked blanket. They were the only survivors. The Continental Navy mourned Biddle as one of its finest officers -- a man who had explored the Arctic, captured a small fleet's worth of British prizes, and chosen to fight a ship nearly twice his size so that the vessels under his protection could escape. He was twenty-seven years old.
The battle occurred at approximately 13.19°N, 59.46°W, off the eastern coast of Barbados. The engagement took place in open water east of the island, visible as the Atlantic stretching to the horizon beyond Barbados's windward shore. Grantley Adams International Airport (TBPB) is on the southern coast of Barbados, roughly 10 miles to the south-southwest. Recommended viewing altitude: 3,000-5,000 feet for perspective on the open water where the engagement occurred. The eastern coast of Barbados faces prevailing trade winds and Atlantic swells.