A Fictional Interview with Abraham Whipple in Providence, Rhode Island
TRAVEL IN TIME WITH DAN | Providence, Rhode Island — 1774
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following is a fictional historical interview. Captain Abraham Whipple (1733–1819) led the party of Rhode Islanders who boarded and burned the British schooner Gaspee on June 9, 1772, after shooting its commander, Lieutenant William Dudingston. Two years later, Captain James Wallace of HMS Rose learned of Whipple’s role and sent him a written threat, promising to hang him at the yardarm. Whipple’s reply… “Always catch a man before you hang him”… is real and documented, and appears below exactly as recorded. Everything else in this conversation, including the setting of Dan catching Whipple in the middle of composing that reply, is imagined, as no record survives of Whipple discussing his state of mind at the time.
SETTING: A cluttered room above a Providence wharf, 1774. A single candle, a half-finished letter on the desk, Wallace’s threatening note pinned beside it. Whipple sits with a quill in hand, unhurried.
Dan: Captain, I have to ask… a man just threatened to hang you at the yardarm, and you’re sitting here as calm as if you were writing to an old friend.
Whipple: What would you have me do instead? Pace the floor? Wallace wants me rattled… that is half the purpose of a letter like his. A threat delivered in ink instead of in person is asking for a reaction, and I have found the surest way to disappoint a man like that is to give him wit instead of fear.
Dan: You don’t seem the least bit frightened.
Whipple: I did not say that. A man who tells you he felt no fear with a hanging threat pinned to his wall is either a fool or a liar, and I am neither. I feel it. I simply do not see the use in letting it hold the pen for me. Fear is welcome to sit in the room. It does not get to write my letters.
Dan: Take me back to that night on the Gaspee itself. What was actually going through your mind as you rowed out toward that ship?
Whipple: Very little that resembled careful thought, if I am honest with you. We had eight longboats, muffled oars, and a great deal of anger that had been building in this colony for a long while over what that ship and its commander had been doing to our trade. When we came alongside, I called out who I was and why I had come… I did not disguise it, I did not soften it. I wanted him to know exactly whose men had come for him. Whatever fear was in me that night, it did not stop my voice from carrying across that water steady and clear.
Dan: And now, two years on, that same steadiness is what you’re using to answer a man threatening to execute you.
Whipple: It is the same instrument, only put to a different use. That night required a voice loud enough to be heard over water and confusion. This letter requires a hand steady enough not to blot the page. Both are simply a man refusing to let the danger of the moment choose his behavior for him.
Dan: Not everyone in this colony has talked, either — the British still don’t officially know for certain who was on those boats.
Whipple: No, and I doubt they ever will hear it from anyone who was there. There is a kind of quiet courage in that, too… men who will carry a secret at real personal risk simply because they believe in what was done. I am fortunate to be surrounded by men who understand that silence, in the right circumstance, is its own form of loyalty.
Dan: What are you going to write back to Captain Wallace?
Whipple: I have already decided the substance of it, if not yet every word. He wishes to remind me that a rope is waiting for me should he ever catch me. I intend to remind him, as plainly as I can manage, that he has not caught me yet, and that a threat is a poor substitute for an arrest. Always catch a man before you hang him. That is the whole of what needs saying to a man like that.
Dan: Thank you, Captain. I’ll let you finish your letter.
Whipple: See that you do. A man composing his reply to a hanging threat prefers not to be interrupted twice.
Abraham Whipple was never captured or tried for his role in the Gaspee affair, went on to fire the first shot of the Revolutionary War at sea in 1775 as commodore of Rhode Island’s navy, and later became the first American to fly the U.S. flag in London after the war. The leadership lesson from that room above the Providence wharf isn’t about the burning of the Gaspee itself… it’s about what a leader does in the quiet, private hours after the danger has become personal and permanent. Whipple didn’t out-fight Wallace’s threat. He out-composed it, answering real danger with steadiness and a dry wit sharp enough to be remembered two and a half centuries later. Real courage, most of the time, looks less like a dramatic stand and more like a steady hand finishing a letter it would have been easy to leave unwritten.
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