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The guns on both sides were silent until they returned. Suddenly, a fierce cannonade from the British ships exploded onto the beach at Turtle Gut Inlet, but only one American was hit, “Shott through the arm and body.” It was Richard Wickes. A cannonball took his arm and half his chest away. Fresh from the Reprisal, Lambert Wickes arrived on the beach at the head of his reinforcements just as his younger brother died: “I arrived just at the Close of the Action Time enough to see him expire . . . Captn Barry . . . says a braver Man never existed.”123 Taking Richard Wickes's body, the American sailors left the spit of sand they fought over that morning. The powder was stowed in the Wasp's hold and sent up the Delaware. “At 2 weighed and made Sail,” Hudson briefly noted in his journal.124 The British returned to Cape Henlopen. As before, Barry had taken long odds, assessed the best plan that could succeed, and beaten the British. The Nancy was destroyed, but the Wasp would reach Philadelphia safely with the desperately needed gunpowder. Despite superior firepower, the “butcher's bill” was far heavier for the British. But the victory brought no cheers or satisfaction among the Americans, and Barry was particularly saddened by the death of the gallant young Wickes.125 The next morning—Sunday, June 30—the men of the Lexington and Reprisal gathered to mourn their shipmate at the log meetinghouse in the small village of Cold Spring, just north of Cape May. Under the same light breezes of the day before, the American sailors, with “bowed and uncovered heads,” filed inside and sat on the long, rough-cut wooden pews. After “The Clergyman preached a very deacent Sermon,” Lambert Wickes and the Reprisal's officers silently hoisted the coffin. Shuffling under its weight, they carried it outside to the little cemetery, and laid their comrade to rest.126 Lambert Wickes now faced the task of informing his family in Maryland of Richard's death. On July 2, in a sad but disjointed letter to his brother Samuel, he mentioned Richard's death among a list of the items—including the sugar and “one Bagg Coffee” that accompanied the letter. “You'll disclose this Secret with as much Caution as possible to our Sisters,” he pleaded. He quoted Barry's report that Richard “fought like a brave Man & was fore most in every transaction of that day,” dying for the cause of the “united Colonies.”127 By the time Lambert's package reached his family in Maryland, the “united Colonies” ceased to exist as well. The same day Wickes posted his letter, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence. Barry, Wickes, and the rest of the Continental Navy were now fighting for the survival of a new country: the United States of America.
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