NAVAL PRIVATEER

This flag, of thirteen alternate yellow and black stribes, sometimes varIn September, 1775, two strong floating batteries were launched on the Charles River, Massachusetts, and in the following month opened fire on the enemy at Boston.  Their ensign used was a pine tree.

Col. Joseph Reed, in a letter dated October 20, 1775 from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Colonels Glover and Moylan, said, "Please to fix some particular color for a flag, and a signal, by which our vessels may know one another.  What do you think of a flag with a white ground, a tree in the middle, the motto -- 'Appeal to Heaven'?  This is the flag of our floating batteries."

The six schooners first commissioned by Washington in the same month to cruise in Massachusetts Bay and the first vessels commissioned soon afterwards by the Continental Congress, sailed under the same device -- a green pine tree in the center of a white field -- with the motto: "Appeal to Heaven" and the floating batteries of the State of Pennsylvania in the Delaware River also carried this flag in the summer of 1775, and likewise during the operations on that river in the defense of Philadelphia in 1777 and 1778.