The appeal was idle. The king's only answer was a violent proclamation denouncing the Americans as rebels. It was learned at the same time that he was preparing to place Indians, negroes, and German mercenaries in arms against them. The truth was forced upon the most reluctant, that the root of England's obduracy was in the king personally, and that further supplications were useless. The surprising success of the colonial arms, the shedding of blood at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill--all which, remember, antedated the Declaration--the increase and the ravages of the royal army and navy in America, were all efficient in urging the colonists to break utterly and forever from the mother-country. [1772] The behavior of the Gaspe officers in Narragansett Bay, their illegal seizures, plundering expeditions on shore, and wanton manners in stopping and searching boats, illustrate the spirit of the king's hirelings in America at this time. At last the Rhode Islanders could endure it no longer. Early on the morning of June 9, 1772, Captain Abraham Whipple, with a few boatloads of trusty aides, dropped down the river from Providence to what is now called Gaspe Point, six or seven miles below the city, where the offending craft had run aground the previous evening in giving chase to the Newport-Providence packet-boat, and after a spirited fight mastered the Gaspe's company, put them on shore, and burned the ship. There would be much propriety in dating the Revolution from this daring act. [1774] Nor was this the only case of Rhode Island's forwardness in the struggle. December 5, 1774, her General Assembly ordered Colonel Nightingale to remove to Providence all the cannon and ammunition of Fort George, except three guns, and this was done before the end of the next day. More than forty cannon, with much powder and shot, were thus husbanded for service to come. News of this was carried to New Hampshire, and resulted in the capture of Fort William and Mary at New Castle, December 14, 1774, which some have referred to as the opening act of the Revolution. This deed was accomplished by fourteen men from Durham, who entered the fort at night when the officers were at a ball in Portsmouth. The powder which they captured is said to have done duty at Bunker Hill. [1776] Most potent of all as a cause of the resolution to separate was Thomas Paine's pamphlet, "Common Sense," published in January, 1776, and circulated widely throughout the colonies. Its lucid style, its homely way of putting things, and its appeals to Scripture must have given it at any rate a strong hold upon the masses of the people. It was doubly and trebly triumphant from the fact that it voiced, in clear, bold terms, a long-growing popular conviction of the propriety of independence, stronger than men had dared to admit even to themselves. [Illustration: Portrait.] Thomas Paine.