By sea Truro men did not get off so easily. In 1775 David Snow and his son, a lad of fifteen, were fishing off the “Back Side” one day when they were captured by an enemy frigate known, significantly, as “the shaving-mill.” They were taken to England and locked up, with other Yankee prisoners, in the Old Mill Prison near Plymouth, where they set their wits at work on methods of escape. Mr. Snow, one night, proposed a dance, when the fiddle squeaked its loudest and the dancers shuffled noisily in heavy brogans, to drown the noise of the file that willing hands kept hard at work eating at the bars. Thirty-six men, under cover of the hilarity, succeeded in slipping out into the yard, overpowered the guard, walked the fifteen miles to Plymouth Harbor, boarded a scow, and before daylight were afloat in the Channel. There they captured a small boat, and set sail for France where they sold their prize for hard cash, Snow and his son receiving as their share forty dollars. The French Government, when occasion served, set them on the shore of Carolina whence they finally worked their way overland to Boston, took boat for Provincetown, and so home again to Truro. Seven years had been consumed in the adventure, and they had long been mourned as dead. The boy was now a man, but a quick-eyed girl cried, as she saw him: “If that isn’t David Snow, it’s his ghost.” And the father found his wife “spending the afternoon” with her sewing, at a neighbor’s. Another Truro lad was of the crew that rowed Benedict Arnold out to the Vulture, and when he knew the significance of that night’s story, fearing that he might be implicated in a charge of treason, he fled straight to Canada. There he married, and it was forty-eight years before he returned to visit his old home. A Yarmouth man was one of the gallant André’s guards the night before his execution, and lamented his unhappy fate. And Watson Freeman, of Sandwich, who in 1754 at the age of fourteen had joined the expedition to Canada, fought in the Revolution, and was present at the taking of Burgoyne in 1777. The next year he was stationed with General Sullivan on Long Island, where, being one of a “foraging party” that was surprised by the enemy in the relaxation of attending a ball, he received a sabre-cut on the forehead that scarred him for life. Later, having joined an uncle who commanded a privateer, he was taken prisoner by the enemy, wounded in an encounter between them and a French boat, invalided to a hospital at Portsmouth, England, and discharged as incurable. Wandering about the country, he came upon an old herb-woman who proved wiser than the doctors, and he lived to amass a fortune in Boston as an “importer of English goods and concerned also in navigation.”