Meanwhile the contempt with which the authority of the crown was regarded, and the necessity for restraining the provincial judges from political partisanship, were forcibly illustrated. Smuggling was carried on freely, especially in Rhode Island. The duty of preventing it in Narragansett Bay was discharged by Lieutenant Duddingston, in command of the _Gaspee_ schooner. He was zealous, and, according to American accounts, was guilty of illegal and oppressive acts. On June 9, while engaged in a chase, the _Gaspee_ ran aground, and on the night of the 10th was boarded by eight boat-loads of men. Duddingston was treacherously shot at and wounded; he and his men were set on shore, and the schooner was burnt. This destruction of one of the king's ships, an act alike of rebellion and piracy, and, as Thurlow said, "an event five times the magnitude of the stamp act," was unpunished. A law, enacted in the previous April, and evoked by a fire in an English dockyard, provided that the setting on fire of a public dockyard or a king's ship should be felony, and that those accused of such an offence should be tried in England. Commissioners were appointed by the crown to inquire into the destruction of the _Gaspee_, and send those concerned in it to England for trial. On their applying for warrants to the chief justice of the province, he declared that he would allow no one to be arrested with a view to deportation, and the commission was fruitless. The colonists were angered by this attempt to enforce the law; and in 1773 took an important step towards union and a future congress by establishing committees of correspondence between the provinces.