In the early months of the session there certainly would arise opposition to the new military project. The inertia and conservatism of some of the members would set them against so great an innovation. To others the fitting out of a fleet, at a time when the length, seriousness, and meaning of the war with the motherland were but half unveiled, would seem an unwise and hasty action. The question of procuring a fleet of armed vessels was first brought to the attention of Congress on October 3, 1775, when the Rhode Island members presented their instructions, an account of which will be given in a succeeding chapter.[4] It is sufficient for present purposes to say that until December the Rhode Island instructions had little other result beyond crystallizing and clarifying opinion on naval affairs by means of the debates which they caused in Congress. On October 5 sundry letters from London were laid before the Congress and read. They conveyed the intelligence of “the sailing of two north country built brigs, of no force, from England, on the 11th of August last, loaded with arms, powder, and other stores, for Quebec, without convoy.” Congress at once saw the importance of capturing these two vessels, in order both to deprive the British of these stores and to obtain them for the Continental army around Boston, which sorely needed all the munitions of war it could get. A motion was therefore made that a committee of three be appointed to prepare a plan for intercepting the two brigs, and that it “proceed on this business immediately.”[5] John Adams in his autobiography says that the opposition to this motion was “very loud and vehement,” and included some of his own colleagues, and also especially Edward Rutledge of South Carolina. It seems to have been recognized that the carrying of the motion would be the initial step in the establishment of a Continental navy. Such an undertaking its opponents declared, with a greater display of rhetoric than judgment, was the “most wild, visionary, mad project that ever had been imagined. It was an infant taking a mad bull by his horns; and what was more profound and remote, it was said it would ruin the character and corrupt the morals of all our seamen. It would make them selfish, piratical, mercenary, bent wholly upon plunder, etc., etc.” The friends of the motion, in colors equally glowing, set forth “the great advantages of distressing the enemy, supplying ourselves, and beginning a system of maritime and naval operations.” On the taking of the vote the motion passed in the affirmative; and according to John Adams’s recollection, he, John Langdon of New Hampshire, and Silas Deane of Connecticut, “three members who had expressed much zeal in favor of the motion,” composed the committee.[6]