the surrender knocked down by a four-pound rammer.”[606] During the last years of the war Maryland in her attempts to defend the Chesapeake, obtained as many as ten barges.[607] She had also in the naval service at this time a schooner, the “Flying Fish.” The end of her navy may be dated with the statute passed by her legislature in May, 1783, which authorized the Intendant to sell “the galley and the barges.”[608] North Carolina’s initial step in procuring a naval armament was taken on December 21, 1775, when her Council of Safety resolved to fit out three armed vessels for the defence of the trade of the state. It appointed three Boards of Commissioners, each of which was to immediately purchase, arm, man, and victual a vessel. The board for Cape Fear was composed of five men; for Newbern, of eight; and for Edenton, of six.[609] Since it proved difficult to assemble a quorum of the Newbern Board, the Council of Safety in June, 1776, vested its powers in three of its members.[610] In May, 1776, the Provincial Congress fixed the monthly wages of officers, seamen, and marines. Captains were to be paid £10; lieutenants, masters, captains of marines, and doctors, £8 each; marines, £2, 13s., 4d.; “seamen complete,” £4; “seamen not complete,” £3.[611] By October, 1776, the Cape Fear Board had fitted out the brigantine “Washington;” the Newbern Board, the brigantine “Pennsylvania Farmer;” and the Edenton Board, the brigantine “King Tammany.” The Council of Safety now ordered these three vessels to protect the trade of the state at Ocracoke Bar, and to proceed against the enemy’s Jamaicamen homeward bound from the West Indies. “It may be necessary to inform you,” it wrote on October 1 to Captain Joshua Hampstead of the “Pennsylvania Farmer,” “that the Jamaica fleet will sail for Europe about the middle of this month under the convoy of a twenty-gun ship only, from the best intelligence we can obtain.”[612]